The Sphinx’s Solutions: Edward Wilmot Blyden, Orientalism, and the Regeneration of Africa

Abstract In this article, I examine how the idea of “regeneration” appears in Edward Wilmot Blyden’s canonical work, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887). More specifically, I contextualize the saliency of this idea for an Afro-Victorian thinker like Blyden and how he invested this idea with rhetorical potency in his writings on racial progress, modern civilization, and diasporic repatriation. I subsequently surface Blyden’s “ambivalent Orientalism” – a heuristic that I borrow from the literary scholar Srinivas Aravamudan – to demonstrate how he leveraged this discourse as a complementary proposal for solving the Riddle of the Sphinx and effectuating the regeneration of Africa.