Ancient Egypt in Black Political Thought

I conceived and taught the undergraduate seminar “Ancient Egypt in Black Political Thought” at Howard University in spring 2026. The course explored ancient Egypt as a place and as an ideal that has inspired African American thinkers from the nineteenth century to the present. Across scholarship, poetry, folktale, film, music, visual art, and other forms, we considered how Black intellectuals and artists have responded to Eurocentric and racist narratives of the ancient African past. What political purpose does Nile Valley civilization serve in plans for a more just future? Why is ancient Egypt especially valorized in these imaginings? How are histories of ancient Egypt reclaimed and revised? These are among the questions we addressed.

The course culminated in a creative project for which students selected three assigned sources from different genres or media that challenged their existing beliefs and assumptions, then developed an interpretation of those sources through collage. Drawing on the tradition of collage in Black expressive culture, they brought disparate images, materials, histories, and ideas into new relation.

This exhibition draws together six of those works. Collectively, the collages engage sources ranging from documentary films and folktales to sound recordings, scholarly book chapters, letters, and public lectures. Viewed together, they surface a tangle of shared concerns: Eurocentrism’s constraints on thought; the promises and pitfalls of cultural nationalism; madness and music as sites of liberation; calling up and calling forth ancestral histories; competing conceptions of Africa; the authority and limits of disciplinary knowledge; outer space as both a reprieve from terrestrial demands and a mirror of self; and what it means to be Black in America. On the latter point, and as expressed across the artists’ statements, Black political consciousness as a critical consciousness asks about Africa, is constructed in relation to some idea of Africa, and is alive to the contested meanings of home, history, and futurity.

Mona Oraby
Curator