In this evocative and well-crafted monograph, Marie Grace Brown recounts a history of Sudan with women’s bodies and dress as her record. The title of the book, Khartoum at Night, is taken from the name of a popular 1950s tobe, the traditional dress of Sudanese women. Throughout Brown charts how narratives of Sudanese women’s aspirations, values, and experiences under imperial rule unfold through their tobes. Scholars have written about Sudan under imperial rule, but none have addressed Sudanese women’s fashion and their bodies during this period. Thus Khartoum at Night can be considered a valuable contribution for placing Sudanese women as active agents of their history. Colonizers regarded the Sudanese female body as a measure of civility and progress. Brown examines how, under the pretext of reform and progress, Anglo-Egyptian imperial governments exercised social and political dominance over Sudan in their attempts to impose specific ways of wearing tobes on Sudanese women. One of the book’s critical interventions is to argue that Sudanese women use their bodies to “talk back,” employing their tobes (174) as vehicles to express and communicate their status, feelings, and intentions. Sudanese women, according to Brown, redefined what was beautiful and correct by maintaining a balance in what was appropriate in their own culture. Khartoum at Night draws on work by postcolonial scholars like Antoinette Burton, Tony Ballantyne, and Ann Laura Stoler,who have spearheaded an interdisciplinary approach that examines global power structures and intimate behaviors. Brownbuilds on their work to examine the connections between the quotidian movements of Sudanese women in their tobes within the structural relationships among gender, sex, and power while questioning how colonial and colonized bodies experience systems of power. The five chapters inKhartoum at Night follow the tobe from its entanglements with the “trappings of empire” during the early years of the Anglo-Egyptian colonization to its

中文翻译：

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夜晚的喀土穆：苏丹帝国的时尚与身体政治

在这本引人入胜且精心制作的专着中，玛丽·格蕾丝·布朗 (Marie Grace Brown) 以女性的身体和服饰为记录讲述了苏丹的历史。这本书的书名《夜色中的喀土穆》取自 1950 年代流行的苏丹妇女传统服饰的名字。布朗自始至终描绘了苏丹妇女在帝国统治下的愿望、价值观和经历如何通过她们的脚趾展开。学者们写过关于帝国统治下的苏丹，但没有人讨论这一时期苏丹妇女的时尚和她们的身体。因此，夜间喀土穆可以被认为是将苏丹妇女作为其历史的积极推动者的宝贵贡献。殖民者将苏丹女性的身体视为文明和进步的衡量标准。布朗研究如何以改革和进步为借口，英埃帝国政府对苏丹行使了社会和政治支配地位，试图将特定的穿着方式强加于苏丹妇女。这本书的关键干预之一是论证苏丹妇女用她们的身体“回话”，用她们的脚趾（174）作为表达和交流她们的地位、感情和意图的工具。根据布朗的说法，苏丹妇女通过在适合自己文化的事物中保持平衡来重新定义什么是美丽和正确的。《喀土穆之夜》借鉴了 Antoinette Burton、Tony Ballantyne 和 Ann Laura Stoler 等后殖民学者的工作，他们率先采用跨学科方法研究全球权力结构和亲密行为。布朗以他们的工作为基础，在性别、性别和权力之间的结构关系中研究苏丹妇女在她们的日常活动中的日常运动之间的联系，同时质疑殖民和被殖民的身体如何体验权力系统。《喀土穆之夜》的五章讲述了从英埃殖民初期与“帝国的陷阱”的纠葛到其