Description
Book SynopsisExplores the relation between nineteenth-century American interest in ancient Egypt in architecture, literature, and science, and the ways Egypt was deployed by advocates for slavery and by African American writers.
Trade Review“
Egypt Land is an exceptional interdisciplinary study of the centrality of Egyptomania to considerations of race and nation in nineteenth-century America.”—Robert S. Levine, author of
Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity “A magnificent piece of scholarship,
Egypt Land does justice to the complexity of the work of nation- and race-making as such work moved circularly along axes of racialized science, ideology, Biblical and political authority, songs, and images, producing social and material effects. In short, the imagining of ancient Egypt was a weapon among an array of agents that both made and resisted, as Scott Trafton puts it, the ‘iconography of empire.’”—Wahneema Lubiano, editor of
The House That Race Built“Now that Scott Trafton has taught us the meaning of Egyptomania, we’ll all be seeing its register everywhere and feeling astonished that we weren’t noticing it before.”—Dana D. Nelson, author of
National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White MenTable of ContentsIllustrations ix
Acknowledgment xi
Preface: “An Inspired Frenzy of Madness” xv
Introduction: “This Egypt of the West”: Making Race and Nation along the American Nile 1
1. “A Veritable He-Nigger after All”: Egypt, Ethnology, and the Crises of History 41
2. The Egyptian Moment: Racial Ruptures and the Archaeological Imaginary 85
3. The Curse of the Mummy: Race, Reanimation, and the Egyptian Revival 121
4. Undressing Cleopatra: Race, Sex, and Bodily Interiority in Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania 165
5. Egypt Land: Slavery, Uprising, and Signifying the Double 222
Notes 263
Works Cited 315
Index 339
