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IntroductionAbigail Harrison Moore & Griselda PollockPublished online: 22 May 2007.

To cite this article: Abigail Harrison Moore & Griselda Pollock (2007) Introduction, Parallax, 13:2,1-5, DOI: 10.1080/13534640701267115

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Introduction

Abigail Harrison Moore and Griselda Pollock

The seminar that provided the catalyst for this edition, ‘Out of Africa: Aspects of Egypt

in the West’, came about as a result of a long-running dialogue between a number of

members of staff in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the

University of Leeds about the dissemination, appropriation and representation of Egypt

in the West in the modern period and how we had, each, engaged with this in some way

in our own research despite our differing subject areas. We were interested in opening up

our interdisciplinary discussions even further to include architecture, art, material

culture, philosophy, film, literature and travel writing. We wanted to question issues such

as revival, historiography, archaeology, race, museology, ethnography and politicization.

Situating the event in the National Media Museum’s (formerly the National Museum of

Film, Photography and Television) Insight Research Centre allowed the seminar to

examine and explore some of the Royal Photographic Society’s collection of images of

Egypt from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Visual images have always

played an important part in the construction of history. We have a tendency to trust

images over words. We look for visual signs to confirm written statements and, in

isolation, these visual signs have a powerful effect on our imagination.1 The nineteenth

century witnessed a reconstruction of the archaeology of Egypt using a scientific system

of standardization, a legible language of signs recognizable to a European audience.

Views of Egypt, frequently featuring the pyramids or the sphinx, underwent a process of

occidentalization and continue to function as key signs of Egypt in the Western psyche.

One is here reminded of Dominique Vivant Denon’s 1802 publication Voyage dans la

Basse et Haute d’Egypte and its illustrations of culture and architecture created during the

Napoleonic mission to document and accumulate historic Egyptian artefacts.2 In his

preface, Denon reminded the reader that he had been engaged in travelling through a

country ‘which was known to Europe by name only; it therefore became important to

describe everything […]’.3 In his engravings, Denon’s ‘descriptions’ reconstructed

Egypt’s archaeology using language that was recognizable to both his French and

English audiences. We can see evidence of this process of occidentalizing the views of

Egypt if we look at Denon’s own engraving of the sphinx. The figures, trees and animals,

and the construction of the landscape of the image illustrated the artist’s stated aim to

emphasize the ‘picturesque’ qualities of the scene. Denon was also at pains to link this

image of Egypt to the classicizing aims of architects, designers and artists of the West.

I had only time to view the sphinx […] if the head wants what is called

‘style’, that is to say, the straight and bold lines which give expression to

parallax, 2007, vol. 13, no. 2, 1–5

parallaxISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online # 2007 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/13534640701267115

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the figures under which the Greeks have designated their deities, yet

sufficient justice has been rendered to the fine simplicity and character

of nature which is displayed in this figure.4

In his Philosophy of Fine Arts, G.W.F. Hegel postulates that Egyptian art was especially

ambiguous because, for him, Egypt was one of the earliest examples of a society

consciously using images and artefacts in order to represent itself. These accrue a

certain stability of meaning through setting and through the expectations of the viewer.

For example, Hegel suggested that the meaning of the pyramid may appear open-

ended, but when placed in a church clearly signals the trinity.5 The process of

transcribing historic sites, via photography, film, painting, literature, architecture or

design creates something that is at once removed from its original setting and, thus,

liable to the imposition of new meaning and order placed within a new system of

language. Walter Benjamin observed that ‘every image of the past that is not

recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear

irretrievably.’6

The seminar, as such, aimed to explore how Western culture has constructed itself

using images of the East. Egypt and the Egyptians have had a consistent and profound

influence on the cultural history of what has been oppositionally defined in the

literature as the West. From the foundations of Greece and Rome and the Hellenistic

tradition, from the development of both the Christian and Jewish religions, Egypt has

provided both an influence and counter-narrative to the dominant systems of thought.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, archaeological encounters with Egypt gave

shape to this understanding of the ‘idea’ of Egypt.

Egypt has figured in the non-Egyptian imaginary for thousands of years. Different

epochs focused on different aspects. For the Romans, conquest involved the defeat of

the last of Ptolemaic line of Pharaonic rulers, Cleopatra VII. This historical ruler was

imaginatively recast as the very image of Egypt, feminized, sexualized, demonized and

constructed as the other of patriarchal, military Rome. Cultural historian Jan Assmann

has tracked a complex set of inscriptions of Egypt into European thought across many

centuries calling into question the exclusive focus on the ‘rediscovery of Egypt’

associated with Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt in 1791. There can be no doubt,

however, that the French campaign and the following British invasion and conquest

stimulated a new kind of encounter with the country, landscape, people, customs but

above all its ancient history which was framed by the emergence of both imperialist,

orientalist and racist discourses in the West. A range of new visual representations in

paintings, engravings, compendious descriptions and, following its invention,

photography brought Egypt’s ancient architecture and monuments into the modernity

of Europe’s museums and visual culture carrying with them the deep equivocation of

Egypt’s place in and meaning for the understanding of Africa as viewed from the West.

