The “Negress” of - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

The “Negress” of
Alexandria
African Womanhood in Modern Egyptian Art

Lara Ayad

In the Fall of 2015, Christie’s Dubai sold a large painting

(如图. 1) to a private American bidder. The work, enti-
tled La Négresse aux Bracelets (Negress with Bracelets)
(1926), was created by the late Egyptian modernist
Mahmoud Said and features a nearly life-size female
figure seated beside a window that looks out onto the
streets of Alexandria. Said remains famous in Egypt and the wider
Arabic-speaking world for his nudes and cityscapes, 其中许多
depict women in olive and brown hues walking along Alexandria’s
corniche and reclining against silken blue sofas. A number of
art critics and historians have praised him for his ability to resist
European-style art and, 反而, capture the essence of Egyptian
national identity in his sumptuous oils. This essence emerges from
Said’s purported ability to express an authentic, native female sex-
uality, as well as the light, 颜色, and cultural fabric of his home city.
La Négresse was not the first of Said’s paintings to fetch a high price
at auction houses in recent years, yet the subject’s black skin sets
her portrait apart from those of his other women subjects.1 More
具体来说, his “Negress” indicates a crucial facet of Egyptian iden-
tity in the modern period that many arts researchers and writers
have rarely discussed—Africa and Egypt’s position in it.

This essay examines La Négresse within a wider corpus of fine
artworks depicting “Black” and “Egyptian” people and created in
Egypt between the World Wars. It demonstrates that Egyptians
went to great lengths to define their cultural and racial identity
vis-à-vis Africa, as well as Europe. Much like other scholars and

Lara Ayad is assistant professor of the visual cultures and built en-
vironments of Africa and the African Diaspora at Skidmore College.
Her research examines the development of modern Egyptian art in
the early twentieth century through Africanist and gender studies
镜片. She currently serves as the inaugural Emerging Professional
member of the board of directors for the College Art Association. 在
addition to her administrative work for a major international orga-
nization for arts professionals, she is the host of the public television
程序, AHA! A House for Arts, on WMHT. layad@skidmore.edu

20 | african arts WINTER 2021 VOL. 54, NO. 4

批评家, I use Alexandrian settings seen in Said’s paintings as a crit-
ical site for understanding Egyptian artistic expressions of iden-
tity. 然而, my study examines the relationship between place
and race in modern Egyptian art by going beyond the binary
of Western and Eastern ontologies, as well as modes of artistic
生产. Images of black-skinned people in interwar period
Egyptian art were often formed from earlier, colonialist discourses
of the Sudan, which became Egypt’s territory in the nineteenth
世纪, until Great Britain claimed dominion over both countries.
I contextualize La Négresse in Said’s other depictions of women, 作为
well as local fine art, 流行文化, and scientific studies of the
Sudanese, all of which served to construct a Black African race as
the foil to an equally fabricated Egyptian one.2 Blending feminist,
sociohistorical, and visual studies approaches ultimately shows
that many Egyptian artists formulated a vision of the Sudan as
Egypt’s primitive and African frontier.

EGYPT, IN AND OUT OF AFRICA
The interwar period marks the apex of European colonialism’s
end in Africa, and examining artistic definitions of Africans seen
in Egyptian art of this time forces us to confront a series of over-
lapping epistemological gaps in the scholarship on Africa and the
Middle East. The terms “Egypt” and “Africa” have had tremen-
dous currency in global debates about race, heritage, and power
since the nineteenth century. Despite Egypt’s physical location in
非洲, art historical scholarship and popular culture in the West
have drawn a seemingly impenetrable distinction between the two,
based on categories of race and culture that are as manufactured
as those of geography. Predominantly White scholars in western
Europe and the United States have often defined “African art” as
that which comes from “sub-Saharan” Africa, particularly west and
central Africa; “North Africa,” on the other hand, is typically woven
into anthropologies and art histories of the Middle East and Islam
(Bassani 2005; Blier 1998; 卡特勒 2009; Ettinghausen, Grabar, 和
Jenkins-Madina 2001; Flood and Necipoğlu 2017; Kasfir 2020).
These binaries are rooted in the racialist paradigms of Orientalist

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1 Mahmoud Said (埃及, 1897–1964)
La Négresse aux Bracelets (Negress with
Bracelets) (1926)
Oil on canvas; 110.4 cm x 81 厘米
Private collection of Hussein Bek Said
照片: courtesy of Christie’s

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scholarship carried out by the British and French during the early
colonial period.3 Popular museums and media outlets today have
also revived colonialist framings of Egypt as a cultural and racial
precursor to Western civilization. National Geographic’s contro-
versial traveling exhibition about King Tutankhamun drew enor-
mous crowds between 2005 和 2008 and paired artworks from
the boy king’s tomb with a three-dimensional rendering of him as
a light-skinned “Caucasoid” (as the wall text termed him).

Black scholars and artists have attempted to counter the white-
washing of Egypt’s identity and weave it into African studies in
the United States as early as the 1920s. Such efforts exemplify the
Black roots of African Studies, which have only recently been ac-
knowledged as critical and valuable responses to systemic racism
in the academy, particularly in anthropology and art history.4
Figures such as W.E.B. DuBois (1915) were among the first to
propose that ancient Egyptian civilization was Black, partly be-
cause of its location in Africa (see also Bernal 1987). While such

efforts originally served to weave ancient Egyptian civilization
into a pan-African history, they also overwrote the cultural and
political realities of Nilotic cultures with essentialist narratives of
a singular “Black” experience rooted solely in either the Atlantic
world or in sub-Saharan west (and central) Africa.5 Many of these
researchers relied heavily on racial binaries of Black and White
that exclude the perspectives of modern Egyptians and, as I will
展示, do not map neatly onto the Egyptian context at any point
在历史上. Subsuming the cultural, 宗教的, and political dynam-
ics of northeast Africa with American frameworks of critical race
theory also inadvertently perpetuates the West’s dominance of
epistemologies of identity that many contemporary Africanists are
trying to dismantle.6

This essay reframes the question of Egypt in Africa through
indigenous constructions of race, 班级, and sex and is part of
an emerging scholarship that globalizes the field of Black stud-
是的. The book The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art

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2 Mahmoud Said (埃及, 1897–1964)
Bather (1937)
Oil on canvas; dimensions unknown
Mahmoud Said Museum
照片: courtesy of Alex Dika Seggerman

Egypt’s imperialist endeavors in the Sudan
and east Africa. Tracing the formation of
African racial and cultural categories in
modern Egyptian art also reveals that art-
ists of color in the postcolony were just
as instrumental, and responsible, as their
White counterparts for promoting racist
representations of Black people.7

Examining the construction of Africa in
early twentieth-century Egyptian art ex-
pands critical inquiries into racial identity,
political power, and representation among
specialists of Egyptian artistic modern-
主义. Nadia Radwan’s art historical studies
of Nubian and Black African subjects in
modern Egyptian art have broken ground
by examining the meaning of Black artis-
tic subjects in Arabic-speaking countries
during the modern period.8 Nevertheless,
they stem primarily from the disciplinary
perspective of Middle East studies, 哪个
has historically used binaries of an Arab
North Africa and a Black sub-Saharan
Africa as an analytical framework.9 My
essay traces the process through which
Said and his contemporaries in the fine arts
constructed Black womanhood. It demon-
strates that Egyptian artists used a series of racial and sexual ste-
reotypes about Sudanese, Nubian, and east African women seen in
fine art and ethnographic literature in order to marginalize them
from a supposedly Mediterranean Egypt.

