Branding Humanity: Competing Narratives of Rights, Violence, and Global Citizenship

By Amal Hassan Fadlalla

The Save Darfur movement gained an international following, garnering widespread international attention to this remote Sudanese territory. Celebrities and other notable public figures participated in human rights campaigns to combat violence in the region. But how do local activists and those throughout the Sudanese diaspora in the United States situate their own notions of rights, nationalism, and identity?

Based on interviews with Sudanese social actors, activists, and their allies in the United States, the Sudan, and online, Branding Humanity traces the global story of violence and the remaking of Sudanese identities. Amal Hassan Fadlalla examines how activists contest, reshape, and reclaim the stories of violence emerging from the Sudan and their identities as migrants. Fadlalla charts the clash and friction of the master-narratives and counter-narratives circulated and mobilized by competing social and political actors negotiating social exclusion and inclusion through their own identity politics and predicament of exile. In exploring the varied and individual experiences of Sudanese activists and allies, Branding Humanity helps us see beyond the oft-monolithic international branding of conflict. Fadlalla asks readers to consider how national and transnational debates about violence circulate, shape, and re-territorialize ethnic identities, disrupt meanings of national belonging, and rearticulate notions of solidarity and global affiliations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Nov 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781503607279

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STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Fadlalla, Amal Hassan, author.

Title: Branding humanity : competing narratives of rights, violence, and global citizenship / Amal Hassan Fadlalla.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. | Series: Stanford studies in human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018009499 (print) | LCCN 2018011177 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503606159 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503607262 (paper) | ISBN 9781503607279 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sudan—History—Darfur Conflict, 2003—Press coverage—United States. | Sudan—History—Civil War, 1983-2005—Press coverage—United States. | Sudan—History—Darfur Conflict, 2003—Foreign public opinion, American. | Sudan—History—Civil War, 1983-2005—Foreign public opinion, American. | Ethnic conflict—Sudan—Public opinion. | Human rights—Sudan—Public opinion. | Sudanese Americans—Ethnic identity. | Sudanese Americans—Politics and government. | Identity politics—Sudan.

Classification: LCC DT157.673 (ebook) | LCC DT157.673 F33 2018 (print) | DDC 962.404/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009499

Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10/14 Minion

Cover photo: Karel Prinsloo / Arete / Unicef

Cover design: John Barnett | Four Eyes

Branding Humanity

Competing Narratives of Rights, Violence, and Global Citizenship

Amal Hassan Fadlalla

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford Studies in Human Rights

I dedicate this ethnography of hope and promising futures to all those who search for the meaning of humanity beyond the confines of identity politics

A JASMINE BRANCH

Good morning, homeland;

split into two.

O, you, bathed in sunlight,

hung out over the two Niles.

Tell me, where are your stars?

Why scattered, your absorbing sands?

Tell me, where are your palm trees?

Why not shake your marches?

Enliven your forbearance,

and the resilience of your hands . . .

A silhouette folding itself in the invisible

is the countenance of the moon.

The moon is caring;

cultivating me all the time;

with a porcelain cup,

broken,

mysterious ash, it remains.

Who would hug me?

O, you, the uprising moon

come to me, with homelands.

The moon is restless,

it is being immured . . .

O, you, the greenest jungle.

We will cut the braids of the night,

and should you encounter the rain,

see, when is she pelting down;

tell her, we will be waiting;

a day, or for years to come.

Fear not, and come earlier.

Prudently, hug me; and cry into my chest.

Cry, profusely . . .

Pour down

Pour down

We have longed for you,

waiting at the Palace street, for you;

and at the confluence of the two Niles.

Carrying in me, a third of my homeland,

And you, carrying Jasmine.

Poem by author

Written July 10, 2011

Translated from Arabic by Fazil Moradi

Contents

Foreword by Mark Goodale

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Violence Narratives and the Cultural Politics of Identity

