Ancient Egyptians in Black and White: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ and the Hamitic Hypothesis

In this essay, I consider how the racial politics of Ridley Scott’s whitewashing of ancient Egypt in Exodus: Gods and Kings intersects with the Hamitic Hypothesis, a racial theory that asserts Black people’s inherent inferiority to other races and that civilization is the unique possession of the White race. First, I outline the historical development of the Hamitic Hypothesis. Then, I highlight instances in which some of the most respected White intellectuals from the late-seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century deploy the hypothesis in assertions that the ancient Egyptians were a race of dark-skinned Caucasians. By focusing on this detail, I demonstrate that prominent White scholars’ arguments in favor of their racial kinship with ancient Egyptians were frequently burdened with the insecure admission that these ancient Egyptian Caucasians sometimes resembled Negroes in certain respects—most frequently noted being skin color. In the concluding section of this essay, I use Scott’s film to point out that the success of the Hamitic Hypothesis in its racial discourse has transformed a racial perception of the ancient Egyptian from a dark-skinned Caucasian into a White person with appearance akin to Northern European White people.

On Twentieth-Century Literature’s Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism, 2019

The winner of this year’s prize is Mark A. Tabone’s “Multidirectional Rememory: Slavery and the Holocaust in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues.” The judge is Michele Elam. Elam’s scholarship and teaching in interdisciplinary humanities research spans literature and social science in order to examine changing cultural interpretations of gender and race. Her most recent scholarship is especially interested in how racial perception impacts outcomes for health, wealth, and social justice.

How to Make “Colored” Japanese Counter-Reformation Saints – A Study of an Iconographic Anomaly

The 1627 beatification of the twenty-six martyrs of Japan was a major milestone in the history of the Church and especially for the missionary orders. These martyrs were the first officially recognized saints from the newly “discovered” lands. However, while the majority of the twenty-six were in fact Japanese, surviving paintings depict them as white-skinned missionaries and without any physical features that would have been considered “typically Asian” at the time. This paper analyzes this iconographic tradition and shows how it can be understood as a consequence of a process of assimilation of Christian Japan into the Catholic world view. Associating particular skin color with true faith and civilization was part of discourses that blended the physical “otherness” of these martyrs. This paper demonstrates how these discourses point to the first seeds of a racial perception of East Asians, which would later become the notion of “yellow.”

Romance and Racism after the Civil War

This chapter discusses the rebirth of the plantation romance from the 1900s through to the 1940s, discussing two key popular fictions: Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. It contextualizes the plantation romance as a genre that speculates on the past and on historiography itself. Such popular fictions re-tell the story of Reconstruction, not just to do a historical critique of it as misguided or as a failure, but to produce perceptual strategies that renew racisms along different lines. It shows how Gone With The Wind transforms racial perception from one based on status and character to one based on creating racial contexts.

Reconstructing Racial Perception

This chapter interprets Frank Yerby, one of the most successful African American historical romance writers in U.S. publication history, in relation to the conjunction of plantation romance and historiography. It shows how Yerby, writing in the aftermath of Gone With The Wind, develops narrative strategies that both critique the way in which Mitchell refigures racial perception and construct different modes of perception. The chapter compares Yerby’s and Mitchell’s plantation romances in order to detail an early narrative practice of anti-racist racial worldmaking.

Alternate Histories of World War II; or, How the Race Concept Organizes the World

This chapter analyzes Korematsu v. U.S. for the development of the legal doctrine of “strict scrutiny” and how it shapes racial perception. It then surveys alternate histories of World War II, focusing on those modes of storytelling that dramatize the defeat of the U.S. by Germany and Japan. The chapter isolates a particular narrative technique - the index - as it is used across both legal storytelling and alternate histories. Finally, it engages Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle as an example of an alternate history that shows the limits of our capacity to imagine an anti-racist world.