Questioning Anti-Blackness and Racial Privilege in the Global South

Program

Monday, November 11

Welcome and Introductory Remarks 

9:15 - 9:30 a.m.

Marwan Kraidy, Dean and CEO, Northwestern University in Qatar, Anthony Shadid Chair of Global in Global Media, Politics and Culture, Northwestern University

Zachary Wright, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Professor of History and Religious Studies, Northwestern University in Qatar

Panel I: Black-Arab relations 

9:30 - 11:30 a.m. 

Moderator: Scheherazade Safla, Assistant Professor of Journalism, Northwestern Qatar

The Question of Anti-Blackness among Arab minorities in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

In October 2024, amid the Israeli war on Lebanon, Senegal repatriated 117 Senegalese citizens of Lebanese descent, drawing attention to the century-old Lebanese presence in West Africa. This paper examines the historical roots of anti-Blackness among Arab minorities in Sub-Saharan Africa, using the Lebanese-Syrian community in Senegal as a case study. Drawing on shared colonial histories in French West Africa (1895–1958) and French-mandate Lebanon and Syria (1920–1946), it explores how Ottoman and Trans-Saharan slavery, French colonialism, and socio-political factors constructed “Black” and “Arab” identities, shaping and re-shaping racial categories and hierarchies across temporalities and geographies. This analysis reveals how these racialization processes and colonial structures continue to influence anti-Blackness and Arab-African relations in the region today.

Biography

Dahlia El-Zein is an Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University in Qatar. She has a PhD in Middle Eastern and African History from the University of Pennsylvania with a certificate in Africana Studies and a Masters in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Her current book project, Dakar–Beirut: Race and Empire in French West Africa and the Levant (1920–1960), examines race-making from below, from the perspective of West African colonial soldiers and Lebanese Syrian migrants within the context of the French Empire, as it remade both modern-day Senegal and Lebanon in the early-to-mid twentieth century. She has published in the Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, the Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.

Invisible Histories: Blackness and Belonging in North Lebanon

Abstract

A historically Black neighborhood in the port town of Mina, Hosh Al Abeed (“Courtyard of the Slaves”) carries a legacy often absent from official records. This presentation shares excerpts from conversations with its residents—stories of marginalization, identity, resilience, and resistance. From reflections on their origins (often ending with an assertion of their Lebanese identity) and experiences with racism to debates on the neighborhood's recent name change, these narratives challenge assumptions about national belonging—about who "belongs" in Lebanon—and aim to reclaim a place within the country’s historical record, showing how Hosh Al Abeed resists erasure.

Biography

Alongside her work as an editor and copywriter, Nisreen develops projects—exhibitions, film, and writing—that examine “race” and identity. Drawing on her academic background in racism and ethnicity studies, she bridges creative practice and advocacy to explore narratives of othering and belonging through photography, personal archives, text, audio, and video.

Dark Knuckles: Bleaching in Sudan’s Skin-Scape

Biography

Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf is Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University in Qatar. Her areas of expertise include human rights, gender and sexuality, the intersectionality of race and gender, migration and diasporic studies, African migrations, and humanistic and political anthropology, with a geographic focus on her native Sudan, the Gulf, Zanzibar, and the Indian Ocean. Professor Abusharaf is the author of several books, including Darfur Allegory (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan: Politics and the Body in a Squatter Settlement (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Wanderings (Cornell University Press, 2002). She is the editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke University Press, 2010), Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), and she is the co-editor of Africa and the Gulf Region: Blurred Boundaries and Shifting Ties (Gerlach Press, 2015). Professor Abusharaf’s work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Sir William Luce Memorial Fellowship, Andrew Mellon and MIT Center for International Studies, and the Rockefeller Bellagio Study Center. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut.

White Privilege/Arab Fear: Racialized Terror in the Jim Crow South

Biography

Sarah Gualtieri is Professor of History and American Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. Professor Gualtieri’s research and teaching cover Middle Eastern studies, migration, Arab American studies, and critical ethnic studies, with a particular focus on race, gender, and power. Professor Gualtieri is the author of Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (University of California Press, 2009), which examines the history of Arab racial formation in the United States with an emphasis on the question of “whiteness.” Her second book, Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California (Stanford University Press, 2019), looks at the histories of Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian migrants in Southern California, focusing on connections and solidarities with the Latin American community. Professor Gualtieri received her Ph.D. in Middle East History from the University of Chicago.

