Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (review)

Egypt Land is an "irreducibly interdisciplinary" tour de force of cultural and historical analysis (xviii). It engages such topics as the "melodramas of archaeological entrance" (95)—that is, of opening a tomb—the unwrapping of mummies, the curses of mummies, the Egyptian revival in architecture (such as The Tombs in New York), and the gendered story of Cleopatra and her racialized "strip-tease" in sculpture and poetry. Trafton unravels the ways in which the obsessive fascination with ancient Egypt embodied racial anxieties. He pays particular attention to "the radical interactions between various factions of nineteenth-century American culture: sacred and secular, professional and popular, classicist and Orientalist, Aryanist and Afrocentrist, black and white" (xvii), as they play across the various fantasies of origins.

As Trafton shows, the attempts by the American School of Ethnology—Nott, Gliddon, and others—to establish a white supremacist "scientific construction of race" were completely "coincident and interactive with the rise of American Egyptology. . . .¹ In America, the scientific construction of race begins with the question of ancient Egypt and vice versa: the question of the race of the ancient Egyptians inaugurates the field of American Egyptology" (49). While Trafton traces the convoluted logic of the American School to create their narrative of the white origins of civilization, he also examines how African Americans attempted to appropriate or transform the racial constructions of ancient Egypt. In particularly acute fashion, he illuminates the extent to which "'Afrocentric' and 'Negrophobic' positions were in dialogue" (72). When proto-pan-Africanists like Delany countered such constructions as the biblical myth of the sons of Noah, they relied on the same assumptions as the white supremacists.²

Trafton sees racial categories deeply embedded in Egyptomania, and the tropes of racialized Egypt influencing other enthusiasms. For example, he takes great pains noting that many lost race or hollow-earth novels employ many of the same figures as those involved in the narratives of discovering and opening lost Egyptian tombs—particularly the trope of the "racial rupture" (90), a crucial element in the accounts of entering the tomb involving the stark encounter with the racial other. Trafton relates this trope to Edgar Allen Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (London, 1838), which employs many Egyptian figures, as well as to such lesser known works as John Cleves Symmes' speculative fiction Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (New York, 1820). In equally deft fashion, Trafton recounts how "the curse of the mummy was a narrative of racialized revenge" (142), the rage of the suppressed African, among other dynamics.

In each of these aspects of obsession with Egypt, Trafton calls upon a wide variety of disciplinary methodologies—historical investigation, literary interpretation, discourse analysis, and aesthetic explication of architecture, sculptor, and art. Egypt Land is a major contribution to understanding the complex underpinnings of American culture, and its "irreducibly interdisciplinary" approach, essential to its ambitious task, is brilliantly executed.