1. Performing Humanity: Suffering and the Making of Global Citizens

2. Humanitarian Publics: Celebrities, Solidarities, and Students

3. Diaspora as Counter-Response: Citizenship Rights and the Suffering of Ghurba

4. Contested Borders of Inhumanity: Refuge and the Production and Circulation of Violence Narratives

5. Routing Humanitarian Visibilities: Rights and Dissent on the Eve of Sudan’s Partition

Toward an Inclusive Humanist Future: Borders, Bodies, and Funerals

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

AMAL HASSAN FADLALLA’S BRANDING HUMANITY is a compelling ethnographic and longitudinal examination of the ways in which different histories of violence, efforts at reconciliation, and postcolonial reckoning in the Sudan became interwoven with transnational currents of human rights activism and humanitarianism, feminist mobilization, and the emergence of new configurations of flexible citizenship against the backdrop of neoliberal globalization. At the same time, however, Fadlalla’s study is also a profoundly nuanced exercise in critical reflexivity, in which her own subject position as a diasporic Sudanese scholar deepens and thickens her interpretations on every page, through every ethnographic interview, and at the end of every consideration of the dilemmas that arise with the kind of participatory action research that she was often called upon to undertake. And as in her own poem, with which she begins the book, there is also a pervasive sense of longing in Fadlalla’s study: a longing for a conceptual path along which the competing narratives that form the basis of her work can be rearticulated; a longing for the excruciatingly difficult kind of synthesis that embraces both national unity and the messiness of actually existing pluralism; and finally, a longing for the emergence of new forms of political and social alliance that can resist the dangerous dichotomy that she reveals with such analytical and empirical precision, that which sees the cultural or the cosmopolitan as the only possible categories for collective belonging.

In tracing the contours of conflict in and about the Sudan, Fadlalla deploys a diverse methodological repertoire that includes both traditional strategies of engagement and highly innovative moves that result in what she calls multifaceted research. With a complicated and self-aware insider/outsider perspective, she casts a wide empirical net as a way to encompass novel spaces of encounter and reflection even as she herself is an ever-present actor in the history that her research problematizes and reinterprets. As she shows us, the struggles in the Sudan both before and after secession were—beyond their quotidian tragedies—constructed and reconstructed in terms of competing ideologies of suffering, cultural authenticity, and moral righteousness. Her ethnographic parsing of these domains of ideological contestation does not lead easily to the kinds of normative judgments that have so often been attached to, and mobilized by, the various sides within the succession of interlinked ethnic, religious, and political conflicts in the Sudan.

Beyond the fact that its historical scope and ethnographic richness make Branding Humanity an unparalleled resource for understanding the course of contemporary Sudan, it also holds a range of key implications for human rights studies more generally. There are two that seem to me to be of greatest importance, and their consequences for the field are significant indeed.

First, this study suggests that what might be thought of as the transnational fix is like a mirage that keeps moving farther away the closer one approaches. In this sense, Fadlalla’s research does for human rights studies what Tania Li’s work did for our understanding of the politics of cultural identity. If it is true, as Li argued, that there is, in the end, no communal fix to the problems of indigenous marginalization and disempowerment, then Branding Humanity stands for something like the opposite proposition: there is no transnational fix for national histories of violence and division, no final humanitarian public whose beneficent engagement will ultimately lead to what the Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung described as positive peace.

And second, Fadlalla’s study serves as a powerful argument for how the politics of recognition, which became so hegemonic throughout the first decades of the post–Cold War period, can accelerate a politics of difference into spiraling practices of embodied category of violence—ethnic, gendered, religious, class, political. Indeed, on the basis of Fadlalla’s intervention, one can read the fracture of separation that gave rise to South Sudan—including the attendant conflicts within the new nation-state—as a consequence of the transnational politics of identity taken to its logical and tragic conclusion. In this way, Branding Humanity gives new meaning and theoretical impetus to what David Kennedy described as the dark sides of virtue.

Finally, by rejecting the siren song of what she describes as transnational sovereignty, Fadlalla leaves us with a much more measured, open, and contingent approach to understanding conflict and structures of violence—whether in the Sudan or within the ideologies and practices that perform humanity for an international market. It is an approach oriented toward much smaller gestures and less-reified moments of interconnection, an approach that is sensitive to the possibilities of what she calls historically grounded solidarities.

Mark Goodale

Series Editor

Stanford Studies in Human Rights

Acknowledgments

WORKING ON THIS PROJECT for the past decade has become an exhilarating intellectual and personal journey, mixed with relentless feelings of hope and despair. At times it felt as if I were carrying my ideas about the Sudan project around the globe in several travel bags, searching for places of intellectual care and refuge to work on them, share them, and finally bring them to fruition. I conceived, wrote, or revised bits of this manuscript in the Sudans, the United States, Germany, Switzerland, France, and the United Arab Emirates. Although I had anticipated finishing the task sooner, the turbulent changes and political transformations in the Sudans dictated otherwise. I am indebted to many institutions, colleagues, friends, and family members for their valuable support over the years. Their belief in me and in this endeavor made this book possible.