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Panel II: Cultural Knowledge Production and the Contestation of Racism

1:00 - 3:00 p.m.

Moderator: Leila Tayeb, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies, Northwestern Qatar

A Global Caste Lexicon

Abstract

This paper is a gestural one that suggests a number of possible political, historical, rhetorical, and affective approaches to the study of race and caste. How might an exploration of the diverse rhetorical manifestations of ‘caste’ as a word, a concept, and a provocation move us away from simplistic demarcations of difference that can hinder transnational solidarities? What do we learn when we shift from a comparative analysis of race and caste to a translational one? This paper is part of a larger project to engage a broad archive of sources in the construction of a nuanced global lexicon of caste that enables an understanding of how the political, pseudo-scientific, and aesthetic representations of each mutually constitute the other. Touching on several examples from political and activist discourse, fiction and poetry, I suggest that a translational logic of caste and race, as opposed to an analogical one, invites us to develop a new comparative approach to diverse narratives that insist on human subjectivities in the midst of dehumanizing systems of race, class, gender, religious and other forms of social division, exclusion, and ostracization.

Biography

Laura Brueck is Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University, where she also currently serves as the Director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She is the author of Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature, the translator of Unclaimed Terrain, a collection of short anti-caste fiction by Ajay Navaria, and an editor of books on South Asian sound studies and gender and vernacularity in Indian literature. Most recently she co-edited, with Praseeda Gopinath, the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature (2024). 

X Marks the Spot: Cruel Mathematics, Fatal Liberalisms, and the Terror of Sovereign Power

Abstract

This talk offers insights from the forthcoming manuscript, The Interminable Catastrophe, to examine how cruel mathematics, fatal liberalisms, and the terror of sovereign power were made ‘new again’, and embedded in everyday life under plantocratic rule and in modern day ecological crises. In this excerpt, she focuses on colonial and postcolonial Louisiana—understood as ‘unlike’ its neighbors and a ‘place apart’—with attention to the Code Noir, plantation economic life, and the French Crown’s appetite for terror via the authoritarian impulses of Bourbonism(s), to discern how plantation life was the site of transformation in our nomos of the earth, turning Western episteme’s discourse(s) and attention away from ‘calamity’ to catastrophe proper. She threads these considerations through the ‘X-code’ or ‘Katrina crosses’, used by search and rescue teams to mark the homes of residents following the Storm, as well as the Kongo cosmogram (also known as a carrefour/kafou) in order to consider how, in the United States, Louisiana represents the crucial intercept of this constellation of mechanisms that constitute catastrophe, and, therefore, a crucial node for articulating the very beginning of the processes which have burdened our planetary assumptions. In other words: ‘x’ marks the spot. 

Biography

Dr. Bedour Alagraa is Assistant professor of Political and Social Thought. A self-described ‘wayward political theorist’, she received her Ph.D. from the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University in the Spring of 2019, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a Masters in Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Colonial Studies from the London School of Economics. More broadly, Dr. Alagraa is interested in Black radical genealogies in political theory, history/ies of political concepts, Caribbean thought, African anti-colonial thought, and Black Marxism(s) (among other topics). She has also studied and written extensively on the works of Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter; she recently completed the archiving of Wynter’s papers alongside a group of 5 other scholars, and is also a member of the editorial team currently editing Wynter’s monograph, Black Metamorphosis. Alongside Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., Dr. Alagraa is also the co-editor of a volume of Chairman Fred Hampton’s Speeches titled I Am a Revolutionary!: Speeches by Chairman Fred Hampton, forthcoming from Pluto Press in 2024. Her book manuscript is entitled The Interminable Catastrophe (forthcoming from Duke University Press), and charts a conceptual history of catastrophe as a political category/concept (rather than Event), via its inauguration in early modern natural science and empiricist debates, and subsequent crystallization as a concept on the plantation. The Interminable Catastrophe also considers how we might interrupt the 'Bad Infinity” of the catastrophic, via the work(s) of Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, Clyde Woods, Derek Walcott, and others.

