ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass, particularly the poem that later became "Song of Myself", next to mid-nineteenth century discourses around Egypt. Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass, which is now widely considered his most radical, and in many respects most transgressive work, came out in 1855, at a moment of intense activity in and around discourses of race and nationhood. Josiah Nott and George Gliddon, a physician and an Egyptologist, had published the monumental volume Types of Mankind (1854), whose argument for polygenesis was extensively and controversially discussed in the public media. Crossing boundaries of time and space, the figure of Egypt had a duplicitous function in nineteenth-century US culture: it served to both create a coherent American national identity apart from Europe, as well as to oppose this very coherent identity. The racializing figure of Egypt brings in another relevant body of research to the question of Whitman and race.
