Аннотация:intr odu ction ''This Egypt of the West'' making race and nation al ong the ameri can nile ''For America, read Africa; for the United States, Egypt,'' wrote African American race theorist, spiritualist, and amateur Egyptologist Paschal Beverly Randolph in 1863: ''change a few phrases into their required equivalents, and in this account of a modern colony, you have the story of the old Nilotic civilizations.'' 1 In this, his signature treatise on history, chronology, and the origins of races, Randolph saw a relationship between two countries of both metaphor and literal link: between Egypt and America there existed a set of connections, which, when properly interpreted, could reveal signs and wonders of revolutionary importance.''We know that these palmy days stretch away vastly beyond the horizon of Time,'' he wrote.''Little by little we are unravelling the tangled skein of Time and human history.'' 2In its combination of racialized theorizing, biblical controversy, historiographic melodrama, political urgency, speculative intellectualism, and popular Egyptology, Randolph's text represents a cluster of consanguinated issues that this book will be concerned to trace.