Egyptian artists were not alone on the African continent in re-
working a local construct of Africa in order to define their coun-
try’s racial and cultural identity during European occupation.
Understood alongside their counterparts in west Africa, it be-
comes clear that Egyptians were part of larger, critical discourses
found in many major African cities. Painters and sculptors living
in these urban centers were trying to redefine Africanness—and
Blackness—at a time when political independence from European
colonialism and national consciousness gained traction. 根据

(Bindman, Blier, and Gates 2017) incorporates studies of Black
subjects seen in nineteenth-century west African sculpture and
early twentieth-century Japanese comics, thus shedding new light
on African subjectivity on the continent, as well as south-to-south
colonialism, 分别. Cynthia Becker’s (2020) art historical
analysis of Moroccan gnawa examines how Blackness has been
defined in Morocco through visual and musical performance.
In a similar spirit, I decenter European and American perspec-
tives on African art and explore how artists in Africa defined the
region and its people. Artists in Egypt used frameworks of slav-
埃里, 种族, and sexuality found in locally developed social sciences
and popular culture in order to distinguish their Egyptian sub-
jects from their African counterparts, the latter defined through

22 | african arts WINTER 2021 VOL. 54, NO. 4

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3 Mahmoud Said (埃及, 1897–1964)
Madame Riad (1938)
Oil on canvas; dimensions unknown
Mahmoud Said Museum
照片: courtesy of Esmat Dawastashy

to art historian Sylvester Ogbechie,
Nigerian modernists active during the
1960s harnessed Pan-African philosophies
of postcolonial identity in order to craft
a Nigerian modern art. Earlier concepts
of Negritude became a primary frame-
work for west African artists such as Ben
Enwonwu, who employed local symbols
of Nigerian cultural identity in order to
promote the idea of a liberated “Black
Africa” with a shared heritage and legacy.10
Like their Nigerian counterparts, artists in
Egypt went to great lengths to define an in-
digenous modern identity vis-à-vis Africa,
albeit vigilant to surpass their geographical
position on the continent. This essay thus
reveals that artistic visions of a supposedly
primitive Africa were formulated not only
in the West, but also in Africa itself.

ALEXANDRIA: EGYPT
AS A MEDITERRANEAN
METROPOLIS
Contextualizing Said’s paintings of
black-skinned women in his aristocratic
upbringing sheds light on the role of class hierarchies in Egyptian
artistic visions of Africa and Black womanhood. Said was born
into a wealthy family in 1897 and had royal connections, as his
niece, Safinaz Zulficar, married King Farouk I in 1938 在那里-
after became popularly known as Queen Farida. 相比之下,
most Egyptian artists of Said’s generation were middle- 和工作-
ing-class and obtained their degrees at the School of Fine Arts in
Cairo (国家安全局), which was established in 1908 by the royal family and
served to educate Egyptian boys in painting, drawing, 建筑学,
and calligraphy. While students at the SFA completed apprentice-
ships with European instructors, Said fed his love for painting by
privately studying oils under the Italian painters Amelia Daforno
Casonato and Arturo Zanieri, as well as drawing under Tewfik
Pasha (Al-Jabakhanji 1986). He developed his own painting style
by the 1920s, even after obtaining a degree in law and serving as a

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lawyer in Alexandria’s courts (赫斯 2017). 在这段时期, Said
created bold compositions and rich colors for his portraits and
landscapes. These paintings (Figs. 2–3) captured the various socio-
economic classes of Alexandria, particularly the Ottoman-Turkish
elite and the indigenous Egyptian working classes, the latter of
whom were usually of peasant background.11

The artist matured in a world marked by political, as well as
班级, divisions that would inform how he distinguished between
Egyptian and Sudanese subjects in his portrait paintings. Popular
uprisings in Egyptian cities and villages against British occupation
and the Turkish-Ottoman royal family in 1919 set a series of legis-
lative and cultural shifts in motion. Leaders of the nationalist Wafd
(Delegation) Party dominated the new parliamentary system and
formed a deal with Great Britain to grant Egypt nominal indepen-
dence in 1923 (戈德施密特 2004). Despite ministers’ claims to
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4 Mahmoud Said (埃及, 1897–1964)
Les Nageuses (The Swimmers) (1934)
Oil on canvas; 90.7 cm x 76.5 厘米
Mahmoud Said Museum
照片: courtesy of ‘Esmat Dawastashy

black shawls appear through the window,
and they reemerge in later works por-
traying characters that were distinctive to
Alexandria’s working-class districts. Banat
Bahari (Coastal Girls; 1935) (如图. 5) 关于-
mains one of Said’s most famous works
from the interwar period and features
prostitutes who solicited male custom-
ers in the Anfushi district of Alexandria
(Karnouk 2015). Their clothes resem-
ble those worn by the passersby in the
streets of La Négresse. A brass container
also sits at the window sill near the Black
woman, appearing again at a window
in the upper right background of Banat
Bahari. Said thus used each painting as a
cyclical entry point to the setting seen in
the other, so that the Black woman and
the Anfushi prostitutes play roles on a
larger Alexandrian stage.

promote equality among all Egyptians during the 1920s and 1930s,
many were part of large landowning families of mixed Egyptian
and Turkish-Ottoman lineages, and their policies often reflected
personal interests in maintaining control over the indigenous
peasants that worked on their ranches (Kane 2013). Said’s family
was no exception, as his father, Muhammad Said Pasha, served as
prime minister between 1910 和 1914 (and again in 1919) 和
was heir to large farm estates.

Alexandrian settings pervade Mahmoud Said’s oeuvre and they
were crucial in his efforts to express what Egypt was and who
truly belonged there. La Négresse aux Bracelets features a view of
Alexandria, seen through the window at upper left (如图. 1). 这
artist’s hometown appears in many of his other paintings, 例如
Les Nageuses (The Swimmers; 1934) (如图. 4), which comes to life
through applications of saturated colors, as well as intense shadow
and light. Blue coastlines signaled Alexandria’s seaside character,
which Said distinguished from the brown village architecture and
delta environments of his Nilotic scenes.12

Although the sea does not appear in La Négresse, other sym-
bols of Alexandrian life served to weave the Black woman into
one Alexandrian universe. Women wearing blue frilled skirts and

24 | african arts WINTER 2021 VOL. 54, NO. 4

Explicit references to Alexandria in La
Négresse were partly imaginative, and Said transformed his home-
town into a site for embellishing class, 种族, and sexual hierarchies
that operated throughout Egypt during this time. Human subjects
symbolized roughly three social strata found in many Egyptian
城市: a small elite class of primarily Turkish and European descent
who were often identified as White; indigenous Egyptians that con-
stituted the majority of Egypt’s population and were often of work-
ing-class or peasant backgrounds; and a less sizeable underclass of
menial laborers and domestic servants of Nubian, Sudanese, 和
east African origins. His commissioned portrait of Madame Riad
(1938) (如图. 3) contrasts with La Négresse because she appears in an
opulent home interior with all the markings of established wealth.
Paintings of anonymous nudes were often modeled by native pros-
titutes, 另一方面, and their brown skin and bare breasts
appear on full display for the male viewer. Said placed such nudes
against a background of fabric sheets and linens, or a vivid country
village backdrop, as can be seen in Nude on Blue Cushion (1926)
(如图. 6) and Bather (如图. 2), respectively.13

Said’s “Negress” is an outlier in this world of cosmopolitan ladies
and indigenous nudes. 反而, she fits into a smaller body of works
by Said that portrayed black-skinned women. The similarly titled

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5 Mahmoud Said (埃及, 1897–1964)
Banat Bahari (Coastal Girls) (1935)
Oil on canvas; dimensions unknown
Muhammad Mahmoud Khalil Museum
照片: courtesy of Esmat Dawastashy

Negress (1936) (如图. 7), for instance, 迪斯-
plays what Alex Dika Seggerman refers to
as a “sub-Saharan African” woman (2019:
123) lying nude against a patterned fabric.
Although the artist gave some of his Black
subjects backdrops similar to those seen in
his portraits of Egyptian nudes, La Négresse
aux Bracelets is remarkable for combining
indoor and outdoor settings. Said drew a
parallel between the Black woman’s body
and household objects that occupy a lim-
inal space between outside and inside.
The conical lid and tapered body of the
vessel seen at the window sill mimics the
woman’s rounded belly and full, pointed
breasts, thus placing the woman’s figure
at the threshold between visibility and in-
visibility in this coastal metropolis. Said
also created a rhythm of harmony and
discord between woman and city through
color and composition, where the window
onto Alexandria’s streets punctuates the
dim room with light and color. Golds and
blues in the subject’s slip and head wrap
appear again in the sky and sunlit build-
ings seen outside, forming a parallel be-
tween Alexandria’s streets and the clothed
portions of her body. Her dark skin is ex-
ecuted in muted, matte tones, 然而,
and the dingy walls that surround her
nearly swallow her figure whole. The Black
woman is thus neither at home in the villas
of the wealthy, nor on the streets that many
poor indigenous women navigated in Alexandria.

