“We Have Supped So Deep in Horrors”: Understanding Colonialist Emotionality and British Responses to Female Circumcision in Northern Sudan

Abstract

When the British colonized Sudan, they were horrified by the practice of female circumcision. Unable to comprehend the meanings of this ritual to adherents, they interpreted it as irrational, immoral and uncivilized. British officials conducted a propaganda campaign against the practice, induced clerics to condemn it as un‐Islamic and passed a stringent, albeit ineffective, law forbidding infibulation in 1946. In the process, they turned female circumcision into a site of contest over Sudanese autonomy. Analyzing colonialists’ responses as embodied states of knowing enacted in repressive measures illuminates the collision of culturally constructed emotions in this colonial context.