The “Maiden Tribute of Modern Egypt”, White Slavery as a Gendered and Racialized Narrative of Imperial Crisis in Early Twentieth Century Egypt

At the turn of the 20th century, a mass moral panic revolving around the figures of trafficked and sexually exploited girls and children known as the “white slave trade” spread across both the metropole and the Empire. In fact, it can be considered as an imperial construct indexing a whole set of racialised, sexed and gendered colonial anxieties about the degeneration - the term is not casual - of the imperial order.Building on a rich tradition of cultural studies focusing on the narration of late Victorian urban margins, this article aims at exploring issues of representation, power, and subaltern agency and their resignification in a colonial context by presenting the micro-history of a peculiar case of alleged child abduction in 1913 Egypt, the ‘Nazifa Bint Omar’ case. Drawing on discourse analysis methodology, the close reading of Nazifa’s case, forcefully illustrates the ways in which a metropolitan discourse of moral panic and social control reinforced itself by migrating and playing on locale-specific cultural and racial elements. It also shows how a whole peculiar material configuration of gender, age, labour, and scarcity was totally obliterated in the process.