Excavate the Fayum Mummy Portraits and Bury Ancient Egyptian Stereotypes

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Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from Western Michigan University's Haenicke Institute for Global Education (Instructional Education Faculty Development Fund) and Office of Faculty Development (Instructional Development Project Grant), for which I am extremely grateful.

Notes

1 To help erode stereotypes and ahistorical visions of Egypt, contemporary artists of Egyptian ancestry and/or birth should be integrated into the curriculum to complement the Fayum mummy portraits. The following are a few of the contemporary artists who create artworks that challenge notions of a homogenous Egypt bounded by national borders, and who resist and transform what is thought of as tradition and provoke critical understandings of Egypt's dynamism, hybridity, and diversity: Armen Agop, Ghada Amer, Alaa Awad, Ahmed Badry, Khadiga El‐Ghawas, Tarek El Komi, Khaled Hafez, Fathi Hassan, Susan Hefuna, Hazem Taha Hussein, and Hassan Khan (Martinique, 2016; Brittney, 2015).

2 I teach a graduate‐level multicultural art education course. My students, all in‐service K–12 art teachers, frequently report such content as part of their own multicultural efforts.

3 I understand hegemony here to be the maintenance of a dominant group's control and influence over others through the spread of ideology that serves to garner people's conscious and/or unconscious assent to this domination.

4 Although there were only two designations of “official” ethnicity under Ptolemaic rule, Hellenes and Egyptian, many ethnicities comprised the Fayum. “Hellenic—or ‘not Egyptian’—legal status was based on official national origin, and virtually all foreigners qualified as Hellenes” (Bagnall, 2006, p. 3). Therefore, the term “Hellenic” came to mean a “foreigner” or “immigrant” to Egypt.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina D. Chin

Christina D. Chin, Associate Professor of Art Education, Frostic School of Art, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. Email: [email protected]