The historical and continued formations of black subjecthood, place-making, and political struggle expands the conceptual and geographical borders of the Middle East. The mobility of Arab/African-identified subjects in the Middle East in particular, challenge familiar conceptions of the region as a geographically and socially bounded place. Since the geography of the “Middle East” expands into the African continent, how does the persistent self-consciousness of the region as non-African reveal anti-Black perceptions of language, religion, territory, and imaginative heritage? How can we contextualize this particular racialization by examining histories of exchange and connectivity that blur clear distinctions between the Middle East and East Africa, “Arab” and “black”?
With these questions in mind, this panel explores how the life of black subjects in Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, and Egypt re-thinks the Middle East as historically and continuously informed by Blackness. The Atlantic Ocean/Middle Passage has dominated discussions of blackness. But south-south forms of racialization are equally linked to different historical patterns of mobility, slavery and indentured labor, precolonial and colonial productions of knowledge and categories of person. By mapping multi-ethnic black communities and their migratory histories, these papers explore Blackness, race, and racism, to shape a lexicon that tackles anti-blackness and critically examines the border between “Arab” and “Black.”
In Sudan today, the “crisis” of African identity has re-emerged as a symbol of political liberation after the fall of Omar El-Beshir. Yet, how does this discourse complicate Sudan’s negotiation of the racial, classed and gendered subtexts of its own marginalized black subjects? In Yemen, the presence of a black minority, al-Muhamashin, disrupts Yemenis’ imagined genealogies of an indigenous Arab population. It additionally calls into question prevalent anti-blackness keeping al-Muhamashin at the fringe of Yemen’s social landscape. In Lebanon, generations of Sudanese male migrant workers have labored and formed communities of memory and attachment. The histories they share challenge notions of Lebanese national belonging by placing the migrant as an active participant in - and narrator of - conflict and class struggle in Lebanon. In post-revolutionary Cairo, the labor and movement of Sudanese migrant/refugee women are routinely criminalized, sexualized, and racialized. Through an intersectional reading of anti-blackness and/as sexism, we explore how power, resistance, refusal, and disenchantment operate to shape blackness and identity across the Red Sea.
-
Anna Reumert
“We are workers, not protesters”. This is how Sudanese male migrants in Beirut would often reason not joining the popular protests that began in Lebanon in fall 2019. Yet while they position themselves as workers in this way, they face a particular predicament; as undocumented migrant workers, they are excluded in both legal and discursive terms from the category of ‘worker’ in popular Lebanese imaginary. As part of the underbelly of Lebanon’s vast service economy sustained through cheap foreign labor from East Africa and South Asia, Sudanese men are the unrecognized working class of Lebanon. They have been living and laboring as cooks, drivers, butlers and doormen in Beirut for decades; their service keeping the well-to-do in comfort through hard times. Now they are the first to feel the current crisis in Lebanon as the service sector is cutting jobs and salaries by the hour. The current crisis has thus cemented their status as exploited and disposable labor, as they face detention and deportation if they strike and protest alongside their Lebanese colleagues; a structural exclusion that has largely gone unnoticed in the protests celebrating Lebanese cross-class unity.
At the same time, Sudanese migrants continue to build communities of kin, memory and attachment in Beirut. Based on fieldwork with Sudanese migrant families in Beirut, this paper explores how migrants’ ability to live on in Beirut amid crises past and present challenges the very discourses and structures that serve to exclude them. In conversation with scholarship that explores how migrants remap state and regional territories as they move through and habitate within them, this paper argues that the sustained presence of the Sudanese migrant worker, as a black African, Arabic-speaking subject, confronts familiar frames of belonging both within the Lebanese city-as-nation and in a regional framework. How might we study ongoing histories of labor class struggles in a Middle Eastern context that follows the perspective of the migrant, not as a minority experience but as the prototype subject of labor and revolt? In a Middle East economy heavily reliant on labor migration, the average worker does not translate easily onto codes of ‘Arab’ identity. The Sudanese migrant trail provides a living archive of transregional connectivity and geopolitical dynamics that calls for a reconsideration of Blackness and belonging in the Middle East.
