Egypt land: Race and the cultural politics of American Egyptomania, 1800-1900

In Egypt Land: Race and the Cultural Politics of American Egyptomania, 1800-1900, I argue that the political, scientific, and social interest in ancient Egypt for Americans in the nineteenth century was directly related to the tensions, concerns, and anxieties over the institutionalized uses of Africans and their descendants as the foundation for an entire economic and social system in the United States. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1946, "It is especially significant that the science of Egyptology arose and flourished at the very time that the cotton kingdom reached its greatest power on the foundation of American Negro slavery." Significant indeed: as a land of scandals, contradictions, and directly opposed interests, in nineteenth-century America, the problems of the writing of the history of Egypt were of a piece with the problems of the politics of race. The web of references to the Biblical story of Hebrew slavery in the book of Exodus by African Americans in general, and by slaves in particular, was always already about both Egypt and America, both history and the politics of race, and it is from this tradition that my study takes both its starting point and its title.;This project examines the roles that images and discourses of ancient Egypt played in the formation of American national identities throughout the nineteenth century. With specific attention to issues of race and racial representation--both of Egypt and America--I track the rise of interest in ancient Egypt relative to four major social movements: American ethnology and the racialized sciences, American architecture and the Revivalist movements, American literary history, and the cultural politics of African American religious practices. From the rites of the Masons to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, from the works of Pauline Hopkins to the construction of the Washington Monument, from the measurement of slave skulls to the singing of slave spirituals: I argue that in all of these diverse social arenas, claims about and representations of ancient Egypt served as linchpins for discussions about nineteenth-century American racial and national identity.