Protests that erupted in mid-December 2018 against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, have thrust the perennial questions of national identity back to the forefront of politics in Sudan. The protests, which began as an outcry against the crippling price of bread, lack of fuel and staggering inflation that left ATM machines without cash to dispense, quickly shifted into the demand “tasqut bas!” (be toppled, enough!). Sudanese young people from diverse ethnic, tribal and religious groups came together at pre-determined times for demonstrations and sit-ins in dozens of cities and towns across Sudan. Their camaraderie and solidarity tested the country’s traditional Afro-Arab fault-line. During Anglo-Egyptian rule (1899-1956) a process of “Arabization” made its mark on the territory’s northern inhabitants. Elites from the “Arab north,” favored by the colonial establishment, formed the ruling class in Sudan upon independence in 1956. When Omar al-Bashir came to power in 1989, he fostered and lent support to a rising tide of Arab supremacism as a means of reinforcing his grip on the country. This produced devastating consequences, especially in Darfur, where non-Arab “rebel” tribes were subjected to ethnic cleansing (2003--) at the hands of a state-sponsored militia that espoused Arab supremacist ideology. The tenuous national unity that was forged in the midst of the 2018-19 uprising posed the most significant challenge yet to the military-led, Islamist regime of Omar al-Bashir, whose regime responded with teargas, rooftop snipers and brutal beatings. In an effort to divide the opposition along the traditional Afro-Arab lines, the regime claimed that (non-Arab) Darfurian rebels were infiltrating protests and killing demonstrators in order to de-stabilize the country. But demonstrators responded by raising the chant “We are all Darfurian.” In doing so, they appropriated the trauma of the Darfurian genocide for the construction of an inclusive national identity framework that could be deployed as a means of mobilization and resistance. This paper traces the evolution of the Afro-Arab binary in Sudan since the country’s independence and employs the politics of identity and exclusion as a research paradigm to explore how the 2018-19 Sudanese uprising has reflected the ongoing quest for a suitable national identity framework. It argues that the Sudanese uprising has reflected an impulse to challenge the state-sponsored Arab supremacism, which has privileged groups that claim Arab tribal, linguistic and cultural heritage. This study is based on interviews, participant observation, newspapers and secondary sources in English and Arabic.

Music has long been understood as a site for the negotiation of racialized forms of difference. Across Arab-majority societies and diasporic spaces, however, difference often figures primarily through Orientalism and sectarianism, rather than racialization, per se. In this paper, I take up Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s call for anthropology of Arab-majority societies to engage with the “critical tension” between one’s analytical categories as a researcher and the ways one’s associates consider and mobilize difference in their day-to-day. This paper asks what utility critical race theory—a model of difference based in Euro-American milieux—may have as a framework for understanding contemporary Lebanese hip hop. I begin by laying out a framework for adapting structural insights of Anglophone critical race theory to this system of what we might call race in Lebanon. I am working with two racial formation theories: contributions from Stuart Hall I call race-as-discourse and from E. Patrick Johnson I call race-as-performance. I then introduce the ways the term “race” has entered my ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon’s independent music scenes before applying these notions to a case study of battle rap in Beirut involving a Lebanese-American named Dizaster and an Ivorian-Lebanese named Edd Abbas. In analyzing the two rounds of insults or “bars” that Dizaster and Edd trade off, I suggest that masculinity enables an aggressive anti-blackness to grind across the cultural formations of US-American and Lebanese conceptions of phenotypic difference. Indeed, the success of the gestural and linguistic elements of Dizaster’s claim to Lebanese-ness rely on the denigration of Edd’s blackness. And yet, both Edd and battle rap league organizer Chyno know that Dizaster’s fame in the US battle rap world has allowed them to build a following for their own league. Thus, this case study not only provides an entry point for discussing the relevance of “race” for anthropology of the Middle East, but it also opens important questions about the late capitalist extraction of value from racialized masculinities packaged in expressive culture.

