The slave women became symbolic mirrors for Anglo-Egyptian claims to the civilizing mission

Evidence

For several weeks, however, these women had appeared like mirrors before the Egyptian and British public, reflecting how deeply both cultures had invested in the image of the civilizing savior of African peoples.The figures of these women also reflected the fears of both societies: British anxieties about black women as agents of sexual licentiousness and crime; Egyptian fears of being identified with these women, of being uncivilized, of being made slaves to the British. Though these apprehensions became clear in the way the slave women were represented in both newspaper and official accounts of the trial, the verdict left the question of actual ownership— of these women and of the Sudan—wide open. The perimeters of Egyptian geography, its form and its limits, the full extent of the body politic, were still to be mapped. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 715

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the freed women’s actual fate (domestic service or marriage, into ‘historical oblivion’) diverge from their symbolic role in the imperial narrative?
• XREF: The mirror/fear dynamic echoes literatures on subaltern women as sites of imperial and nationalist contestation (cf. Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee on the women’s question). — connects to: Orientalist paintings of enslaved fair-skinned women justified Western rescue missions