Rethinking Race as an Analytic in the Early Twentieth Century
Panel I-10, 2021 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 29 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
The early decades of the twentieth century in contemporary Middle East Studies are dominated by analyses of war, empire, revolution, colonialism, and nationalism. This panel focuses on race as a category and racism as an ideology, system, and set of practices that shaped anxieties, discourses, and projects, as well as the distribution of resources, in multiple settings during these decades. White supremacy and racism were fundamental sources of tension from the beginning of the century at international scholarly conferences, as were continuing challenges by colored peoples of the world to the coherence of race and the superiority of white men and women. Concerns about eugenic fitness, the racial composition of populations, and birth and death rates were ubiquitous, especially among white global powers. The global color line that divided whites from non-whites was central to the politics of white Western states and empires (including, for example, the Japanese and the Ottoman) and how they ceded, allocated, and extracted power and resources. The League of Nations and the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, for example, were not simply projects of war and peace but motivated to maintain white economic and political supremacy, a point rarely addressed in scholarship on the Middle East. “White slave trade” rhetoric and hysteria emerged in multiple settings in the the Jim Crow United States and in the midst of Western imperial predation on the colored, and often colonized, peoples of the world. Concern with the racial, class, and sexual composition and fitness of citizens and nations shaped immigration policies, law, and even the Class A, B, and C Mandate system. “Civilization” often stood in for a vaunted class of European and U.S. Christian whiteness that set the terms on which other peoples of the world were forced to compete, informed by local and regional prejudices and hierarchies, including their own racisms and "civilizing" missions. This panel examines race as an analytic without imposing anachronistic categories, informed by critical race studies, decolonial studies, and feminist studies, among others. The papers rethink common periodizations and draw on a range of theories and methods and original research to push forward race analytics as they intersect with formations already prominent in the field for the purpose of developing new angles of empirical and theoretical inquiry.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Frances S. Hasso
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
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Miss. Francesca Biancani
-- Presenter
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Dr. Sarah Ghabrial
-- Discussant
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Dr. Kyle Anderson
-- Presenter
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George Topalidis
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Miss. Francesca Biancani
At the turn of the twentieth century, traffickers - who were called raiders of girl-flesh or “traders of virtues” - figured prominently in Metropole tabloids as icons of moral degeneration and societal collapse. Together with prostitutes, demi-mondaines and pimps, traffickers played a central role in the public discourse on social and moral degeneration, known as the “White Slave Trade” panic. They played the villain in many lewd and graphic tales about the increasing dangers of urban life that came to be part of a wider classed and gendered global critique of social change, human mobility and interconnectedness.The mass moral panic revolving around the figures of trafficked and sexually exploited girls and children was prominent in metropolitan and colonial sites. In fact it was a white imperial construct (Deveraux 2006) that indexed a whole set of racialized, sexed and gendered colonial anxieties about the “degeneration” of imperial order. This paper explores these issues through a micro-history of a peculiar case of alleged child abduction in 1914 Egypt, the ‘Nazifa Bint Omar’ case, a Syrian girl brought into Egypt by a Zanzibari woman. It compares the ways in which diverse sources - court papers, the press and social purity literature - presented the case, often fictionalizing it, and argues that some of the discursive strategies served the different agendas of advocates of social and moral reform. The Nazifa case was reworked into a “white slavery” narrative by William Nicholas Willis in his Anti-Christ in Egypt (1914), forcefully illustrating the ways in which metropolitan accounts of moral panic and social control reinforced themselves by using colonial settings, in the process obliterating context-specific material configurations of gender, age, labour and scarcity.