Symbols of class status seen in La Négresse were one of multi-
ple methods that Said used to exclude black-skinned women from
Alexandria’s cultural and political fabric. The settings that he chose
for peasant women figures allude to Italian Renaissance art and
shed light on the Mediterranean character that Said associated
with Egypt, in contrast with Africa. In early modern Europe, 这
relationship between sitter and setting was a key feature of portrait
绘画, and Naima (1925) (如图. 8) exemplifies Said’s attempts to

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liken the Egyptian peasant woman to a Renaissance art patron. 这
format and composition reflect Western conventions of portraiture
in the late fifteenth through early sixteenth centuries (Christiansen
and Weppelman 2011). Naima is posed like a Florentine lady, 和
her body dominating the foreground and seated at an angle, 她
head turned towards the viewer. Her black shawl and tunic mark
her Egyptian peasant status and set her figure apart from the village
setting that appears in the background. 尽管如此, the tunic’s
rich red color is reminiscent of elite women’s dress in Renaissance

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6 Mahmoud Said (埃及, 1897–1964)
Nude on Blue Cushion (1926)
Oil on canvas; 100 cm x 73.5 厘米
Private collection of Mohammed Said Farsi
照片: courtesy of Christie’s

where irregular rows of adobe homes lend
depth to the composition. A similar archi-
tectural background appears in L‘Apôtre
(The Apostle, also known as Self-Portrait;
1924) (如图. 10), in which Said set his like-
ness against a backdrop of multistory
buildings seen in irregular rows. A faint
light also glows at the horizon line in
both works, not only echoing the meth-
ods that Vittore Carpaccio used to paint
skies, but also lending the figures a subtle
halo reminiscent of saintly portraits from
early modern Italy. The visual harmony
that Said expressed between portrait sitter
and Egyptian setting, and the parallel that
he drew between himself and his peasant
women subjects, was something he denied
the Black woman in La Négresse. 反而,
the Black subject of La Négresse is tied to the
low socioeconomic status of Alexandria’s

意大利, and the pines dotting the scenery behind her make the village
look more Tuscan than Egyptian. Said’s choice of color palette, 和
the background in warm tan and sepia and a cyan-tinted sky, 还
evokes that of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503–1506) and a
Portrait of a Woman (如图. 9) by Antonio Pollaiuolo from ca.1475.

By excluding Black female subjects from his European-inspired
vision of Egypt, Said attempted to weave Egyptian peasant women
and elite (白色的) men into the same Mediterranean world. Said’s
experiences studying Renaissance art in Europe likely served as
the inspiration for the distinct architectural landscape framing
Egyptian peasant subjects, such as Naima. Around the early- 到
mid-1920s, Said toured art museums in major European countries,
including Italy. Renaissance Venetian painting displayed at Italian
museums had a profound impact on the artist, who claimed that
the natural and architectural landscapes of the period possessed
“unforgettable charm” and “vibrant rhythm.”14 These rhythms
form the layout of the village scape behind the subject in Naima,

“streetwalkers” while being trapped inside a dark room.

Binaries of “African” and “Mediterranean” identities seen in
Said’s Alexandrian subjects engaged directly with discourses of
racial identity and cultural heritage often found in local ethnog-
raphies of race. Social scientist and intellectual Salama Musa
crafted a taxonomy of the human race in which Egyptians were of
a “Mediterranean” stock that included southern Europeans, 北
Africans, and even the Welsh.15 Musa’s arguments on race were
meant to connect the future of contemporary Egyptians fighting for
national independence with the wealth and political ambitions of
the pharaohs. 尽管如此, his writings also placed Egypt and the
Sudan on opposite ends of the human hierarchy and credited the
ancient Egyptians with spreading their civilization south to what
Musa referred to as the “savages” (mutawahishun) of sub-Saharan
非洲. Mahmoud Said was not attempting to portray his Black
subject as a savage in La Négresse, yet his choice to exclude her
from the Italianate settings seen in his Egyptian peasant portraits

26 | african arts WINTER 2021 VOL. 54, NO. 4

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7 Mahmoud Said (埃及, 1897–1964)
Negress (1936)
Oil on canvas; dimensions unknown
Mahmoud Said Museum
照片: courtesy of Esmat Dawastashy

reflects hierarchal dichotomies of Egypt
and Africa that operated in social scien-
tific texts of the time. Both Said and Musa
thus envisioned Egyptian people’s racial
and cultural superiority through their pur-
ported membership in a Mediterranean
race and, by extension, their superiority
over so-called primitive Africans.

DEFINING THE SUDAN,
DEFINING AFRICA
If Egypt became part of

这
Mediterranean realm in Said’s imagina-
的, then it was also separate from the
Africa that black-skinned women came
to represent in the fine art world of inter-
war period Egypt. The Black woman in La Négresse became a key
site for artists such as Said to characterize the Sudan as an African
frontier on racial, 班级, and sexual levels. Said placed her in a
local tradition of representation in which the Black woman was
servile and morally corrupt. His sexualized vision of the Sudanese
maid—a familiar figure in Egyptian cities—engaged with artistic,
scientific, and literary discourses about more exotic characters, 在-
cluding east African and Nubian women. Many Egyptian men un-
derstood these latter groups as colonial subjects from a primitive
land and portrayed them in their sketches and sculptures as living
proof of Egypt’s imperial position in Africa.

Modern art criticism in early twentieth-century Egypt indicates
that many Egyptians hypersexualized Sudanese women and con-
flated them with the Black female subjects seen in Said’s paint-
英. Prominent Egyptian art critic Ahmad Rasim (日期不详。) penned
an Arabic-language review of a 1936 fine art exhibition held in
Cairo. The show included La Négresse aux Bracelets, which the
critic renamed La Fleure Soudanaise (Sudanese Flower) in his
review. Rasim’s decision to rename the painting reflected Said’s
francophone education and his tendency to give French titles to

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his works. 更重要的是, 然而, an excerpt from his review
of the painting exemplified the connections that many Egyptians
made during this period between blackness and Africa (implied in
the French term “Négresse”) and a person’s Sudanese origins:

I remember the image of that “Negress,” surrounded by the walls of
lust and temptation. I remember her as she looks at us and I listen
to her groan like the scent of a flower that slowly wilts in the air of a
room swimming with the silence of loneliness, and we can see that
she feels as if her life is going nowhere, like waves vanishing upon a
beach, this beach being the place where the painter goes to wash the
memory of bygone eras (Rasim n.d.: n.p.).

