In February 2020, the editors of this volume organized a POMEPS workshop that explored the origins of the disciplinary divide between the study of Africa and the Middle East, examining issues that span both regions (i.e., cross-border conflict, Islamist politics, social movements and national identity, and Gulf interventionism.) In February 2021, we convened another workshop, sponsored by POMEPS and the newly-founded Program on African Social Research (PASR, pronounced Pasiri) centered on racial formations and racialization across the two regions. Both workshops centered around the need for a genuinely transregional scholarship, one which rejects artificial divisions between ostensibly autonomous regions while also taking seriously the distinctive historical trajectories and local configurations of power which define national and subregional specificities. The workshop brought together nearly two dozen scholars from across multiple disciplines to explore the historical and contemporary politics of racial formation across Africa and the Middle East.
Hisham Aidi, Columbia University, Program on African Social Research
Marc Lynch, George Washington University, Project on Middle East Political Science, Program on African Social Research
Zachariah Mampilly, Baruch College, Program on African Social Research
The Seduction of Comparisons: Untouchability beyond Caste in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East
Diana S. Kim, Georgetown University
No One’s Memory: Blackness at the Limits of Comparative Slavery
Parisa Vaziri, Cornell University
Denis Regnier, University of Global Health Equity
Sean Jacobs, The New School
Putting Northwest Africa in its place
Wendell Marsh, Rutgers University-Newark
Anti-Black Racism and Slavery in Desert and Non-Desert Zones of North Africa
Stephen J. King, Georgetown University
Blackness, slavery and anti-racism activism in contemporary North Africa
Eric Hahonou, Roskilde University
The Racial Politics of the Amazigh Revival in North Africa and Beyond
Paul A. Silverstein, Reed College
Disarticulating blackness or the semantics of (anti)blackness in Tunisia
Afifa Ltifi, Cornell University
Waiting and Working: Shared Difference and Labors of Belonging in Immigrant Tangier
George Bajalia, Wesleyan University
Helmi Sharawy’s Critique of Racial and Colonial Paradigms in Egyptian African Studies
Zeyad el Nabolsy, Cornell University
Bayan Abubakr, Yale University
Narrating Nubia: Between Sentimentalism and Solidarity
Yasmin Moll, University of Michigan
Race after Revolution: Imagining Blackness and Africanity in the “New Sudan”
Zachary Mondesire, University of California, Los Angeles
Racial tropism in Afro-Arab relations. Notes based on some ordinary incident
Abdourahmane Seck, Université Gaston Berger, Saint-Louis, Sénégal
Interrogating Race in Gulf Studies
Amélie Le Renard, Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Paris & Neha Vora, Lafayette College
The Kafala System as Racialized Servitude
Sumayya Kassamali, University of Toronto
Who counts as “People of the Gulf”? Disputes over the Arab status of Zanzibaris in the UAE
Noora Lori, Boston University & Yoana Kuzmova, Boston University
East African birth and Omani ethnic descent: a social history of Omani citizenship 1970-1990
Nathaniel Mathews, Binghamton University
Identity and War: The Power of Labeling
Sabria Al-Thawr, Sana’a University
Black and Yemeni: Myths, Genealogies, and Race
Gokh Amin Alshaif, University of California, Santa Barbara
Erasure and Affect in Race-Making in Turkey
Deniz Duruiz, Northwestern University
Anti-Palestinian Racism: Analyzing the Unnamed and Suppressed Reality
Yasmeen Abu-Laban, University of Alberta & Abigail B. Bakan, University of Toronto
Jewish Illegality: the case of Ethiopian Jews between 1955-1975
Efrat Yerday, Tel Aviv University
Racial Formations in the Middle East and Africa
Noah Salomon, University of Virginia
Reflections on Race Formation in Comparative Context
Ann McDougall, University of Alberta, Canada