Inversion, Irony, and the Global South in Contemporary Art

Biography

Ivy Wilson (Ph.D. Yale University) teaches courses on the comparative literatures of the black diaspora and U.S. literary studies with a particular emphasis on African American culture. His book, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism (Oxford UP), interrogates how the figurations and tropes of blackness were used to produce the social equations that regulated the cultural meanings of U.S. citizenship and traces how African American intellectuals manipulated the field of aesthetics as a means to enter into political discourse about the forms of subjectivity and national belonging. Along with articles in ESQ, Arizona Quarterly, and PMLA, his other work in U.S. literary studies includes edited volumes on James Monroe Whitfield, Albery Allson Whitman, Walt Whitman, and on the emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the “long” nineteenth century. His current research interests focus on the solubility of nationalism in relationship to theories of the diaspora, global economies of culture, and circuits of the super-national and sub-national.

Race, Gender, and Modern Education in Bahrain

Abstract

In 1937, with the support of government scholarships, the sisters Sherifa and Lulwa al-Zayani, along with their companion Za’faranah Sa'eed, became the first Bahraini female cohort to study abroad at the British Syrian Training College in Beirut, Lebanon. Since then, the stories of Sherifa and Lulwa as girl pioneers continue to be summoned as evidence of girl empowerment--a monumental accomplishment of the nation-state. Yet, Za’faranah remains peculiarly absent from this narration of the nation. Subjected to quadruple disciplinary forces of gender, age, class, and race, little is known about who Za’fanarah was, the conditions of her journeys, and what meanings can be deduced from her transgressing color-lines and borderlines. Za’faranah’s story becomes our point of departure. Specifically, this study emerges from a curiosity about the deafening silence on the histories and lived realities of school-aged girls racialized as black in existing literature on the politics of schooling and the legacies of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Bahrain and the Arab Gulf states. I ask: How do we explain the perpetual erasure of the black girl citizen-subject from the social imaginary of (post)colonial Bahrain? Drawing on archival material and ethnographic data, I employ discourse analysis to interrogate and articulate the historical (de)construction of blackness as a social category. Recognizing the school as a key institution of nation-building, I argue for a serious engagement with anti-blackness as a disciplinary force operating in and through schools. Also, by centering the stories of school-aged girls racialized as black and learning about the creative ways in which they navigate and negotiate social difference in their everyday lives, critical education scholars can begin to re-imagine education justice in schools from the vantage point of those most marginalized.

Biography

Sara Musaifer received her Ph.D. in the Department of Comparative and International Development Education from the University of Minnesota, where whe was also a graduate student fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. She also holds a BA in political science from the University of Jordan in Amman, Jordan. Her professional experiences are transcultural and transnational, and include policy research, cross-sectors engagement, community outreach, capacity building, reconciliation, restorative practices, and international development. Her current research interests lie in the field of education and its intersection with political socialization, labor market organization, and peacebuilding in the Middle East. In her doctoral studies, she focused on examining non-formal education environments, particularly as they relate to youth empowerment and its role in supporting sustainable reconciliation in the region. She is currently a postdoctoral associate at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Extractive Knowledge Practices and Policy Making in the Global South: The Case of Sudan

Abstract

Power imbalances in knowledge production between the Global South and Global North has long been an area of concern for many scholars. In light of new evidence and lived experiences, there is pressure for more balanced and deliberative relationships. Over time, these processes have resulted in knowledge accumulation in the North, often presented as global truths for the South to adopt. While the long-term implications are difficult to prove, the nuances have been communicated and documented in various ways. In simple terms, the epistemological relationship can be summarised as: the North theorises, the South applies – and in the case of knowledge production, the North assumes the benefits. Despite a scarcity of quantifiable evidence, some actual and potential policy implications have been documented in several studies. Recently in Sudan, these imbalances manifested in various context-agnostic social and economic policy decisions. The policies were not externally imposed per se but were a result of a complex process of intellectual assimilation and conditionalities enforced by external actors. The outcome was more entrenched political instability and conflict.

Biography

Muez Ali is a Senior Research and Policy Associate at Earthna: Center for a Sustainable Future at Qatar Foundation, an Honorary Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources at UCL, and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, Qatar. His research activities and interests span food security, climate change in the MENA region and Sub-Saharan Africa, electrification and energy access, and the political economy of knowledge production and development. On Sudan, his research focuses on social and economic policy, and civil society and governance. He has a PhD in Energy and Economics from University College London.

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Tuesday, November 12

Panel III: Religion and Racial Liberation

9:00 - 11:00 a.m.