I launched this project in 2007 with generous grants from Rackham Graduate School, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Their financial assistance enabled me to carry out the intensive fieldwork needed for the study. In March 2012, I received two additional awards from the University of Michigan: the Associate Professor Fund from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA), and the Human Rights Award from the Program in Comparative and International Studies. These awards supported the follow-up and completion of the fieldwork and the beginning of the data analysis. The financial support I received from the University of Michigan and the intellectual conversations with my colleagues in the Department of Women’s Studies, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Department of Anthropology have been crucial to the development of this book and my overall career. I especially thank Abigail Stewart, Elizabeth Cole, Valerie Traub, Sandra Gunning, Rosario Ceballo, Leela Fernandes, Elisha Renne, Tiya Miles, Angela Dillard, Frieda Ekotto, Howard Stein, Derek Peterson, Deborah Keller-Cohen, Andrew Shryock, Naomi André, Raymond Silverman, Anne Pitcher, Martin Murray, Kelly Askew, Adam Ashforth, and each and every one of my other colleagues who offered support through the years. I also extend special thanks to the department staff members, who provide continuous support to help us pursue our scholarly work: Wayne High, Elizabeth James, Faye Portis, Donna Ainsworth, and Patricia Mackmiller.

In 2013 I was named a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, DC, with support to begin writing the manuscript during a nine-month residency. This fellowship was significant for many reasons. The center and its architecture of intellectual care helped me and other scholars share our work, engage with policy makers, and present our work at various forums. I am forever indebted to the directors and to my colleagues at the center for their generous engagement. Special thanks to Robert Litwak, Steve McDonald, Haleh Esfandiari, Michael Van Dusen, Monde Muyangwa, and Alan Goulty. Thanks also to members of the staff, especially Kimberly Conner, Lindsay Collins, Aniel Krishna, Maria-Stella Gatzoulis, and librarian Janet Spikes. Special thanks to my research assistant, Katherine Fiely, for her help with data collection and organization during my residency. At the center, I benefited from discussing my work with the scholars of the 2013–14 cohort and the small writing group we formed. I am especially grateful for my exchanges with Hope Harrison, Donny Meertens, Anne-Marie Brady, Mae Nagi, Maria Cristina Garcia, Sayuri Shimizu, and Alison Brysk.

This book could not have been finalized without two additional significant awards: a seven-month Mercator fellowship from the Department of Anthropology and Philosophy at the University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany and a one-semester LSA Humanities Award from the University of Michigan. At the University of Halle I was hosted by the vibrant anthropology group LOST (Law, Organization, Science, and Technology), chaired by Professor Richard Rottenburg. I learned a great deal while in residency with the group of scholars at LOST, especially from their weekly seminars, their debates of urgent African issues, and their creativity in fostering dynamic and productive group work. I am indebted to Professor Rottenburg for organizing the warm welcome and generous hospitality I received at Halle and for facilitating my connection with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. I thank all my colleagues at LOST and the Max Planck Institute for making my stay at Halle so memorable, and give a special thank-you to the administrative team and staff at the two units. Cornelia Heimann and Ronn Müller particularly deserve acknowledgment for so gracefully handling the laborious administrative details of my stay in Germany. My ultimate gratitude goes to many students and colleagues who found the time to show me around, stop by during my writing breaks at Café Rosenburg or Haus und Hof, or join me during my routine walks along the Saale River as we exchanged ideas and shared our work. Thank you, Mariam Mahjoub Sharif, Enrico Ille, Laura Matt, Zahir Abdel Karim, Andrea Behrends, Timm Sureau, David Kananizadeh, Maria Stilidi, Kati Illmann, Boris Wille, Stefanie Bognitz, Nadine Adam, Sung-joon Park, Siri Lamoureaux, Benjamin Beck, Bertram Turner, and Fazil Moradi. I am particularly indebted to my colleague Fazil Moradi for translating my poem A Jasmine Branch from Arabic into English. The poem, the epigraph of this book, was widely circulated in different Sudanese media outlets after the division of the Sudan. Moradi, with the assistance of the novelist Goran Baba Ali, conveys the words of this poem in a similar rhythmic style that expresses the depth of what I felt at that historical moment.