The impact of archaeological excavations throughout the nineteenth century that

rediscovered the heretic ruler Akhenaton, culminating in stunning discoveries of intact

Pharaonic tombs that catapulted an unknown young man, Tutankhamun, into

becoming the twentieth century’s best known ancient Egyptian, also produced a range

of new names, images and fantasies that would find their place in the newest cultural

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technology of the twentieth century, cinema, at the same time as Egypt’s monuments

and antiquities found their way into the material and intellectual space of

psychoanalysis. Once available as a figure of contested cultural memory and meanings

by means of archaeology, cultural appropriation and imaginative projection,

Pharaonic Egypt, blotting out that country’s complex historical intertwinings with

Christian, Jewish, Muslim and ultimately modern socialist socialities, could become a

site of other inscriptions by African-American musicians or European-trained Egyptian

film-makers returning uniquely in Arab culture, back to the complex figure of the

Mummy, the revenant, the double.

In this small contribution to the vast topic of Egypt-Africa-Europe-The West, we

explore some of these questions through two pivotal points. The first concerns the

status of the arguments over the Africanness of the ancient Egyptians which Robert

Bernasconi tracks through the bitter contest over slavery and its abolition. A major

analyst of the discourses that constitute racism in western thought and thus resistant to

any notion that there are ‘races’, Bernasconi does not aim to decide who the ancient

Egyptians were so much as to ‘chart how they were racially identified from the late

eighteenth to the early nineteenth century’ at a moment when much was politically

and materially invested in the imposed classification, because of the nature of the claim

on Egypt as a cultural progenitor both of white supremacist and European identity and

of enslaved African claims for full and freed membership of the human community on

the basis of the cultural significance of a once great African civilization. Bernasconi’s

philosophical studies of the terms of this debate are responded to by art historian Darcy

Grimaldo Grigsby. Sharing the field of investigations into the identity of the ancient

Egyptians as Africans but bringing the perspective of an art historian to the continuing

debate relaunched by Martin Bernal in Black Athena, Grigsby analyzes how the French

writers and artists of the late eighteenth century couched their claims, ‘the forms of

evidence’ they mastered, the ‘inconsistent and vexed status of art in such arguments’.

Close readings of the responses to and representations of the head of the Gezan Sphinx

and the faces of mummies open up the space in writing about preserved or sculpted

faces, bodies and body parts for erotic projection, which sometimes overwrote the

racialization that otherwise nags at these texts and the encounters with Egypt they

inscribe.

Two further articles operate at the cross-roads of cultural history – the material aspect

of Egyptomania fuelled by nineteenth century archaeology and psychoanalysis, a

discourse of modernity into which Pharaonic Egypt is complexly inscribed. Joan

Raphael-Leff here complements her path-breaking analysis in ‘If Oedipus was an

Egyptian’ (1990) of the unused psychoanalytical potential of the Egyptian Isis-Osiris-

Horus-Seth quadrangle as opposed to the Oedipal triangle that Freud selected as the

foundation of his theory of subjectivity. Raphael-Leff analyzes the paradoxical

conjunction of Freud’s passionate involvement with Egypt through his collections of

antiquities and his remarkable resistance to acknowledgement of the mythic material it

held before him, notably in relation to the passionate mother/son relation contained in

the Egyptian Isis-Osiris-Horus-Seth quadrangle. Raphael-Leff speculates that, having

denied the transferential reprocessing of the most archaic of attachments as a result of

his auto-analysis, Freud never confronted what she names ‘the repressed raw elements

of his own ‘‘subterranean’’ ‘‘Egyptian’’ narrative of the maternal era.’ These relate to

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his earliest childhood traumas associated with the death of his brother and its effect on

his young, grieving, but soon pregnant mother. Not merely another attempt to

psychoanalyze Freud, Raphael-Leff’s attentive reading of the probable psychological

conditions under which Freud’s relation to his mother and hence his ability to theorize

the mother’s place in psychic life were repressed, points to the implications of this

repression for the development of critical lacunae in psychoanalysis. By identifying not

only the collection of Egyptian things which Freud described as an addiction but the

‘Egypt’ of Freud’s dream about his mother’s death and the writing of his Egyptian

book Moses and Monotheism undertaken under the threat of exile and imminent death

from cancer, Raphael-Leff at once opens up the terrain Freud personally repressed,

but renders Freud’s case a further instance in a familial setting of themes of both

exodus and the revenant – the Jewish and the Egyptian thematics that his last major

text would attempt to rework through psychoanalysis.

