Disarming words: Reading (post)colonial Egypt's double bond to Europe

Might cultural imperialism captivate its subjects even as it captures them? Although theorists from Frantz Fanon and Christopher Miller to Homi Bhabha and Priya Joshi have asked this question, dominant understandings of cultural imperialism as a process of imposition---not proposition---continue to muffle the "seductionist" undercurrents in their thought. I read the interplay of cultural attraction and military coercion in the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt---the French, in 1798, and the British, in 1882---to contend that the colonial transmission of culture involves seduction in subjugation, and to theorize that dynamic of seduction as a sexualized economy of translation. Translation, I argue---the "conversion" of languages, of literary genres, of intellectual and spiritual idioms, and of persons---underwrote both French and British efforts to seduce Egypt into empire and Egyptian receptions of the colonial enterprise: the French and the British were most attractive to the Egyptians they colonized, I show, when they "spoke" the idioms of Arabic or Islam---that is, when they translated themselves into imitations of their colonial targets. Analyzing a series of literary representations and translations published between 1798 and the 1950s, I contend that Egyptian writers and intellectuals of the late eighteenth through twentieth centuries responded to the lure of French and British mimicry with the identificatory desire to translate themselves into Frenchness and Englishness, if not French and English. First, they learned the colonizers' languages and translated literatures of French and English expression into Arabic. Second, they adopted and adapted these models of European literature and thought as their own, and by so doing, they annexed Egypt to Europe through translation. Under unequal conditions of East/West power, these translational relations climax in a phenomenon that I call "copula-tion": the asymmetrical translation of the colonized's tongue, being, and time across the colonizer's copula, or verb of being. Here the colonized loses as much as the colonizer gains. Ultimately, I suggest, the translated word---by calling on the self to forget itself (if not its language) in the memory of another---annexes a colonized people to its colonizer far more effectively than arms.