Rasim’s strange and introspective review of La Négresse reveals the
profound effect that the subject had on him. She is simultaneously
a site of sexual tension and a woman trapped by “lust and temp-
tation”—whether her own, that of the viewer, or of the painter.
References to history and permanence layer those of the erotic be-
cause the text characterizes the woman as an ephemeral relic of the
distant past. Although Rasim does not explicitly discuss a national
历史, he gives Said an active role in shaping a memory of “bygone
eras” understood by both painter and beholder. His references
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8 Mahmoud Said (埃及, 1897–1964)
Naima (1925)
Oil on canvas; 108 cm x 85 厘米
Sherwet Shafei Collection
照片: courtesy of Safarkhan Gallery, Cairo

9 Antonio Pollaiuolo (意大利, 1431/32–1496)
Portrait of a Woman (c.1475)
Tempera on wood; 55 cm x 34 厘米
Uffizi Gallery, Florence
照片: courtesy of Photos.com/Jupiterimages

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to “vanishing” memory are thus marked by a collective sense of
loss, and placing La Négresse in local discourses of the Sudan and
Africa during the interwar period reveals a nostalgia among many
Egyptians for Egyptian political hegemony in northeast Africa.

所以, how did Rasim come to associate the Black woman seen in
La Négresse with the Sudan? Black women subjects seen in Said’s
oeuvre became part of a growing tradition among more affluent
Egyptian artists to model Black women figures from domestic
servants of Sudanese origin. Many elite families in early twenti-
eth-century Egypt had household servants from the Sudan, 和
woman seen in La Négresse may have worked for Said’s family. 她
headwrap was a sign of her class status and is similar to that seen
in other fine art and popular media depictions of black-skinned
domestic workers. Advertisements printed in Egyptian newspa-
pers during this period sold soap and other household products
to middle- and upper-class Egyptian readers by using drawings of
Black female house maids wearing such head coverings. Said also
drew an affinity between the subject’s body and symbols of domes-
tic servitude. The brass container that sits upon the window sill
was called a qulla in Arabic, and was used by maids to serve water
or drink to members of the household.

Just beneath the class and ethnic hierarchies that Rasim saw in La
Négresse is a deep history of slavery along the Nile. The Black woman
may have been the daughter or descendant of slaves brought from
southern Sudan to Egyptian cities, such as Alexandria, Cairo, 和
Port Said. Historian Eve Troutt Powell (2003: 20) states that Sudanese
slave traders and Egyptian religious leaders alike used Arabic words
to designate who was enslaveable and who was not, often based
on interchangeable definitions of religion and race. Terms such as
bilad al-sudan (“land of the Blacks”) were found in medieval Arabic
geographical texts and served to describe all of Africa south of the
Sahara. This label characterized eastern and southern Sudan as a
land of pagan infidels who could be bought and sold as slaves in
Khartoum and in Egypt’s cities. Northern Sudan and Egypt, 在
另一方面, were commonly understood as bilad al-‘arab (“land of
the Arabs”) because the majority of the population was Muslim and,
所以, protected from slave status. Although the British managed
to slowly abolish slavery along the Nile in the 1870s, such catego-
ries of identity endured into the interwar period and shaped how
Egyptian artists expressed the cultural and racial makeup of the
Sudanese in the early twentieth century. Bilad al-sudan and bilad
al-‘arab were especially controversial terms among Sudanese and

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10 Mahmoud Said (埃及, 1897–1964)
L‘Apôtre (The Apostle) (1924)
Oil on canvas; 76.4 cm x 58.5 厘米
Mahmoud Said Museum
照片: courtesy of Esmat Dawastashy

Egyptians because, by the early twentieth
世纪, they served to draw parallels be-
tween black skin, barbarity, and pagan re-
ligious practices—and, 反过来, 之间
proper Islamic beliefs, civility, and lighter
skin. Rasim’s description of the subject in
La Négresse as a “Sudanese flower” reveals
the direct connections that Egyptians made
between black skin and an individual’s ori-
gins in bilad al-sudan.

The appearance of the anonymous
subject in La Négresse in an urban home
evokes a narrative similar to the one that
lies behind sculptures of Black women cre-
ated by formally trained Egyptian artists.16
Precedents for fine art representations
of Black subjects include sartorial refer-
ences to female maids familiar to many
Egyptians. The famed sculptor Mahmoud
Mokhtar created a bronze bust called Ra’s
Zanjiya (Head of a Negress) (如图. 11) 在
1910 and included the subject’s distinc-
tive headwrap, tied in the front above her
forehead. He also captured the weight of
the subject’s aging skin around the eyes
and the corners of her mouth as she appears to turn her head and
look out to the right.17 Yet, the tension between the subject’s recog-
nizable features and her anonymity—rendered through Mokhtar’s
choice of Arabic title for the work—betrays the complicated re-
lationship between sitter and artist. Marsilam Abdallah worked
as a house servant for Mokhtar and his family, and her official
identity papers state that she was “a cook” who was “born in the
Sudan.”18 But who, 确切地, were the “Sudanese” in the Egyptian
collective imagination? And why were Sudanese cultural subjects
so important for Egyptian artists in their visual constructions of
Africa more widely?

Fine art representations of Black women, including Said’s paint-
ing and Mokhtar’s bronze bust, formed a collective portrait of
Egypt’s colonial history in the Sudan. Developments in modern
Egypt-Sudan relations began with the expansionist endeavors of
Muhammad Ali (r. 1805–1848), Ottoman viceroy of Egypt. 在
1820, Ali sent researchers and explorers up the Nile in order to
record the land and peoples south of Egypt, find gold and the Nile’s
来源, and slaves to populate his growing military. 从 1821 到

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1884, his descendants ruled this region as an Egyptian-Ottoman
colony, which it called the Sudan. By the late 1880s, 然而, Ali’s
grandson, Ismail (r. 1863–1879), drove Egypt into immense debt,
which the British used as a pretext to occupy Egypt and expand
their power into Egypt’s southern colony. An anticolonial revolt
led by Muhammad Ahmad (an Islamic religious leader known as
the “Mahdi”) against both British and Egyptian presence in the
Sudan marked the end of Egyptian colonialism there. The British
Occupation remained limited to Egypt until 1898, when British
armies seized regions ruled by the Mahdi’s forces and annexed them
to Egypt, so that the Sudan became known thereafter as the Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan until independence in 1955 (Daly and Holt 1988).
Political cartoons and publications from the 1930s called for
Egypt to reclaim the Sudan, and they reveal larger Egyptian dis-
courses of colonial loss and parochialism seen in fine art represen-
tations of the Sudanese. In February of 1936 the widely circulated
Arabic-language newspaper al-Musawar printed a cartoon (如图.
12) in which the Sudan pens a letter to Egypt stating his commit-
ment to the nation. The figure is seated in profile against a map

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11 Mahmoud Mokhtar (1891–1934)
Ra’s Zanjiya (Head of a Negress) (1910)
Bronze; 26 cm x 26 cm x 45 厘米
Mahmoud Mokhtar Museum, Cairo
照片: Lara Ayad

The sculptor used bronze to capture the
weight of his family servant Marsilam
Abdullah’s aging skin.

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of northern Egypt and specifies in writing that Egypt has right-
ful ownership of the Sudan, as well as its cities and inhabitants,
south of Khartoum.19 His clothing resembles that of an Egyptian
schoolboy and, together with his downcast gaze and slouched po-
sition at a desk, visually manifests the overwhelming submission
demanded of the Sudan by Egypt. This infantilizing image of the
Sudanese also manifested in written reports concerning Egypt-
Sudan relations and dismissed Sudanese liberation movements
of the period. 例如, A 1935 报告, entitled dahaya misr fi
al-sudan (Egypt’s Victims in the Sudan), attributed anticolonial
revolts in the Sudan either to the “tyranny” of the Mahdi in the
late nineteenth century or to the inspiration that the 1919 Egyptian
uprisings brought to the Sudanese.20

Such newspaper illustrations and written reports formed the
milieu in which Rasim understood Upper Nile subjects, 和, 喜欢
many other Egyptians, he likely limited the meaning of La Négresse
to the colonialist narrative of the Egyptian state.21 Although Rasim’s
written reflections on Said’s painting do not explicitly refer to co-
lonial history, his decision to rename the Black woman “Sudanese
Flower” suggests an imperialist perspective on the subject and the
bygone eras that she symbolized. Color and setting in La Négresse
may have also encouraged Egyptian critics and viewers to under-
stand the female subject as both compatriot and colonial subject.