Griselda Pollock shares this concern with the ways we can read Freud’s collection of

Egyptian antiquities and his interest in Egyptian mytho-poetics. She also notes how we

can trace the imprint of Pharaonic ‘Egypt’ in Freud’s key concepts of the uncanny and

the return of the repressed. Hypothetically explaining why Freud probably did not see

Karl Freund’s film The Mummy, itself indexing in the emerging Hollywood horror genre

of the recent Egyptomania occasioned by the finding of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922,

the article asks: Could we not use Freud’s imaginative engagement with Egypt also to

think about the implications of the uncanny return or rather appeal of ‘Egypt’ as a

signifier in modernity and, in particular, the hold a recovered ‘Egypt’ has had on

popular culture through a century of cinematic spectacles starting with The Mummy and

culminating in the 1990s with two vastly popular films, Roland Emmerich’s science

fiction fantasy Stargate (1994) and Stephen Summers’ 1999 remake of The Mummy,

which rewrote the gentle and subtly acted 1932 version by crossing it with Steven

Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark? What both of these swash-buckling adventure films

full of technical wizardry to feed our Egyptomanic fantasies miss, is what was there,

affectively, in The Mummy of 1932, which is the drama of an old man seeking love,

hence life, refusing the absoluteness of death. They, therefore, also miss what Freud

knew had to happen but which his collection fetishistically suspended: we have to grow

out of such boys’ own fantasies based on infant dreams of narcissistic omnipotence and

learn the meaning of those fantasies as well as become aware of their dangerous

appeal, while also realizing how hard such a struggle is, and how the return of the

repressed is always there to capture us again. Again the figure of the mummy, the

dessicated body that is witness to a dream of perpetual living, emerges as theoretical

object.

There is only a single ‘iconic witness’ to the mummy in Arabic cinema which since

1932 became the figure of Egyptianness in popular western culture. Known as ‘the

pharaoh of Egyptian cinema’ (Armes 1997), Chadi Abdel Salam’s La Momie (Al

Momya, 1969) is subtly deconstructed by Egyptian filmmaker and Derrida archivist

Safaa Fathy (D’Ailleurs Derrida) as a sustained cinematic mediation on ‘RE’ as in return,

reawakening, reliving. The mummy condenses a number of figures, of the body, of

death, of the return and of the double. Salam’s film, deeply and critically inflected with

the traditions of the political aesthetics of Italian and French independent cinemas,

stages the story of a discovery of Egyptian sarcophagi used by the narrative’s key

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family, whose secret is its location, to sustain their lives through illegal sale of the

antiquities. Fathy reads the film as an exploration of cinema itself – a series of doubles,

reawakenings and deaths in the light of Derrida’s reading of Freud’s The Uncanny.

Continuing with this theme of the double, Marcel Swiboda explores the mythological

‘revisionism’ of the African American musician and poet Sun Ra, initially emphasizing

the role played by the act of re-naming that led the man formerly known as Herman

Blount to adopt this Egyptian appellation during his time in Chicago in the early

1950s. In addition, Swiboda situates Sun Ra’s esoteric use of Egyptian mythological

tropes in relation to the African American vernacular cultural traditions that in some

measure provide the context for Ra’s approach to language. Ra’s mytho-poetics is

hereby viewed as simultaneously challenging the racialized inscriptions of Egypt in the

discourses of the Western philosophical Enlightenment and as opening up the

possibility of an affirmative re-figuring of African American subjectivity through the

play of rhetorical differentiation and doubling, as a singular example of ‘signifying’ and

as a means to positively interpreting Ra’s contentious and oftentimes confounding

‘duplicity’.

Psychoanalysis, art history, philosophy, music and cinema studies are the varied points

of departure for this transdisciplinary encounter in which the concept of ‘Egypt’, read

through historically and geo-politically divergent moments and practices, travels to

weave a text in cultural analysis, theory and history.

The work for this special issue was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research

Council in their funding for the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History

(CentreCATH). The editors and writers are grateful to the AHRC for making possible

the event ‘Out of Africa’ and the intellectual conversations that generated this second

event: this edition of parallax.

Notes

1 See Dana Arnold, ‘Facts or Fragments? Visual

Histories, in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,

Art History, 25:4 (2002), pp.450–68.2 See Abigail Harrison Moore, ‘Voyage: Dominique

Vivant Denon and the transference of images of

Egypt’, Art History, 25:4 (2002), pp.531–49.3 Dominique Vivant Denon, Travels in Lower and Upper

Egypt, trans.ArthurAikin(London:Longman,1803),p.ii.

4 Dominique Vivant Denon, Travels in Lower and

Upper Egypt, p.171.5 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Arts, trans. F. R. R.

Osmaston, 4 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920),

p.14.6 Walter Benjamin, ‘Thesis on the Philosophy of

History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London:

Fontana, 1992), p.247.

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