The Routledge Companion to Black Women's Cultural Histories

Janell Hobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429516726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Women in Business
• Index: Business

In the social and cultural histories of women and feminism, Black women have long been overlooked or ignored. The Routledge Companion to Black Women's Cultural Histories is an impressive and comprehensive reference work for contemporary scholarship on the cultural histories of Black women across the diaspora spanning different eras from ancient times into the twenty-first century. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into five parts:

• 
  
  

• A fragmented past, an inclusive future

• 
  
  

• Contested histories, subversive memories

• 
  
  

• Gendered lives, racial frameworks

• 
  
  

• Cultural shifts, social change

• 
  
  

• Black identities, feminist formations

Within these sections, a diverse range of women, places, and issues are explored, including ancient African queens, Black women in early modern European art and culture, enslaved Muslim women in the antebellum United States, Sally Hemings, Phillis Wheatley, Black women writers in early twentieth-century Paris, Black women, civil rights, South African apartheid, and sexual violence and resistance in the United States in recent history.

The Routledge Companion to Black Women's Cultural Histories is essential reading for students and researchers in Gender Studies, History, Africana Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Part I

A fragmented past, an inclusive future

1

Women are from Africa and men are from Europe

Monica Hanna

This chapter is an experiment to analyze colonialism and patriarchy in the field of Egyptian archaeology and how they interact with the interpretation of the past as well as the management of Egyptian heritage today. Given the focus of this companion on Black women’s cultural histories, a chapter exploring the Western imperialist and male-dominated origins of a field of study that has severed Egypt from its African context raises crucial issues on the cultural meanings of ancient Egypt. It further invites critical interventions that can bring such studies toward more inclusive, inter-African frameworks.

After the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, the Western obsession with ancient Egypt was revamped. The expedition was composed of soldiers as well as the famous savants, or “scholars.” Fascination with ancient Egypt continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Egyptomania inspired the West, which was in a phase of identity creation, to appropriate ancient Egypt into its new selfhood through the physical import of thousands of ancient Egyptian objects for its museums and the usurpation and inclusion of the ancient Egyptian past into its own historical narrative (Breger 2005, 206).

Imperialism and colonialism (Trigger 1984, 365) also went hand in hand with androcentrism (Nelson 2004, 152) in the interpretation of archaeological data and the construction of the ancient Egyptian past, which was in turn used in Western identity formation. Not only did ancient Egypt affect colonialism and imperialism, but as suggested by Michel Foucault, it still holds a strong connection to postcolonial ideology (Foucault and Sheridan 1972, Breger 2005, 136–7). Imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and androcentrism thus worked to create a discontinuity pretext between modern Egyptians and their past. The result of this schism is that the white Western man, as opposed to a modern Egyptian woman from Upper Egypt, was thought to resemble the ancient Egyptian. Gender claims have been at the heart of the cultural discontinuity pretext, on the one hand, and of cultural appropriation, on the other hand. Egyptian objects in museums of North America and Europe help to construct their identities through the “otherness” of cultures (Breger 2005, 137). Ancient Egypt was first completely interpreted by imperialist white men while they willfully ignored the social history of modern Egyptians and how they engaged with their past.

As a trained indigenous Egyptologist, I attempt in this chapter to analyze how colonialism and androcentrism together affected the way we experience ancient Egypt in the twenty-first century in relation to Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism. This I will carry out through an interdisciplinary approach, relating philosophical and social concepts of embodiment such as those of Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1962) and Foucault (Foucault 2012, Foucault and Sheridan 1972) and the feminist theories of Butler (Butler and Trouble 1990) and Gatens (1991). My analysis of past colonialism is based on the works of Said (Gbazoul 2007, Said 1995, 1989), Trigger (1984), and Reid (2002, 2003, 1985, 1992, 2015). The research design is an integration of action research, constructivism, and critical discourse analysis.

Imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and androcentrism

In 1932, a journalist wrote in the newspaper al-Balagh: “It is indeed a matter of deep regret that the monuments should be ours and the history should be ours, but that those who write books on [the] history of ancient Egypt should not be Egyptians” (Reid 2003, 1). During the French expedition to Egypt, military occupation by soldiers was coupled with cultural imperialism by the savants who found the Rosetta Stone. It was later deciphered by Jean-Francois Champollion through the copies that were made by the French; they had lost the war to the British, who had confiscated the stone as a spoil of war. However, most scholars attribute to Champollion the discovery of ancient Egypt and the birth of the field of Egyptology.

That Egyptology was born in Europe has led to a continuous Western hegemony over Egypt’s past, which continued as cultural colonialism even after Egypt declared independence in 1922 and even after the regime change in 1952. Egypt was exploited by European imperialism, and at the heart of such exploitation was Egypt’s heritage. Mohamed Ali (1805–49), the first de facto independent ruler of Egypt – he himself was not Egyptian – did not really appreciate the value of ancient monuments. Much of Egypt’s heritage was ransacked by nineteenth-century European explorers/treasure hunters who joined a race between countries to own the best objects in their museums (Fagan 2009, 65). For example, the Louvre Museum in Paris used dynamite in the temple of Dendera to remove the Zodiac, which is now, ironically, in a dark side-room of the museum (Waxman 2008, 74). Consuls and diplomatic missions in the nineteenth century focused on bringing back home the best objects they could find without any regard for the rights of the Egyptian people or their relations with their past. The relationship between the West and the East has been one of control, dominance, and cultural appropriation (Said 1995, 11).