The interplay between exterior and interior in the painting renders
the Black woman alien to Alexandria’s dynamic cultural realms—
whether elite or working class—while imprisoning her in the visual
and conceptual order of the city. Just as Egyptian newspapers por-
trayed Sudanese men as harmless schoolboys willing to give up
their land and community for Egypt’s sake, the Black woman in
La Négresse is transformed into a colonial subject trapped as a ser-
vant—literally and metaphorically—within Egypt’s urban fabric.

The development of social science museums in Egypt can
also explain why Rasim and his contemporaries identified Said’s
“Negress” as a Sudanese colonial subject. State-sponsored ex-
hibitions played an important role in solidifying the connection
that local visitors would have made between La Négresse and the
Sudan. As part of their goal to compensate for the collective sense
of political loss found among literate Egyptians, national museums
of ethnography, heritage, and culture attempted to symbolically
revive Egypt’s hegemony in the Upper Nile and offered Egyptians
a rare glimpse into the Sudan and east Africa. In the years prior to
the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, the British administration in
Sudan restricted a majority of Egyptians from traveling into the
southern protectorate, for fear that nationalist, anti-British sen-
timent growing in Egypt would spread up the Nile (霍尔特 1963).
Establishing the Khedivial Geographic Society (KGS) in Cairo in

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12 Sudan, personified as a schoolboy,
writes to Egypt. 来源: al-Musawar, 不. 591,
二月 7, 1936, pg. 10.
照片: Lara Ayad

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1875 became an important part of Khedive Ismail’s moderniz-
ing program because it served to distance Egypt from Africa and
bring it closer to Europe on political and cultural levels, 从而
enabling it to become a modern nation. The KGS contained an
Ethnographic Museum with the first Sudan-themed exhibitions
in Egypt. Staff there included European geographers and scien-
奶嘴, who gave viewers a tactile vignette of the Sudan’s people and
places by pairing weaponry and river boats from the Sudan with
photographic panels displaying various male and female “types”
from “Album d’Afrique Centrale” in frontal and profile poses (如图.
13). Such displays not only portrayed Sudanese material culture
and sub-Saharan Africans alike as primitive specimens, 但他们
also symbolically overwrote the diverse tribes, kingdoms, 和
sultanates of the Upper Nile with the imperial logic of Egyptian
nation-building.22 The Ethnographic Museum’s displays of east
Africa thus served to represent Egypt as both the modern portal
to a stateless Africa—reduced to the stereotype of bilad al-su-
dan—and a powerful player in the formation and dissemination
of colonial knowledge.

While it is unclear whether Said ever visited the Ethnographic
Museum in Cairo, his portrait of the Black woman was part of a
larger body of artworks inspired by scientific exhibitions of the
Sudan. Other artists working during the interwar period painted
Upper Nile subjects by drawing from Sudan-themed exhibi-
tions held in Cairo. A “Sudan section” was created for the Fuad
I Agricultural Museum in Cairo in 1938 and included represen-
tations of people from the Sudan similar to photographs found
at the Ethnographic Museum. An oil painting created by an un-
known artist features a boy at the lower right whose body, 姿势,
and arm bands closely resemble that of two women featured in
the “Album d’Afrique Centrale” photographic panel (如图. 13).23
Said’s contemporaries were thus forming a symbiosis between
fine art and scientific epistemologies of Upper Nile Africans in
their paintings of the “Sudanese,” the latter of whom were largely
known to urban Egyptians as house servants and menial laborers
from bilad al-sudan.

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DEFINING AFRICAN FEMALE SEXUALITY
La Négresse embodied a hypersexualized stereotype of the
Sudanese maid, whose erotic energy stemmed from her suppos-
edly primitive, immoral condition. Said and his contemporaries
used concepts of the primitive Other to characterize the bodies
of Sudanese, east African, and Nubian women alike. By weaving
these female subjects from diverse parts of Nilotic Africa into a
sexually charged language of representation, many Egyptian artists
portrayed vast swathes of the Upper Nile as a monolithic “African”
领土, ripe for Egypt’s moral and political intervention.

In La Négresse Said left little to the viewer’s imagination and
reduced the Black woman’s clothing to a short slip, which reveals
her legs and clings to her voluptuous form like a wet cloth. Hardly
any house servants living during the early twentieth century would
have worn such scant clothing while carrying out their domestic
工作. 反而, the artist transformed Sudanese domestic workers
into a sexual fantasy for the male, Egyptian viewer (his aesthetic
choices certainly won over the critic Ahmad Rasim, WHO, 在他的
written review of La Négresse, likened the silent Black woman to a
flower who “groans” with erotic desperation).

La Négresse’s exposed body served to personify the Sudan and
what many Egyptians saw as the region’s so-called African charac-
teristics: barbarity and promiscuity. In much of Egyptian society,

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13 These two photographs are displayed in
a panel entitled “Album d‘Afrique centrale”
at the Ethnographic Museum in Cairo.
The two women appear in frontal and
three-quarter angle rear poses intended to
invite scientific and physiognomic analysis of
their faces and bodies. Created ca. 1875.
照片: Lara Ayad

such traits were seen as antithetical to modern womanhood and
its basis in chastity. Many male nationalists situated modern wom-
anhood at the meeting point between sexual purity and national
honor, so that the sexual behavior of a country’s female inhabitants
came to represent its moral evolution in the global pecking order.24
Personifications of the Sudan as a dishonorable woman peppered
Egyptian political cartoons of the interwar period and resemble
the woman’s form seen in La Négresse. An unknown cartoonist for
A 1926 issue of the weekly al-Kashkul (The Scrapbook) (如图. 14)
juxtaposed the civility of Egypt, who appears white-skinned and
covered in modest bourgeois dress, with the wanton character of

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14 Unknown illustrator
sakhra al-ghurur al-inkilizi [British Delusions of
Grandeur],
Front cover illustration, al-Kashkul, 一月 1926.
照片: courtesy of Eve Troutt Powell, A Different
Shade of Colonialism, (2003), p. 216

Frontpage illustration for the weekly magazine
al-Kashkul (The Scrapbook), 一月 1926. 这
caricature features Lord Lloyd, a British official,
flanked by female personifications of the Sudan
(Lloyd’s right) and Egypt (左边).

the Sudan. The latter has black skin and ex-
aggerated, pendulous breasts, which seem
to swing forward as she sways her naked
torso towards a caricature of Lord Lloyd—a
British official—at center.25 Allegories of
Egypt and the Sudan seen in print media
echo the distinctions that Mahmoud Said
made between different socioconomic
and racial classes of women in his painted
portraits. While the subject of La Négresse
lacks the caricature-like qualities of the
Sudan allegory seen in print magazines
of the period, her bare black skin and
curvaceous form contrast with Madame
Riad, whose white skin and sumptuously
clothed body (如图. 3) signaled her status as
an honorable and upper-class woman.

