In February 2020 – the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic – the Project on Middle East Political Science held a preliminary meeting at Columbia University in New York to explore the origins of the Africa-Middle East divides that treat North Africa as part of the Middle East and neglect states such as Sudan and Mauritania. Columbia was an appropriate place to begin such a dialogue. Two decades ago, when two of us (Aidi and Mampilly) were graduate students at Columbia, the Institute of African Studies was in serious crisis. The Ugandan political theorist Mahmood Mamdani arrived and launched an initiative to decolonize the study of Africa to counter Hegel’s partition of Africa by transcending the Saharan and red Sea divides, and by underscoring Africa’s links to Arabia, Asia and the New World. To that end, we co-organized a second conference on racial formations in Africa and the Middle East looking at race-making across these two regions comparatively, including the border zones often left out of both African and Middle Eastern Studies: the Sudans, Amazigh-speaking areas in the Sahel, Arabic speaking areas on the Swahili coast and Zanzibar. This workshop represents the third in our series of transregional studies across the Africa-Middle East divide.
Hisham Aidi, Marc Lynch and Zachariah Mampilly
France in Africa
Racializing Arabic: Colonial Education Policies and the Linguistic Issue in Contemporary Mauritania
Baba Adou, University of Florida
Lamine Senghor, Anti-Imperialism, and Racial Solidarity in the Interwar French Metropole
Oumar Ba, Cornell University
Politique des races: The Racialization of Lebanese Syrian Migrants in French West Africa
Dahlia El Zein, University of Pennsylvania
Black Racial Politics and the Racialist Populist Backlash during Tunisia’s Democratic Transition
Houda Mzioudet, University of Toronto
Franco-African Postcolonial Diplomatic Relations: A Very Odd Arrangement
Amy Niang, Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA)
On Postcolonial Alliances: The Case of the Parisian Noirabie Challenged by Slavery in Libya
Kenza Talmat, l’Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Universite Paris Nanterre
Connecting the Two Sudans: Mobile Histories of Faith, Cotton, and Colonialism
Madina Thiam, New York University
Africa in France
Is There a French Sociology of Race?
Solène Brun, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS); Claire Cosquer, Université de Lausanne, in Switzerland
Ya-Han Chuang, Sciences Po
Leonard Cortana, New York University
Who Is Still Liberal? Islamophobia and Anti-Racism in Authoritarian Times
Hamza Esmili, KU Leuven
Between Generations in the North African Jewish and Muslim Textiles Industry in Paris
Samuel Sami Everett, Universities of Aix-Marseille, Cambridge and Southampton University
Sélima Kebaïli, University of Lausanne; Eléonore Lépinard, University of Lausanne
Refusing Disavowal and Discovery: Notes on Narrative Epistemic Blackness as Method(ology)
Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, London School of Economics and Political Science
Football’s Commandments: On Sport, Race, and (Post)Coloniality
Paul A. Silverstein, Reed College
Emmanuelle Carinos Vasquez, Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris (CRESPPA)