Some of the material in this book appeared in articles that were published elsewhere. I thank Signs, Urban Anthropology, Humanity, and the School for Advanced Research Press for allowing the reproduction of these articles.

This book could not have been possible without the long-term support, engagement, and care of many colleagues, friends, and family members. I want to give my special gratitude to Hope Harrison, Miriam Ticktin, Patrick Dodd, Micaela di Leonardo, Caroline Bledsoe, Sandra Gunning, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, May Seikaly, Evelyn Alsultani, Sondra Hale, Omoladi Adunbi, Nesha Haniff, Akbar Virmani, Nasrin Qader, Lynette Jackson, Dario Gaggio, Thomas Abowd, Taghred Elsanhouri, Nadine Naber and Atef Said, Sunita Bose and Damani Partridge, Nadia Osman and Anwar Elhaj, and Claudia and Klaus Wilhelm. Thank you as well to my family members in the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, in particular to my sisters, Neimat and Ihssan, and to my nieces and nephews, who make my life better from afar.

I am grateful to the many individuals who assisted with the collection of data for this study or helped in other organizational and editorial capacities. Here I especially thank Christopher Tounsel and Sarah Juster. I also thank Kim Green-well and Kristin McGuire for their meticulous and careful reading and editing of the manuscript. My ultimate gratitude goes to the reviewers of the manuscript and to the excellent editorial and production teams at Stanford University Press for making this a better book.

The final round of appreciation goes to my Sudanese and Sudanist interlocutors in the United States, the Sudan, and other diaspora locales. Their collaboration made this book possible. I will forever be indebted to the many wonderful people who gave their time to respond to my questions and to those who invited me in and opened their homes and hearts to share their life experiences. The names of many of these individuals appear in the pages that follow; I’d like to note in particular Mahasin Ahmad, Ilham Abdel-Razig, Adlan Abdel-Aziz, Abdel-Fatah Said Arman, and Husham and Dalia Haj Omar.

FIGURE 1. Student wearing a T-shirt inspired by George Clooney’s documentary Sand and Sorrow. STAND conference, Washington, DC, 2009. Photo by author.

FIGURE 2. Darfur protest in front of the White House, Washington, DC, 2009. Photo by author.

Introduction

Violence Narratives and the Cultural Politics of Identity

Are you Bedouin? . . . NO

From Negro-land? . . . NO

I belong to you, a wanderer coming back

To sing with one tongue and pray with another

—Muhammad Abed-Alhai.¹

IN MAY 2009, THREE YEARS AFTER the massive Save Darfur rally on the Washington Mall, I stood on Pennsylvania Avenue, right in front of the White House, to attend a demonstration with forty Sudanese activists and their Save Darfur allies. The activists were trying to regain visibility for the cause of the Darfurian people amid increasing American attention toward Sudan’s North-South conflict and efforts to fulfill the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the two sides (figure 1).² One Darfurian activist I spoke with during the protest asserted that the Southern conflict and the approach of the January 2011 referendum on South Sudan’s independence were leading to compassion fatigue toward Darfur.

As I was waiting for the Darfur activists, who were at a nearby park rehearsing for the demonstration, I noticed a group of twelve Tamil activists holding posters of dismembered children and burned villages and schools and chanting, Obama, Obama, you are Tamil’s only hope, and Send the media, send the NGOs, yes you can, yes you can. I was taking photos of the Tamil protesters when the Save Darfur activists arrived. Unlike the Tamil activists, the Save Darfur protesters had their media coverage ready: The Voice of America and Aljazeera English Television were there to cover the event, as were photographers (figure 2). And, of course, I was there as well, as an anthropologist. I knew most of the Sudanese who were participating in the demonstration, and I had interviewed some of them as key figures in the Sudanese diaspora in the Washington, DC, area. The group included people who were originally from Darfur as well as people who identified themselves as Sudanese seculars or as political victims of the current regime.