-
Mr. Zachary Mondesire
In Khartoum today, after the revolution that deposed former president Omer El-Beshir in 2019, there have been numerous invocations of Sudan as decidedly “African.” The resurfacing of the first flag of Sudan—the blue, yellow, and green tricolor flag used before the adoption of the red, black, and white pan-Arab flag in 1970—has conjured new possibilities for Sudan’s place-in-the-world broadly and in Africa particularly. This iconography compounds sentiments since the 2011 partition of South Sudan that express both the loss of imaginative kinship ties with their “African” kin to the south, as well as longing for eventual reunification. There has been an outpouring of cultural production in theater, popular music, and visual art attempting to reconcile the seemingly ever-present Afro-Arab “identity crisis” of Sudan. As a result, the vocabulary of the “New Sudan” has reemerged to capture the euphoria of Sudan after the fall of Omar El-Beshir. The late John Garang called for the production of a “New Sudan” to imagine a secular nation-state that embraced religious and ethnic diversity. Thus the post-revolution invocations of “Africa” produce an affective pride in Africanity considering the decades-long hegemony of a mono-lingual and mono-religious national imagination of the former regime. As it did at the dawn of continental political independence, an imaginative “Africa” has come to represent liberation and reconnection with an alienated past. Yet, there is scant attention to who and what constitutes the “Africa” to which the “New Sudan” will orient itself. There is a conundrum when the individual, who laments as distorted the new map of Sudan, is unable either to pronounce the names of their South Sudanese counterparts or to position the contemporary revolution within the long genealogy of struggle in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains. How might appeals for reunification and the embrace of Africanity neutralize the capacity to formulate a racial and political vocabulary in the “New Sudan?” How might the emergent racial hegemony produce a discourse of equity that enables inequality to persist (Hanchard 1994)? This paper will explore how discourses of pluralism and recognition taking shape in Khartoum construe ongoing forms of inequality as personal or individual (Brown 2006), as though the symbolism of newly embraced African identity has a material effect on the lives of the racialized communities at the margins of Khartoum in particular and Sudan at large.
-
Gokh Amin Alshaif
The 1960s was a decade of global revolution. In Southern Arabia, it was a time of hope and promise in both Republican North Yemen and Communist South Yemen - the only Communist state in the Arab world. But revolutionary hope and promise did not extend to all Yemenis. Black Yemenis, known as Akhdam, (or “servants” in Arabic) were trapped at the bottom of both states’ social ladders. To this day, this sector of the African diaspora occupies an “untouchable” position in the Yemeni social landscape. They live in informal housing on the margins of villages and cities with little access to clean water, heating, healthcare, or safety. These conditions are not simply a consequence of Yemen’s position as the most impoverished Arab country. These conditions are a direct result of structural and historical anti-blackness. Anti-blackness permeates the very origin myths surrounding this marginalized group. These myths usually tell the story of foreign African invaders who occupied pre-Islamic Yemen only to be ousted by the indigenous Yemeni population. The African soldiers who remained in Yemen, were enslaved, relegated to the social fringes, and their descendants dubbed as Akhdam, or “servants” by other Yemenis.
These origin myths tell us much about the struggle for Yemeni social and racial hegemony. Many Yemenis draw on such myths to not only justify this group’s social position as the “servants of Yemen” (akhdam al-Yaman), but also construct this group’s very identity as “Africans” rather than Yemeni-Arabs. The post-1962 north Yemeni state’s employment of this group in exclusively sanitary positions further demonstrates this struggle and highlights the revolutionary state’s role in the racialization of these Yemeni “servants.” Thus, this paper explores the role genealogical imagination plays in the construction of “Arab” and “black” identities in Yemen. What does this process tell us about how race and “blackness” is constructed in the country and the region more broadly? In what sense was the post-revolutionary north Yemeni state a racial state? What can this teach us about the racial undertones of other revolutionary states and their state-building project? The paper ends by demonstrating how various Muhammashin, this group’s preferred name meaning “the marginalized” in Arabic, have sought to reclaim the power over naming and genealogical imagination. Their struggle to do so teaches us much about the categories of “black” and “Arab” in the Middle East and the limits of viewing these categories as mutually exclusive.
-
Gehad Abaza
Many Sudanese women in Cairo, Aswan, and other governorates rely primarily on their henna art skills to earn a living in Egypt. Through these labor and art practices, women are also able to navigate borders, states, and cities given that work with henna can allow for some degree of mobility. The reliance on henna as labor in Cairo is a tiresome, yet necessary, means of income for the women who have to commute to the required spaces (primarily tourist attractions like Khan-El-Khalili), spend hours on end looking for customers, and navigate a police state where they are regularly arrested and imprisoned under charges of tasawul, or “mendacity.” In addition, racism often factors into the how Egyptian authorities target these women. This project is based on a photo essay (in 2017-2018) in which I did fieldwork with Sudanese refugee/migrant women living in Cairo. I aim to highlight how these women navigate through states and borders while at one and the same time laboring for their livelihoods, primarily by focusing on their henna artwork/labor practices and how the henna moves with them. In other words, their dependence on making henna art as work is one that structures of structural violence and racism impose, but the henna art itself is a manifestation of an art form, and hence a means of expression for many women. Sudanese women often have a long history with henna as they reform and grow the henna in design and practice with time, and they learn and teach it to fellow women. My interlocutors engage with each other’s henna work, critique it, and admire it. I add layers to this project by contextualizing the IMF/ World Bank economic structural reforms, Sudanese-Egyptian border/diplomatic relations, and racialization in Egypt. Through this project, I aim to unfold the ways in which working, black, Sudanese women in Cairo are criminalized, racialized, and sexualized. I study their labor in terms of the products, the art forms, and the commodities that they shape and produce. Furthermore, I look into how their labor is passed on to, and between, the people who receive and consume it. I pose the questions: What does it mean to practice this in a moment of intense political and economic violence (of post-revolutionary Egypt and pre-revolutionary Sudan)? How can one read the operation of power, resistance, refusal, disenchantment and struggle, within, and around the labor and movement of these women?