This cultural appropriation has mostly been male dominated and presented a white male–perceived idea of ancient Egypt. Egyptology evolved to be a “scientific” study of ancient Egypt, whose practice is only for the well-educated; consequently, many Western academics take it as a justification for the “guardianship” of the field as well as the numerous objects sequestrated by imperialism (Sedra 2004, 249). Furthermore, Egyptology was deemed at its conception to be a subdiscipline of the classics; this was best explained in Bernal’s Black Athena – despite the legitimate criticism it drew in general – on how Western academic circles focused on marginalizing the contributions of ancient Egypt to the Greco-Roman culture, rationalizing that Africans were not capable of producing culture of such sophistication (Bernal 1991, 241–66). Most Western Egyptologists never learned Arabic; in fact, the Egyptological languages are English, French, German, and Italian. Interaction with indigenous communities was considered a nuisance by some, and from several experiences working with archaeological missions, the situation remained like this until the post-2011 political uprising.

This male-driven Western hegemonical attitude can be found, for example, in the writings of Gustave Flaubert, especially when he describes the courtesan Kuchuk Hanem from Esna, a region in the south of Egypt, and plays on the stereotype of the “oriental” woman (Said 1995, 11). Kuchuk Hanem was exploited physically by Flaubert but never had the chance to have her voice written as part of the history (Said 1995, 11). The narrative of their encounter is only from his point of view as the white wealthy man who spoke on her behalf to feed the stereotype of the oriental woman, a recurrent image in the exchange between the Orient and the Occident (Said 1995, 11): erotic and highly sexualized. Similarly, the esteemed Egyptologist Jan Assmann (1996, 68) describes Queen Nefertiti as a “love-poem in stone” and reiterates how her “very refined sensuousness and almost erotic grace and radiance” are embedded in the masterpieces of Egyptian art during the Amarna Period (1350 BCE). Both descriptions of Egyptian women show how the male-dominated ideology of Western stereotypes of the Orient has continuously been propagated uncritically.

The reception of an androcentric Egypt

The Western stereotypes of Egyptian women proliferated through the scholarship of mainly Western male academics as well as some Egyptians until very recently. Despite the fact that archaeology and anthropology, as part of humanities and social sciences, started to evolve based on the feminist critique, Egyptology took years to realize the changes in social theory around it due to its weaker theoretical foundation. Postmodernist archaeology focused more on the reconstruction of historical landscapes and the analysis of technology, industry, and economies, shifting to a new type of inferential archaeology (Hamilakis, Pluciennik, and Tarlow 2012, 4–5). This shift marked in archaeology a more representational analysis of how the body in the past experienced different norms of life and resulted in the publication of several studies by feminist scholars interested in gender analysis of the past through the different experiences of embodiment (Meskell 1998, Joyce 2004, Joyce and Meskell 2014).

The West has created a disembodied meaning of the past through its masculine theory of knowledge, which does not incorporate a female perception that is embodied and multisensory (Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips 2006, 7). Egyptology, like other disciplines of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and history, placed the man in the middle of cultural evolution and production and confined women to a marginal position, so that men’s activities represented the whole society (Nelson and Rosen-Ayalon 2001, 30). This awareness of the marginalization of women led in the 1970s to the first discussions of the role of women in archaeology, history, and their related disciplines. Women in ancient Egypt were mostly studied when they were powerful, such as Merneith, Ahhotep, Ahmose-Nefertari, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Cleopatra. More recent is the case of the God’s Wives of Amun, such as Shepenwepet and Amenirdis (Ayad 2009), because primarily, in Western ideology, power is gendered male (Nelson and Rosen-Ayalon 2001, 30, Sweely 2012, 187).

Nefertiti, whose famed bust was unethically smuggled to Berlin by Ludwig Borchardt, has also been the object of a political imperialist fantasy through her metonymic appropriation, which helped with the construction of modern Western identity (Breger 2006, 283). Women who were outside the realm of power were probably thought to have taken their stereotypical roles of childbearing and household upkeeping, which was fostered by the imagery of Isis suckling Horus that later filtered into Classical and Christian art (Koloski-Ostrow, Lyons, and Kampen 2003, 562). It was not until recent years that archaeologists started looking at gendered goods in the Predynastic Period as a way to relate and understand women’s roles in the formation of the Egyptian state around 3200 BCE (Wrobel 2004, 170–92).

The archaeological discoveries at Deir el-Medina by Ernesto Schiaparelli at the beginning of the twentieth century, shedding light on the lives of common women, prompted gender studies to relate to women in ancient Egypt (Sweeney 2009, 154, Matić 2016, 181). More studies targeted women’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories: An Introduction by Janell Hobson
• PART I A fragmented past, an inclusive future
• PART II Contested histories, subversive memories
• PART III Gendered lives, racial frameworks
• PART IV Cultural shifts, social change
• PART V Black identities, feminist formations
• Index