1. Race Politics and Colonial Legacies: France, Africa and the Middle East
- Author:
- Hisham Aïdi, Marc Lynch, Zachariah Mampilly, Baba Adou, and Oumar Ba
- Publication Date:
- 05-2024
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- 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.
- Topic:
- Politics, Post Colonialism, Race, History, Colonialism, Islamophobia, and Racialization
- Political Geography:
- Uganda, Africa, Europe, Sudan, Middle East, France, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Mauritania, and United States of America