Moderator: Hasan Mahmud, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Northwestern Qatar

Islam, Black Internationalism, and the Black Radical Tradition

Biography

Dr. Rasul Miller (PhD, History, University of Pennsylvania) is Assistant Professor of History in the School of Humanities at the University of Californa Irvine. He joined UCI from Yale University's Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration where he served as a postdoctoral associate in the study of the racialization of Islam. His research interests include Black Muslim communities in the Atlantic world, Black radicalism and its impact on social and cultural movements in the twentieth century U.S., Black internationalism, and West African intellectual history. Miller's current book project, Black Muslim Cosmopolitanism: The Global Character of New York City's Black Muslim Movements, examines the Black internationalist origins of early twentieth-century Black Sunni Muslim congregations in and around New York City, and the cultural and political orientations that characterized subsequent communities of Black Muslims in the U.S. who built robust, transnational networks as they actively engaged traditions and communities of Muslims on the African continent.

Almost as Muslim as the Arabs: Colonial Racism and the Invention of the ‘Natural Muslim

Biography

Mafaz Al-Suwaidan is a PhD candidate in Philosophy of Religion focused on Islam and Modern Thought, with a secondary degree in African and African American Studies. She holds a Master of Theological Study (MTS) degree in Islamic Studies, a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative Writing, and a Bachelor of Journalism. Her research interests include modern Islamic thought, Muslim movements, West African Sufism, Black Power studies, and religion in literature. Her dissertation explores the religious thought and philosophies of early 20th-century Muslim social-political movements in Egypt, Senegal, and the U.S.; reconstructing and reconsidering key elements of their thinking against a backdrop of Western liberalism. 

A Daring Testament of Hope: Exploring the Power and Persuasion of Liberation in African Theology

Abstract

Beyond a totalizing theological construct, this presentation explores the synergy between spirituality and social justice. Its exploration and analysis of African liberation theology uses the insights and thoughts of Englebert Mveng and Marc Ela to establish the linkages between spirituality and solidarity. Both scholars boldly proclaimed that God systematically sides with the “forgotten people” and gives them a new sense of dignity and freedom that defies the ungodly hubris of the powers-that-be and oppressive hegemonic paradigms and proclamations. The presentation examines the pain, processes, and possibility of African liberation theology. It examines how Mveng’s thought on “Anthropological poverty” and Ela’s exposition of “African Cry” resonate with the intersection between race and redemption. A discussion of the role of contextualization and cross-cultural engagement in theological discourse provides important formulations for delving into the examination of African liberation theology. 

Biography

Akintunde E. Akinade is a Professor of Theology at Georgetown University’s Edmund E. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Qatar. He is the author of Christian Responses to Islam in Nigeria: A Contextual Study of Ambivalent Encounters. He co-edited The Agitated Mind of God: The Theology of Kosuke Koyama with Dale T. Irvin (the book was chosen as one of the fifteen outstanding books in Ecumenical and Mission Studies in 1996 by the International Bulletin of Missionary Research) and Creativity and Change in Nigerian Christianity with David O. Ogungbile. He is the editor of A New Day: Essays on World Christianity in Honor of Lamin Sanneh and Fractured Spectrum: Perspectives on Christian-Muslim Relations in Nigeria. He serves on the Editorial Board of The Muslim World, The Trinity Journal of Theology, and Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue. At GU-Q, he is the Director of the Africana Studies Minor. This is a joint program with NU-Q.

Poetry in the Black American Muslim Experience

Biography

Amir Sulaiman is a Grammy nominated poet, recording artist, Harvard Fellow, and producer, screenwriter for film and television. He has performed his works across the US as well as many other countries including England, Belgium, Senegal, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Australia, Iran and the Netherlands, and continues to tour world-wide.

The album “8:46” Amir created along with Dave Chappelle has earned them a Grammy nomination and praise from publications like Variety and USA Today. The shows he has written and produced for Marvel, Disney+, Hulu and HBO have garnered Emmy, Golden Globe, and Peabody nominations. His poetry collection, Love, Gnosis & Other Suicide Attempts, met with critical acclaim, in addition to his latest album "The Opening," the third in a unique trilogy project. Amir was first introduced to a National audience in 2005 when he was featured for two seasons on Russell Simmons' groundbreaking series Def Poetry Jam on HBO.

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Panel IV: Racial Colonialism, the Question of Palestine, and Anti-Imperialism

12:30 - 2:30 p.m.

Moderator: Sami Hermez, Liberal Arts Director, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern Qatar 

The African Union and the Israeli-Arab Contestation

Abstract

The African Union's engagement with the question of Palestinians represents a complex interplay of post-colonial politics, international relations, and continental solidarity. This study examines the evolution of African diplomatic positions from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to the African Union (AU), highlighting the significant shift from widespread African-Israeli cooperation in the 1960s to the collective diplomatic rupture following the 1973 October War. The research analyzes how Western pressure, through economic and diplomatic leverages, attempted to influence African states' positions while exploring the role of Arab-African solidarity in shaping continental policy. The study particularly emphasizes the institutional mechanisms within the AU that facilitate decision-making on contentious international issues, exemplified by the recent controversy over Israel's observer status (2021-2022). This analysis reveals how African collective diplomacy navigates between international pressures, regional solidarity, and post-colonial principles in addressing the Israeli-Arab contestation by examining documents like AU resolutions, communiques and reports. The findings demonstrate the endurance of the AU's support for Palestinian self-determination while highlighting the complex dynamics that challenge African diplomatic unity on this issue. 

Biography

Dr. Lynda Chinenye Iroulo is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in Qatar. She is also an Associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, Germany; an Associate Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS); and a Resident Fellow at the Africa Policy Research Initiative. Her research focuses on International Relations – The role of bureaucrats in International Organisations, African Regional Integration, Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories, and Africa in Global Politics.

The Whiteness of Phosphorous: Racial Ingenuity and the Weapons of War

Abstract

During Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip in January 2009, medical workers there began treating patients who were suffering from a type of wound that they had not previously encountered. These patients had been hit by something that burned deeply into their body, quickly penetrating the flesh and destroying muscle, bone, and sinew. When the patients removed their bandages after several days or even a week, the wounds would sometimes unexpectedly reignite and continue to burn. This was the first experience that Palestinians in Gaza had with white phosphorus, a weapon that is both hotter and more toxic than napalm. It has since become commonplace. In this paper, I will use the Israelis’ use of white phosphorus to examine the relationship between weapons and race—or, more specifically, the relationship between the Israelis’ waging of war and their claims to whiteness. While many scholars working in the field of critical whiteness studies have examined the racial assimilation of Jews in the context of twentieth-century North America, these studies for the most part neglect the role that Israeli militarism has played in this process. Through its use of weapons, including white phosphorus, Israel is not only aspiring to be included in the ranks of whiteness, it is expanding the field of whiteness itself and creating new monstrous forms of it.

Biography

Greg Burris is an associate professor in residence of visual communication at Northwestern University in Qatar and the author of The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple University, 2019). Before coming to Doha, he was director of the Media Studies Program at the American University of Beirut, a research fellow at both the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study (STIAS) in South Africa and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Amsterdam, and a Fulbright fellowship recipient in Istanbul. He obtained his doctorate in film and media studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also holds degrees from Indiana University, Bloomington, and the University of Texas at Austin. Greg’s research and teaching are focused on the intersections of cinema, race, and emancipatory politics. His current writing project focuses on Palestine and the battlefield of time.

African Muslim Intellectuals and the Liberation of Palestine

Abstract

Through letters, poetry, and public addresses, 20th century West Africa's most renowned Muslim scholar Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d.1975) called on Arab leaders to take decisive action for Palestinian liberation, viewing Palestine not only as a battleground for territorial justice, but as the highest spiritual cause. Shaykh Ibrahim saw the Palestinian struggle as a unifying cause for all Muslims, transcending racial or national boundaries. Centering justice as a key Islamic principle, he urged Arab and Muslim leaders to prioritize Palestine and the sacred sites of Jerusalem as an ethical and religious duty. Shaykh Ibrahim's anti-colonial legacy, his commitment to principled resistance and his rousing warnings to Arab and Muslim leaders provide an enduring relevance that speaks presciently to our present moment.  

Biography

Farah El-Sharif is a scholar of Islamic intellectual history. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2022, where she worked on Islam in West Africa, resistance to colonialism  and the intersection of Islamic law and Sufism. She received her Master’s degrees in Islamic Studies from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and completed her undergraduate degree at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. 

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