The Save Darfur activists created a circle and placed themselves in front of the Tamil demonstrators. Their louder chants for justice in Darfur drew the attention of many passersby, especially that of touring high school students, who may have known more about Darfur than they knew about any other region in the world. I noticed that the Tamil activists stopped chanting and focused their attention on the Darfur group and their media team. My anthropological curiosity and interest in issues of transnational alliances, inclusion, and citizenship motivated me to shift my attention as well, from the Darfur group to the overshadowed Tamil protesters. I walked over to them and asked one if he had heard about the Darfur conflict, to which he responded that he hadn’t. Some of the Darfur activists I had interviewed noticed my movement toward the Tamil protest, and one of the Save Darfur group quickly approached the Tamil activists and invited them to join the Darfur circle. The two groups combined and began chanting against genocide in both places: Obama, Obama, stop genocide in Darfur and Sri Lanka. A member of the Darfur group who introduced himself to me as Zimbabwean chanted for peace, human rights, and justice for all humanity, calling for solidarity across the globe, while a Tamil activist interjected, Media, media, bring the truth. The media team noticed the merger and gave the Tamil activists a chance to speak about their cause.

A Tamil woman who thought I was a journalist thanked me for drawing attention to their protest. She said she had been in the United States for twenty-five years, and although she is American, she is still tied to her motherland through a community of Sri Lankans in the United States. She commented on the lack of media attention given to the atrocities committed against Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan government during its crackdown on the Tamil Tigers in May 2009. Another activist noted the large community of Tamils in the Washington area, explaining that they had organized the protest in order to draw more news coverage and adding that they needed to make a noise in order to draw media attention and to be heard by policy makers. After the demonstration, some Darfurian and Tamil activists exchanged contact information, hoping to share experiences and to build solidarities.

I begin this introduction with the story of the Darfurian and Tamil alliance to highlight the uneven landscape of recognition and how that plays into the competition for transnational attention and visibility of activists’ causes of national exclusion. While the Darfur movement in the United States garnered ample media attention, other conflicts in Africa and elsewhere—as the Tamil example shows—had to compete for public notice. The relative success of the Darfur campaign can be attributed to a well-framed narrative of the Sudanese conflicts around gender-ethnic violence and genocide, inspired by the languages of human rights and humanitarianism and promoted at the height of America’s war on terror.³ The American-based Save Darfur campaign itself endorsed this narrative and helped to circulate it by mobilizing faith-based organizations, incorporating some Sudanese activists, and engaging the media and policy makers in order to increase the conflict’s visibility. At its inception in 2004, the campaign was focused primarily on the crisis in Darfur, and it soon came under criticism for its approach to media advocacy and its simplistic gendered and ethnic categorization of violence.⁴ The polar categories of Muslim/Arabs versus Christian/black Africans dominated the political campaigns for Southern Sudan in the United States, and the Save Darfur campaign relied on similar categories of gender and ethnic violence committed by Muslim Arabs against Muslim black Africans. Not all Darfurians in Washington were content with the Save Darfur coalition and its strategies. Some told me that many Darfurians did not join Save Darfur because they felt that they were recruited as informants and not agents capable of speaking for themselves and the plight of their people. They also complained that the campaign simplified complex political debates about diversity, inclusion, and citizenship rights in the Sudan.

The alliances and solidarities that many Sudanese social actors and activists create with other Americans, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and policy makers in Washington, DC—including their responses to the Save Darfur efforts—provide insight into how members of the Sudanese community in the Washington metropolitan area engage in Sudanese cultural politics from afar. Many of them utilize these connections and social networks to respond to the dynamically shifting ethnic divisions and conflicts in their homeland, and the subsequent political constructions of their cultural identities, as exiled Sudanese nationals, Muslims, non-Muslims, and as American citizens and noncitizens. In the years following September 11, 2001, immigrant communities in the United States have experienced the impact of political tensions and racial panics in various ways.⁵ The experience of the Sudanese community, however, has been uniquely complex because the life histories of Sudanese immigrants are shaped by ethnic divisions and the realities of war and conflict at home and by the representation of these realities in political campaigns, Western mainstream media, and other such forums. Northern Sudanese, who are mostly Muslim and Arabic-speaking, bore more of the brunt of the war on terror and its aftermath of labeling and exclusion than did Southern Sudanese refugees and immigrants, who are mostly Christian and hail from different ethnic backgrounds. Similarly, the escalation of the Darfur conflict in 2003 and the political campaigns that defined the conflict as one of genocide and ethnic cleansing have distanced Darfurians from a Northern-Muslim Sudanese identity in exile. Although many Sudanese exiles in the United States migrated to escape the violence of war, ethnic conflicts, and structural inequities, ethnic divisions continue to be mobilized and reproduced in new forms in American official discourses and mainstream media reportage about Sudan and its violence. The Western insistence on a narrative that emphasizes ethnic division engenders new articulations of identities and new claims of national and transnational belonging, alliances, and affiliations.

