Race, Gender, Class in the Arab World

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

Much of the literature on race and racism (including those that employ an intersectional approach) takes Western, particularly Euro-American formations of race, gender, and class as a starting point, thereby overlooking other racial formations like those in other contexts. As scholars who focus on the impacts of imperialism and structures of inequality in the Arab World, we recognize that the “Arab World” continues to be homogenized by applying Euro-American frameworks that are insufficient for explaining the unique structures of race and processes of racialization that are intertwined with gender and class. This panel invites papers that engage with structures of race, racism, and racialization and how they intersect with gender and class in the Arab World (countries in Southwest Asia and North Africa) and the impacts that various racializations (including minoritized populations) have on people and the societies in which they live. We take seriously the diversity of indigenous peoples in the Arab World while simultaneously recognizing the numerous ways that people are labelled, othered, and marginalized through anti-Black racism, sectarianization, or other racializations. We welcome papers that focus on minoritized people in the Arab World including but not limited to Black Arabs, indigenous tribes and societies that have been and continue to be erased, and ethnic identities and religious sects as a forms of racialization.

Sub Unit

• Race, Gender, and Class Section / Race, Gender, Class in the Arab World

Presider

• Matthew Heinrichs, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Individual Presentations

• A Transnational National Identity? Upper-middle-class Moroccan Migrants Setting the Boundaries of Moroccan-ness - Emma Fromont, Harvard University

• Living in the U.S. as an Egyptian: On Black Racialization, Temporary Interpellation and Feeling Outside Race - Nehal Elmeligy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

• Multiple invisibility: An intersectional perspective on the invisible work of Palestinian-Arab women in Israel - Maha Sabbah-Karkabi, Ben Gurion University; Amit Kaplan, The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Jaffa

• The Grand Egyptian Museum as a Project of Racial Petrification - Salma Moustafa-Kamel, Northwestern University

• ‘We’re Not Them’: Armenian Americans, Race, and Ottoman Legacies - Haley Zovickian, University of Southern California

Session Organizer

• Ghassan Moussawi, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign