The Grand Egyptian Museum as a Project of Racial Petrification

• In Event: Race, Gender, Class in the Arab World

Abstract

Political commentators have coined the term "Neo-Pharaonism" to describe the most recent iteration of Egyptian racial nationalism, which refers to the Egyptian state’s revitalization of its ancient civilizational history through grand public spectacles and exorbitant funding for new and renovated museums (TIMEP 2023) at the expense of the public good. The Egyptian state’s cultural productions focus on a primordial and historical “Egyptianness,” which often colludes with the populist and nativist interests of many urban middle and upper-class Egyptians following the 2011 revolution and the 2013 military coup and takeover. This is especially critical in light of Egypt’s geographic position at the center of regional conflict, a context in which refugees and migrants from Sudan, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, among others, were forced to enter the country following violent escalations in their own countries of origin. The racial nationalism of neo-Pharaonic discourse focuses on an idea of Egyptian racial particularity and continuity and thus has high political stakes for the treatment of Black African refugees and migrants. Indeed, neo-Pharaonic discourse has focused on Afrocentrism as a scapegoat for the state’s failures to satisfy citizens’ existential demands on two levels; on the level of basic material existence and subsistence, and on that of the meaning of Egyptian citizenship and belonging. Afrocentrism as a scapegoat fills in with a highly mediatized provocation, framed as the claim that the current non-Black inhabitants of Egypt are not descended from the original Black Egyptians (Aïdi 2022), throwing questions of identity and continuity into disarray. I argue that the Egyptian state and its cultural authorities produce and preserve racial artifacts for moral preservation, and introduce the concept of “racial petrification” to describe the processes of production and preservation as they relate to major sites and institutions, particularly the newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum.

Author

• Salma Moustafa-Kamel, Northwestern University