Politically charged stereotypes of Black
women animated Egyptian sculptures and
drawings portraying other Upper Nile
女性, including Nubian and Sudanese
subjects, within scientific and cultural ex-
hibitions. Artworks depicting both groups
of women at the Agricultural Museum expressed their exteriority
to Egyptian culture, whether urban or rural. Nubians are an ethnic
group indigenous to southern Egypt and northern Sudan, 和, 喜欢
their Sudanese counterparts, they were largely familiar to Egyptians
as house servants and menial laborers in cities such as Alexandria
and Cairo. Many Nubians living during the early twentieth cen-
tury did not identify as “African” or “Black,” yet their appearance in
sculpture resembles those of Sudanese and east African women in
the fine arts world of interwar period Egypt (史密斯 2009). Mustafa
Naguib (1913–1990) created many sculptural works of exotic sub-
jects for the Agricultural Museum between 1934 和 1939, 包括-
ing his life-size sculpture of al-nubia that al-jarra (Nubian Woman
with Jar; undated) (如图. 15). Her features include tightly plaited
hair and a series of heavy, long necklaces that hang above her

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bodice wrap. Art historian Yasser Mongy (2014: 85–96) highlights
the ethnological approach that Naguib took to such Upper Nile fig-
ures and attributes their realistic detail to Naguib’s education under
the Swedish sculptor Boris Frödman-Cluzel (1878–1969). Naguib
trained under Cluzel ca. 1929 when he was pursuing a diploma at
the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, and both artists would move on to
create portraits of dancers and athletes with lifelike detail.

Naguib shared with Cluzel an interest in African themes, 更多的
than an attempt to master a realist technique, 然而. 在 1911,
Cluzel created a bronze sculpture, entitled Dancer with Drum,
which depicts a woman kicking her foot in the air as she prepares
to strike her drum. The piece emphasizes exotic African costume
and explosive movement by including beaded adornment around
the dancer’s bare chest, a nose ring, and her flying hair and skirt.

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Naguib diverged from Cluzel’s emphasis on motion and merged
images of Nubian women with tropes of the lascivious Sudanese
woman already familiar to many Egyptians. In al-nubia, Naguib
used the subject’s sexual and racial attributes as signposts of her
barbaric origins and promiscuity. The woman’s unnatural pose ul-
timately brings attention to her massive breasts and pubic area, 这
latter represented by the open-mouthed jar.

Such artistic visualizations of Upper Nile women in fine art
and the contemporary press had literary precedents. Nineteenth-
century accounts written by male Egyptian travelers signaled the
barbarity of the Sudan with the supposed licentiousness of its
female inhabitants. These authors highlighted the pressing need
for cultural and religious reform there by describing the freedom
of Sudanese women to walk about bare-breasted and mingle with
male strangers. The clay jar in al-nubia served to twist written crit-
icisms of Sudanese women into male sexual fantasies about Nubia
because rural women there often used these containers to gather
water from the village well or the banks of the Nile. By captur-
ing the Nubian woman going about her daily chores in such scant
衣服, Naguib characterized the women of her ethnic group as
sexually shameless and similar to Sudanese national allegories seen
in Egyptian magazines (如图. 14).

Similar approaches to the female form can be seen in the
drawings of Giuseppe Sebasti (1900–1961), an Egyptian artist of
Italian background. Sebasti was unique among his peers in Egypt
for traveling to the Sudan during the 1920s, and his drawings of
“Sudanese” village women in profile engaged his aesthetic con-
cerns and the “anthropological studies” of Upper Nile subjects cre-
ated by other Egyptian artists (Sebasti 1999). Although his char-
coal and crayon works (如图. 16) steered away from the anatomi-
cal exaggeration of Naguib’s Upper Nile subjects, they translated
the erotic currency of sculpture into two-dimensional form. 他的

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15 Mustafa Naguib (埃及, 1930–1990)
al-nubiah that al-jarrah (The Nubian Woman with the
Jar) (undated)
Bronze, dimensions unknown (roughly life-sized)
Agricultural Museum, Cairo
照片: Lara Ayad

16 Giuseppe Sebasti (埃及, 1900–1961)
Untitled drawing of two women (1933)
Charcoal and crayon; dimensions unknown
Ethnographic Museum, Cairo
照片: Lara Ayad

Note the similarity between the left-hand figure’s body
shape, 衣服, and pose to that of the woman who
appears in the right-hand photograph from “Album
d‘Afrique centrale” (数字 13).

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highly realist style captures the sheen of the woman’s bare torso
and gives her the appearance of a bronze figure, thus inviting the
male viewer to “touch” her exposed body with his eyes. The pal-
pable quality of Sebasti’s African figures resembles the modeling
techniques that Mahmoud Said used to paint La Négresse, 其中
her breasts and belly appear more plastic than they do naturalis-
tic. Although Said was more interested in expressing the role of
Black women in Egyptian urban life, the visual affinity between his
Alexandrian “Negress” and Sebasti’s ethnographic subjects shows
that many Egyptian artists understood Black female physiognomy
as a document of the Upper Nile and its uncivilized sexuality.

结论
This essay has shown that Mahmoud Said and his contemporar-
ies in Egypt used Black female subjects to situate Egypt outside of
非洲. Said’s erotic nudes and commissioned portraits from the
interwar period engaged with popular culture, scientific, 国家-
alist, and fine art narratives about one’s sense of belonging to the
Egyptian metropolis or countryside based on shifting categories
of racial identity. Contextualizing his works in Egyptian sculpture
and photography seen in local museums demonstrated that many
Egyptian artists transformed Sudanese women into sexualized
symbols of Black degeneracy rooted in Africa and its supposedly
primitive condition. Such artistic depictions contrasted with Said’s
portraits of working-class Egyptian and elite Ottoman women,
WHO, in his view, represented Egypt’s cultural and racial ties to a
metropolitan—and largely White—Mediterranean world.

The question of Egypt in Africa as seen in modern Egyptian art
has major cultural and political implications. Examining Black
racial identity and its construction in ethnographic drawings and
fine art portraits of the interwar period can help us understand
pressing current issues around the globe, particularly the status of
Sudanese refugees in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Conflicts in Darfur, located in western Sudan, and the violent
unrest in South Sudan have driven many Sudanese nationals to
seek refuge in other countries over the past twenty years. 许多
of these refugees have settled in Egyptian cities such as Cairo,
Alexandria, and Damietta, only to face racial discrimination, 六-
奥伦塞, and institutional negligence upon arrival. Abuses against
Sudanese nationals in Egypt range from racially inflected harass-
ment on the streets, to government barriers to employment, 到
murder (Eltahawy, Comer, and Alshimi 2010). Fine art stereotypes

of Black women not only sustained Egyptian imperialist attitudes
towards the Sudan, but they also lie just beneath the surface of the
immense challenges that many Sudanese migrants face in Egypt
今天. Shedding light on the artistic roots of anti-Black racism in
Egypt can help develop the international focus of the Black Lives
Matter movement. While BLM has traditionally focused on fight-
ing anti-Black racism in the United States, it has recently gained
traction in parts of the Arabic-speaking world, where Palestinian
and Syrian activists have shown explicit support for BLM in their
protests against violent and dictatorial government regimes at
home (Lebron 2017). Many of these Arab activists decry long-
standing anti-Black racism in the Middle East while shedding light
on the parallels between the oppression of Black men and women
in the United States and that of people living under Israeli occupa-
tion in former Palestine and the Syrian civil war, 分别 (铝-
Sharif 2020). Ongoing studies of Black subjects and their meaning
in modern Egyptian art can thus stimulate positive and critical di-
alogue about race in the Arabic-speaking world and help build a
global racial justice movement.

最后, this essay opens critical questions about Egyptian artis-
tic engagement with Pan-Africanist discourses, as well as the re-
formulation of Black identity in the mid-twentieth century—the
latter often referred to as the Independence Period of Africa. 这
Egyptian women painters Inji Efflatoun and Gazbia Sirry were
unique for creating portraits of African American life and polit-
ical activism in the 1960s. This period was marked by an upsurge
in civil rights movements in the United States, as well as the rise
of Pan-Arab and Pan-Africanist activities in a newly indepen-
dent Egypt.26 Furthermore, Egyptian intellectuals, such as Ramses
Younan, wrote for local Arabic-language newspapers at this time
about the importance of masks, sculpture, and other examples of
“African artistic heritage” in the context of the Third African Youth
Conference held in Cairo in 1961 (Younan 1969: 134–35). This cul-
tural turn in postcolonial Egypt towards global Black and African
narratives of identity, freedom, and art raise important questions
that would expand the key concerns of this essay on temporal and
geographical levels: Did the African Diaspora play a role in the
formation of a global Arab identity? Did Egyptian artists see a con-
nection between the status of Sudanese and east African migrants
in Egypt, 一方面, and the wave of anti-racist movements
developed across the Atlantic, on the other? 和, 最后, 是
Egyptians beginning to reconceptualize their own racial identities
in the face of such tumult?

