Translating Egyptians: Race-Consciousness of 1960s Egyptians in the African American Imagination

May T. Kosba

PIIRS, Program in African Studies Postdoctoral Research Associate

May Kosba is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Program in African Studies at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) at Princeton University. She earned her Ph.D. in the Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion and an M.A. in Islamic Studies, both from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Centering Egypt as an imagined African and African diasporic geographical space in the Black and non-Black African novel, her project investigates the role of religion and Arab nationalism in Black and non-Black African subject formation using the novel as a site of cultural and historical memory and a vehicle for knowledge production. Her research contributes to transnational discourses on race and Blackness in Afro- Arab political and cultural contexts in contemporary Islamic Studies, Ethnic Studies, Middle East and North Africa Studies, and African Diaspora Studies. The transdisciplinary and transnational locations of her work engage the African continent in ways that expand beyond the Atlantic, engaging the role of religion and Arab nationalism in Black and non-Black African subject formation in literature. Through a cultural studies and continental and diasporic African Studies framework, her project illuminates the interlocking legacies of colonialism, Islam, Arab nationalism, and relics of the anti-colonial era that continue to inform Egyptian consciousness. Her forthcoming article, “Islam and Race in Egypt,” in Race and Islam, an edited volume by Routledge, argues that the complexity of identity formation among contemporary Egyptians and grasp nationalist influences of the late 19th and early 20th centuries can be read through investigating the interlocking legacies of Western European colonialism, Ottoman rule, and the Arab conquest and Islam, and the ways in which they inform contemporary Egyptian consciousness. Using Walter Benjamin’s time theory, this article shows that the history of race and racialization and the construction of Egyptian race consciousness can be understood as an accumulation of ideas through time. She is currently working on her book manuscript while also translating Mufāraqat ibn Rushd (2017) or The Paradox of Averroes by Egyptian philosopher Mourad Wahba.