I read William Carruthers’s Flooded Pasts as a Nubian woman. Consequently, I do not claim a neutral position, nor do I seek one. As I read, the ghosts of my ancestral flooded land loom large in my consciousness. I appreciate learning from the archival investigations that appear throughout this book. In Egypt, institutional archives are now kept behind a wall of security clearances and permits that are seldom issued to Nubians. Many archives outside Egypt are also inaccessible to Nubian researchers, most of whom are local historians in displacement without affiliations with academic institutions or access to their resources.
Nubians were displaced from their ancestral land by the construction of the Aswan High Dam in 1964. This was not the Nubians’ first displacement; it was preceded by the building of the Aswan Low Dam, constructed on the First Cataract by British colonialists in 1902 and subsequently heightened twice, in 1912...
University of California Press