I define “local” in this essay as having been created

Notes
It sold for US$665,000. https://www.christies.
1
com/lot/lot-mahmoud-said-egyptian-1897–1964-la-ne-
gresse-5935114/
2
in Egypt’s national boundaries. More often than not,
evidence of cultural and scientific production from the
interwar period comes from Egypt’s major northern
城市, particularly Cairo and Alexandria. Other studies
of modern Egypt concerned with art, 机构,
政治, and culture also revolve around urban life, 在
part because most fine art and print media come from
Egyptian metropolises, where there have been higher
concentrations of people with formal education and
access to resources. The scholarship on modern Egypt,
including this essay, has thus inadvertently privileged the
perspectives of urban, 中间- and upper-class Egyptians
over those of the rural and poor. A more robust practice
of documentation, art historical study, and oral history
from rural regions of Egypt among researchers would

help define “local” in more holistic ways.
3 Art historian Prita Meier (2010: 24–29) argues that
dichotomies of a “White” North Africa and a “Black”
sub-Saharan Africa in recent scholarship have obscured
the tremendous influence of African Muslims in
transcultural networks across the Sahel and the Swahili
coast, as well as in the building of Islamic states.
4 Political scientist Pearl Robinson (2004) 提供了一个
rich account of the history of African studies, 主要是
in the United States and, 正在进行中, highlights
the roles of American research universities, Pan-Afri-
canist scholars, and African universities and research
网络. Historian Paul Zeleza (2011) also provides a
history of the respective studies of African and African
美国研究, but ultimately traces this history
in order to examine the emergence of Africana (和
diaspora) studies in the United States.
5 One of the most vocal, and controversial, 学者
to argue for ancient Egypt’s connections with a “Black
Africa” was the late scholar Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop

based his claim that the ancient Egyptians were Black
on primarily American conceptions of race and skin
颜色. By using anachronistic and culturally inappropri-
ate data, Diop inadvertently perpetuated the myth of a
racially, ethnically, and culturally homogenous Black
Africa—a concept that stems directly from colonialist
White literature on African people, 文化, 和历史.
此外, there is evidence that Diop and his
supporters did not engage in sustained or critical ways
with the tension between their claims and the popular
belief among most modern Egyptians that they are not
黑色的. A summary report of a conference held in Cairo
在 1974, regarding “The peopling of Ancient Egypt
and the deciphering of the Meroitic script,” includes a
description of the Egyptian participants and their re-
sponses to Diop. They disagreed with Diop’s claim that
the ancient Egyptians were Black and, 反而, believed
that civilization spread from north to south in the Nile
谷. See Mokhtar 1990: 50–51.
6 Overwriting Egypt with cultural and political

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histories specific to west and central Africa perpetuates
the misconception, often found in the canon of African
art history, that west and central Africa are inherently
more African, and more Black, than peoples and cul-
tures found in southern, eastern, and northern regions of
the continent. Anthropologist Jessica Winegar and art
historian Katarzyna Pieprzak (2009) critically respond
to the ways that scholarship on Africa has divided the
continent into “North” and “Sub-Saharan.” They urge
scholars to blur such conceptual binaries and, 反而,
examine the robust cultural exchange of ideas, 艺术, 和
people between the two so-called regions. Curatorial
项目, such as Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time,
by Kathleen Bickford Berzock (2019), have begun
shifting the field of African art history in new directions
and highlight the very porous boundaries of artistic,
政治的, and cultural exchanges between Saharan and
western Africa, as well as Africa and Asia more widely.
7 For more information on constructions of Black-
ness and Black African subjects in popular culture in
Egypt and Sudan throughout the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, see Smith (2006: 401) and Troutt
鲍威尔 (2003).
8 Art historian Nadia Radwan (2017: 234–35)
analyzes representations of Black African, Nubian,
and Sudanese subjects created by the first generation
of Egyptian modern artists who, she claims, were part
of a wider “colonial culture.” These artists understood
their Upper Nile subjects as antithetical to idealized
sculptures and paintings of Egyptian peasant women
exhibited at fine art salons in Cairo.
9 Zachary Lockman (2016) highlights how these
racially inflected binaries found in Middle East and
Oriental Studies in the United States stem from the
disciplinary inheritance of historically White institu-
系统蒸发散. The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative
on Race (2020), 然而, is helping spearhead major
shifts in the field and its approach to studies of race
in the MENA regions. Their publication Race & 这
Middle East in the United States is a collection of
peer-reviewed articles dealing with the topic of race
as discussed in the Middle East Studies scholarship
之间 1979 和 2019. While it focuses on the role of
race in politics and activism between the Middle East,
North Africa, 和美国, the bulk of the
articles treat the United States as the center of knowl-
edge production about race in MENA countries, 这样的
as Palestine. This trend, highlighted through the efforts
of MESPI, only demonstrates the need for scholars
to focus more on constructions of race within Middle
Eastern and Arabic-speaking countries.
10 Ogbechie (2008: 5–6, 77–78) argues that drawings
of southern Nigerian sculpture, 音乐, and female
figures seen in Ben Enwonwu’s gouaches fit into wider
debates about the ideology of Negritude in the years
following Nigerian independence from the British.
Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor first devel-
oped Negritude while living in Paris in 1934 and sought
to create an African modernism through what late art
curator and historian Okwui Enwezor calls “an act of
internal reflexivity on the status and value of African
culture” (2001: 12).
11 Mahmoud Said was unusual among his peers in the
fine arts world of early twentieth-century Egypt because
of his class background and art education, which have
led scholars to interpret the prevalence of Egyptian
subjects in his paintings in controversial ways. 许多
Arabic-language scholars, such as ‘Esmat Dawastashy
(1997: 52) and the late Badr al-Din Abu Ghazi (1975:
95–105), claim that these subjects reveal Said’s affinity
towards working-class Egyptian subjects and his role
as a “national artist” (fannan watani), 分别.
Anglophone art historians Alex Dika Seggerman
(2019: 103–104) and Elizabeth Miller (2012: 210,
224) have challenged such nationalist interpretations
of Said’s work. 反而, they show that his Alexandria
was a largely White, foreign-born world dominated
by the Turkish-Ottoman aristocracy and European
expatriates. Such studies have enriched the history of
modern Egyptian art by moving beyond deterministic
questions of whether or not Said was a “truly Egyptian”
artist. This essay shows that Said’s female portraits and
Alexandrian settings engaged directly with discourses
of racial identity and cultural heritage often found in
state museums and social science literature created in
interwar period Egypt, even if he did not intend to form
an explicitly nationalist art.
12 例如, Bather (1937) (如图. 2) 特征
single-sail boats (known in colloquial Arabic as