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Dr. Kyle Anderson
During the First World War (1914-1918), the British empire enlisted roughly half a million young men into the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC). This paper examines representations of the ELC as “slavery” (‘ibudiyya) or “kidnapping” (khaṭaf) and ELC workers as “Black slaves” (zanūj) in the diaries, memoirs, official communications, and books of nationalist intellectuals and politicians during the 1919 revolution. I argue that the mobilizing force of such representations depended on challenging British rulers for both their white supremacy and their mischaracterization of Egyptian racial identity as “people of colour.” Pioneering research projects by Kenneth Cuno, Terrance Walz, Emad Ahmed Helal, and Eve Troutt Powell have traced the development of popular associations between Black Africans and servile status even after 1877, when the slave trade was officially abolished in Egypt. During the war, urban educated nationalists who saw Egyptian fallāḥīn led away from their fields in handcuffs and tied to each other by thick rope perceived themselves to be on one side of what W. E. B. DuBois called the global color line, and realized that the British had racialized them alongside Black Africans. In response, nationalist politicians like Sa‘d Zaghlul and public intellectuals like Salama Musa centered peasants as the true symbols of national authenticity, doing racial boundary work to differentiate themselves as rural-to-urban middle-class strivers who were heirs to an ancient “civilization,” superior to Black people, and not deserving of imperial subordination. Zaghlul’s rural roots were crucial to constructing support for the 1919 revolution in part because of the prominence of the fallāḥ in Egyptian racial nationalism.
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George Topalidis
This study of Ottoman Greek immigrant racial classifications and identities in the early twentieth-century United States is partly based on analysis of a systematically collected random sample of 1,283 ship manifest files for immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1930 through Ellis Island (Ellis Island Online Archive) from regions that were part of the Ottoman Empire or (after 1923) the Republic of Turkey. About 48 percent of these immigrants, the largest cohort, racially self-classified as “Turkish Greek,” “Greek Greek,” or “Ottoman Greek.” Approximately 20.5 percent identified as Armenian and the remainder used other national or racial categories. The paper shows how relevant US immigration laws in the early decades of the twentieth century shaped the racial identities and self-categorizations of the Ottoman Greek immigrants. Documents analyzed include the Dictionary of Races and Peoples, which was published as part of the US Congress’s Joint 41-volume Dillingham Commission Report on immigration in 1911 and formalized racial identity categories for US immigrants. The random sample of Ellis Island files analyzed indicates that the majority of Ottoman or Turkish immigrants between 1900 and 1930 were male (70 percent) and single (61 percent) and largely came from the Marmara region. Approximately 38 percent were between 21 and 30 years old, 28 percent were 20 years or younger, and 15 percent were between 31 and 40 years old. The largest proportion arrived at Ellis Island between 1919 and 1922 (37 percent). I found that the anti-immigrant Dillingham Commission’s classification system compelled Ottoman Greek immigrants to use the racial categories of US immigration authorities. When Ottomanism was mainstream (1909-1913), a substantial proportion of the total sample (3.3 percent) identified as Ottoman Greek. Between 1919 and 1922 (during the period of the Greek suzerain), most immigrants shifted from claiming “Turkish Greek” to “Greek Greek” identity. In a broader sense, these findings indicate that geopolitical events and immigrant identity as codified by the US government, resulted in the racialization of this immigrant group as white.
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Racialized and classed evaluations of human value were central to the decision-making of British colonial and Zionist settler-colonial elites in Mandate Palestine. This paper uses archival sources to examine the eugenicist inflections of British and Zionist demographic anxieties in Mandate Palestine, which were motivated by different agendas and had global precursors and diffractions. Concerns about infant mortality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were linked to class and racial anxieties in metropolitan and colonial settings, and were invariably worked out on women’s bodies and sexual and mothering practices. The paper examines the conditions of the appearance of such eugenicist campaigns in archival records of the Zionist health workers in Mandate Palestine who built a Jewish settler-colonial “homeland.” These projects were eugenicist insofar as they were concerned to increase the birthrates, reduce infant mortality rates, and improve the health of only some children, in this case Jewish. In addition to their racial settler-colonial demographic concerns, Zionist health activists viewed their work as an important element in a competition with Palestinians over racial-national fitness and civilization. British authorities, in turn, frequently expressed concern with higher Palestinian birthrates, which they racialized from early in the occupation. They recognized (and occasionally expressed a calculus) that limited investment in Palestinian welfare and infant, child and maternal healthcare led to substantially higher mortality rates.