Activists from Morocco’s 2016 Rif Movement have repeatedly been categorized as potential terrorists by state actors and Western commentators in accordance with the racialized logic of the post-9/11 War on Terror. While the racialized nature of Western counter-radicalization efforts has been widely recognized, histories of its development have failed to see its longer genealogy as rooted in colonial divide and conquer strategies, for example the Berber Dahir of 1930 in Morocco. In French-colonized lands in the Maghreb, subjects were categorized as either assimilable heterodox Berbers (Amazighen), or "orthodox", backwards Arab Muslims. Within this colonial racial logic the Amazighen were seen as more assimilable to enlightened secular European modernity, or alternatively, convertible to Roman Catholic Christianity. This logic, of course, was then used to exacerbate historical, linguistic, and cultural differences between Arabs and Amazighen for the designs of empire. Similarly, within the logic of the War on Terror, counter-radicalization policies in the US and abroad assume that ideology (i.e. Islams that are seen as non-palatable to the West) is the primary cause for terrorism and thus those possessing them ought to be pre-emptively disciplined. While within diasporic contexts, these indicators are used to isolate a racialized category of minority Muslims for surveillance, in Muslim-majority countries like Morocco, these indicators are being used to cast a wide net under the guise of terrorism-prevention to justify repression of entire populations, and especially political dissenters. The Rif Movement offers a striking example of this, as decidedly pacifist protest leaders with no organized religious links were convicted on terrorist charges and imprisoned in the summer of 2017. Based on nine months of fieldwork by the author during and immediately following the Rif Movement, this papers seeks to draw out the similarities and differences between the colonial logic of divide and conquer and the War on Terror logic of counter-radicalization, thereby contributing to an understanding of contemporary anti-terrorism frameworks and their effects on the Muslim subject.

The issue of identity for Egypt's Nubian minority has received renewed interest with the 2011 revolution. Yet even among Nubian activists, the question of seeking inclusion versus autonomy remained a divisive issue. Leading writer Haggag Oddoul's work in the drafting of the 2014 constitution led to its inclusion of a call for Nubian return to "original areas." The most prominent Nubian author, however, Idris Ali, died a year before the revolution. This paper looks at the works of Idris Ali and argues that despite his bitterness, his work called for Nubian inclusion in the Egyptian national identity, rather than autonomy and that Ali himself mocked the idea of a "right of return."

Wasta is an important means of connection between citizens and political leaders in Jordan and many Arab countries. An informal political practice that roughly equates to influence or favoritism, Jordanians often complain that “having wasta” is all but essential in many types of interaction between citizens and government officials. Research so far has examined the indispensable role of wasta in gaining employment (e.g., Cunningham and Sarayrah 1993) and doing business (Loewe, Blume, & Speer 2008). Others have analyzed wasta’s political impact in binding Jordan’s tribes to the monarchy (Al Ramahi 2008) and as a form of electoral clientelism (e.g., Lust 2009). Despite ample anecdotal evidence that Jordanians have strong views on wasta, however, little research has examined public opinion on this ubiquitous political practice. In this paper, I argue that wasta plays an important role in shaping Jordanian attitudes toward their political system and their elected leaders. I use several waves of Arab Barometer survey data from Jordan, covering the time period 2010-2016, to conduct a series of logistic regressions examining the relationship between Jordanian perceptions of wasta and attitudes toward the political system. I show that the more likely Jordanians are to feel that wasta is needed to get things done in their country, the more likely they are to report feeling that citizens have no ability to impact politics, and the more likely they are to rate the effectiveness of Jordan’s parliament negatively. The presence of wasta, it seems, leads Jordanians to feel more alienated from the political life of their country. After the Arab Spring, and particularly after Jordan’s wave of protests in the summer of 2018, questions about whether Jordanians can express their political grievances and can expect their leaders to make corresponding changes have only grown more salient. This paper helps us to understand these critical dynamics, and points to a need for greater research into the role wasta plays in shaping the political challenges Jordan faces.