36 | african arts WINTER 2021 VOL. 54, NO. 4

felukat), women gathering water at the Nile River, 和
mud brick buildings dotting the horizon line above.
Said was also known for creating hybrid settings of var-
ious Egyptian cities. Seggerman (2019: 103) 描述
Said’s famous and monumentally sized La Ville (1937)
as a “pastiche” of various Egyptian urban centers such
as Cairo and Alexandria, respectively marked by the
Muhammad Ali Mosque and the electric blue water
seen in the background.
13 Seggerman also identifies class and ethnic differ-
ences among women seen in Said’s oil portraits. 她
comparison of Riad’s clothed figure and the peasant
woman’s swelling thighs in Bather shows that Said’s
portraits of elite women lacked the sexual force of
their working-class counterparts and, 推而广之,
the “latent power … of the Egypt [that the latter] rep-
resents” (2019: 122).
14 These descriptive terms are based on Elizabeth
Miller’s translation, from French to English, of Said’s
personal correspondence with the French painter Pierre
Beppi-Martin in 1927. Said penned glowing descrip-
tions of the works of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, 作为
well as Carpaccio, whose natural and architectural land-
scapes possessed “unforgettable charm” and “vibrant
rhythm” Miller 2012: 214, fn382.
15 Musa did not understand North Africans as
“Arabs.” As Omnia El Shakry, historian of Egyptian
social sciences, explains, Musa developed his Arabic
texts on human evolution from the writings of the
British paleoanthropologist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith,
who came up with the theory of cultural diffusionism
(El Shakry 2007: 55–60)..
16 While details about those who worked in Said’s
household are unavailable, Eve Troutt Powell’s
historical study indicates that his generation was one
of the last to have Sudanese maids, cooks, and guards
who were brought to Egypt as slaves (2003: 180–88).
She draws excerpts from the diaries of the aristocratic
nationalist and feminist Huda Shaarawi in order to
outline the emotional and cultural impact of Sudanese
domestic servants on this generation of affluent Egyp-
tians. Shaarawi reminisced about her family’s Sudanese
guard with a warm tenderness at the same time that she
advocated Egyptian reclamation of the Sudan from the
英国人. Said and Shaarawi shared the same socioeco-
nomic background, and it is likely that he, 也, transi-
tioned to manhood under the watchful eyes of Sudanese
servants at home.
17 According to art historian Nadia Radwan (2017:
234–35), this sculptural work was unusual for portray-
ing a woman without the idealized features typically
given to female subjects in the Egyptian art world of the
early twentieth century.
18
‘Edara ‘ummum al-aman al-‘am, “shahada tahdid
al-hawiya, Marsilam ‘Abdallah” [identity card, Marsilam
Abdallah] (Cairo: General Security Administration,
1917), scan of certificate courtesy of Emad Abu Ghazi.
19 Unknown illustrator, “min al-sudan ila misr” [到
埃及, from the Sudan], cartoon, al-Musawar, 二月
7, 1936, 10.
20 The report’s author, who refers to himself as
Mahzun (“Dejected” in Arabic), describes at length the
“devastation” that the Mahdi’s forces wreaked upon the
Sudan’s towns and rural regions and claims that years
of cruelty and persecution in the years following 1884
“exterminated entire tribes, such as the Shukriya and the
Kababish …” Just as Mahzun frames the Sudanese as
victims of the Mahdi’s men, he also positions Egypt as
their savior and the driving force behind anti-British re-
volts among the Sudanese in 1924. 进一步来说, 他
describes how British control in the Sudan eventually
rendered its people powerless, and that the Sudanese
“had hoped that Egypt would rescue them from the
Khalifa’s [the Mahdi’s] oppression, and bring them
back to [Egypt’s] arena of justice and compassion…”
(Mahzun 1935: 69).
21 Eve Troutt Powell’s (2003) concept of the “colo-
nized colonizer” is fruitful for understanding Rasim’s
review of La Négresse and contemporary political
cartoons, particularly their melancholic references to
Egyptian colonial history in the Sudan. A dualistic
nationalism developed in Egypt in response to dramatic
shifts in the last decade of Muhammad Ali’s reign.
Leaders of nationalist parties who were active around
the turn of the century attempted to claim unity with the
Sudan while also labeling it as Egypt’s colony. Ahmad
Lutfi al-Sayyid founded of the Party of the Nation (hizb
al-umma) and delivered an impassioned speech in 1910
supporting the unity of the Nile Valley against British

occupation. Like many of his nationalist colleagues,
al-Sayyid used this term to describe both Egypt and the
Sudan, and to stir up feelings of brotherly love among
Egyptians for the Sudanese. But any potential bonds
between the two groups were undercut by the parochial
edge of this nationalist endeavor. Leader of the National
Party (al-hizb al-wataniyya) Mustafa Kamel fomented
the public’s sense of belonging to a wider Egyptian
national community by describing the Sudan as the
rightful property of Egypt, unfairly stripped away by
the Western menace.
22 Historian Timothy Mitchell’s analysis (1988: 6–8)
of European world’s fairs is particularly helpful for un-
derstanding the colonial logic of the museum institution
and its representation of the “world-as-spectacle.”
23 Other Egyptian artists who portrayed Sudanese
and Nubian subjects may have had their own social
scientific aims. Art historian Mostafa al-Razzaz (2007:
31) argues that the painters Hamed Nada and Abdel
Hadi el-Gazzar painted scenes of Nubians participating
in the zar (an exorcism ceremony) as “anthropological
studies” of life in southern Egypt.
24 Historian Beth Baron (2005: 41–53; see also
Badran 1995) explains that Egyptian nationalists active
at the turn of the century used women as national
symbols by formulating the concept of national honor
from the traditional framework of familial honor in
埃及. The sexual objectification of women in Egypt
served primarily to uphold patriarchal family structures,
in which the honor (‘ird) of the family was rooted in the
woman’s body. It was from this sexually specific notion
of honor that the importance of chastity for women
in Egypt emerged. In an effort to make the national
liberation movement relevant to both Egyptians of all
类, Mustafa Kamel introduced the idea of Egypt
as a “national family” and implored his fellow citizens
(Egyptian men) to defend the “honor” of the Egyptian
国家.
25 Eve Troutt Powell’s (2003: 217) analysis of this
same cartoon affirms the illustrator’s attempt to connect
the exposed bodies of black-skinned women with
sexual deviance. She explains that the Sudan’s behavior
around the male British official would have been under-
stood by Egyptian readers as “brazen,” and as “beyond
the structures of either British or Egyptian morality.”
26 The seeds for Egyptian identification with Africa
could be found in the political platform and activi-
ties of Gamal ‘Abdel Nasser. Nasser was the second
leader of Egypt after the end of British colonialism
(he stepped into the presidency after his colleague
Muhammad Naguib, served for a short period) and he
began pairing his vision of a Pan-Arab politics with
that of Pan-Africanism during the 1950s and 1960s. 他
played a key role in the so-called Bandung Conference
的 1955 (officially known as the first Asian-African
会议), when leaders of African and Asian
nations gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to develop
economic and cultural collaboration among postcolo-
nial nations on these two continents. Nasser was also
close friends with Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of
an independent Ghana. Nkrumah married an Egyptian
woman, Fathia, 在 1957 in order to show his solidarity
with Egypt. This positive trend in Egyptian engagement
with African identity existed alongside cultural racism,
然而. Blackface portrayals of Nubian men were not
uncommon in Egyptian films of the 1960s, and this ten-
sion between political discourse and cultural production
of African and Upper Nile subjects in Cold War Egypt
raises questions about the receptivity of the Egyptian
public to Nasser’s Pan-African alliances. See Gordon
2006: 56–58; 伯克 2010: 13–16.

References cited
Abu Ghazi, Badr al-Din. 1975. al-funnun al-jamila fi
misr: jil min al-ruwwad [The Fine Arts in Egypt: 这
Pioneer Generation]. Cairo: Society of the Friends of
Fine Arts.

Badran, Margot. 1995. Feminists, Islam, and Nation:
Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. 普林斯顿大学, 新泽西州:
普林斯顿大学出版社.

Baron, Beth. 2005. Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism,
性别, and Politics. 伯克利: 加州大学
按.

Bassani, Ezio. 2005. Arts of Africa: 7000 Years of African
Art. 摩纳哥: Grimaldi Forum.

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