Imagining the Nile: Knowledge-Power Nexus in the 19th Century Anthropocene

Abstract

The Nile River has featured prominently in both nationalist memoirs and foreigners' travelogues. This paper explores human interventions in the Nile, not in the physical changes in the landscape but rather in the imagination, discourses and knowledge production of the nineteenth century European and Ottoman Empires. We show how the emergence of the 'modern river' was made possible by two crucial strains of Nile imaginaries and knowledge. The paper examines writings by European travellers and nationalist writing by Egypt's modernist, Alī Mubārak. Through our analysis we show how the Nile was co-constituted by two principal story-telling ventures: European travelogues and Egyptian modernist writing.

Heterogeneity of Water Justice and the Question of Nile Solidarity

“…These fierce policies aimed at gaining power to consolidate his position in the international arena. But these policies that built "the new Egypt" as narrated in the nationalist Egyptian history had dispossessed peasants from their lands and turned them to wage labor in the ruler's projects (Abazeed & Hafez, 2022;Fahmy, 1997;Mikhail, 2011). When the British Empire occupied Egypt in 1882, it persisted in extracting the river by constructing dams, that is, the Aswan Low Dam in Egypt (1902) andSennar Dam in Sudan (1926), besides implementing the model of large-scale irrigation, mainly the Gezira Scheme in Sudan (1922) (Taha, 2010).…”