… And Bid Him Sing: Egyptian Race Consciousness in African Diasporic Memory

Abstract

Egyptian consciousness on race, white supremacy, and Blackness has not been fully theorized or analyzed. This article provides a textual analysis of the novel … And Bid Him Sing to show how David DuBois interrogates and juxtaposes Egyptian and Black American consciousness on race and Blackness in the 1960s. Further, the article shows how David DuBois makes Egypt’s “Blackness” or lack thereof an integral part of a political conflict in Black consciousness. Scholars exploring Black and Arab cultural and political collaborations in the novel have mostly focused on how Cairo became a Black diasporic space in Black imagination through translation. From my position as an Egyptian Africanist, I investigate Egyptians’ race consciousness in Black imagination, highlighting translatable and untranslatable themes in the novel, while imagining Egypt as an African diasporic geography. In light of this investigation, this article argues that the novel reveals the liminality (in-betweenness) of modern Egyptians’ racial identity and consciousness that is caught between two dichotomous White superior (Europe) and Black inferior (Africa) worlds. In addition to being an understudied area of research in modern Egyptian and Middle Eastern studies, such investigations are timely, for it can help explain past and present political notions of race in Egyptian consciousness.