About this Event
Presented by William Carruthers, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of Art History and World Art Studies, University of East Anglia; [email protected]
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and on either side of Egypt’s 1922 ‘independence’—the building and heightening of the Aswan Dam under the oversight of British engineers (and sometimes Egyptian capital) radically altered the relationship of the region of Nubia to Egypt. Flooding Nubian settlements and causing the population to move their homes higher up the banks of the Nile, the dam’s increasingly high floodwaters constituted Nubia within imaginaries of (ancient) Egypt itself. Creating a land of picturesque ruin best viewed from the deck of a Nile steamer, the Aswan Dam not only made Nubia a region of touristic intervention, but also a landscape ripe for archaeological survey. This process, meanwhile, meant that Nubians themselves took on the form of the ethnographic ‘survival’: degenerate relics of a different time whose presence became at best secondary to relics themselves.
This lecture illustrates how the imbrication of imperial engineering, national development, and archaeological survey created a region in which contemporary population became disaggregated from ancient past and how touristic gaze shaped all in its image. As a result of that process, during the 1960s, archaeological and preservationist intervention again took place as construction of the Aswan High Dam began and Nubia flooded again: not only in newly independent Egypt, but also on the other side of the border in Sudan. Then, UNESCO promoted its ‘International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia’ as a universal good. It was a universal, however, that not only rested on earlier colonial intervention, but also made possible the elision of Nubians from the cross-border region forever.
Registration is for in-person attendance only. This lecture will also be live-streamed on the OI YouTube channel. Please note: this lecture will not be recorded.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Oriental Institute - Breasted Hall, 1155 East 58th Street, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00