Racialized Nationalism and Nation-Building

The rise of racialized nationalism in Sudan was a product of racialized historiography of Africa, which was shaped by the Hamitic Hypothesis. This type of history claims that Africa was “civilized from outside, with light-skinned or fine-featured migrants from the north civilizing natives to the south.” The dominant colonial and nationalist historiography of Sudan assumed Arabization—the spread of Arabic language, culture, and genealogy—was the result of Arab immigration from outside Sudan. This historiography centralized the West in the production of knowledge and institutions such as anti-colonial nationalism and nation-state. However, this study does not define anti-colonial nationalism and nation-state “as a derivative of, and imprisoned within, the mental work of the West.” For the “derivative discourse” tends to deny the capacity of colonized and formally colonized peoples to transform structures of thought and governance. Even if nationalist ideology were the invention of Europe, however, it does not follow that it must remain a European monopoly. Although imperialism and colonialism transferred ideas and cultures across the globe, the colonized people maintained their agency in mitigating its impacts and reworking for their benefit. Edward Said argues, “A confused and limiting notion of priority allows that only the original proponents of an idea can understand and use it. But history of all cultures is the history of cultural borrowing.”