In 2007, I began to explore the meanings of these emerging claims and affiliations through my engagement with Sudanese social actors and activists in the Washington metropolitan area. I followed these social networks back to the Sudan and elsewhere by documenting their conversations and debates through on-site interviews and observations and also through various cyberpublics and media connections. In response to political tension, fear, and unrest in the Sudan, the United States, and the Middle East, many of my interviewees in the United States and in the Sudan shied away from identifying themselves as political activists or as members of one particular political party or ethnic group.

Khalid, one of my interviewees, like many Northern Sudanese who left Sudan in the 1990s because they feared political prosecution, refused to identify himself as Northern Sudanese or as a political activist.⁶ In numerous conversations, he commented that identifying as a Northern Sudanese in the United States often associated him with Islam and Arabism and with the negative attention that those categories attracted in the aftermath of 9/11. He told of a time when an American coworker asked him where he came from, and when he responded that he was originally from the Sudan, she asked what part of the Sudan. He responded that he was from Northern Sudan, and she then asked him what he thought about the Muslim-Arab treatment of black Christians in the south and in Darfur. I said, ‘Darfurians are Muslims, you know?’ But because of the media a lot of people thought Southerners and Darfurians are all Christians, he explained. The heightened representation of the Sudanese conflicts in mainstream American media and other political forums, especially during the North-South civil war and the Darfur conflict, has added to such tensions and alienating perceptions. Therefore, depending on the social context, Khalid preferred to identify as secularist, Nubian, Sudanese, or Sudanese American interchangeably, referring to broader political, ethnic, national, and transnational affiliations that encompass his belonging to multiple places, at different times and in different situations. He also used the term social activism to refer to the politics of everyday struggle in the Sudan and the United States. Activism for him includes his involvement with the community, his daily hour-long drive to work, his worries about the future of his two kids in America, his concerns about his aging parents in the Sudan, and the debates around culture and politics that he has with friends and family in his small apartment, in his friends’ homes, and in other public and cyberpublic spaces.

This book—which grew out of stories such as Khalid’s—examines the transnational transformation of the Sudanese nation-state before its division into the Sudan and South Sudan on July 9, 2011. I trace this transformation through interviews and interactions I conducted with Sudanese social actors and activists and their allies in the United States, the Sudan, and online. The complex and compelling life histories and experiences of these various interlocutors make possible a nuanced interpretation of how national and transnational narratives about violence, rights, and humanity circulate, and how they shape and reterritorialize ethnic identities, disrupt meanings of national belonging, and rearticulate notions of solidarity and global affiliations.

I highlight how the clashing narratives of transnational affiliation and belonging of Islamists on the one hand and their human rights and humanitarian rivals on the other work through assimilation and/or exclusion of other Sudanese secular visions. Transnational human rights and humanitarian groups have relied on a master narrative of gender violence and ethnic suffering to characterize the struggle of ethnic minorities in South Sudan, Darfur, and later in the Nuba Mountains. I argue that this narration, while well intended, has obscured the struggle of other activists fighting against the monolithic vision of the Islamist regime. Secular activists and other social actors in the Sudan and abroad have contested and rearticulated these narratives differently to highlight their own marginal positions as political opponents in the Sudan and as exiled migrants seeking safe transnational abodes. They find themselves in murky positions: Either they have to conform to the Islamist vision, appropriating available spaces of human rights and humanitarian protests to make their voices heard, or they have to create their own alternative alliances and spaces of expression through other social domains and cyberpublic media. In this book, I describe the conflicting humanitarian and diaspora publics where these clashing narratives, debates, and contestations are expressed and performed.

My analysis engages transnational theories that invoke the flexibility of citizenship, identities, and global flows of people, ideas, and capital.⁷ It further suggests a framework that incorporates competing models of transnationalities to reflect a hardening of social boundaries and a politics of exclusion and dispossession in the post–Cold War era. Since the late 1980s, the fall of communism, and the end of the Cold War, new confrontations among Western and Muslim countries (especially those in Africa and the Middle East) have exacerbated ethnic conflicts over identity and citizenship and produced new discourses about gender, ethnic violence, and suffering. The ascendance of political Islam in opposition to Western intervention in Africa and the Middle East and the aftermath of the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, coupled with the prominence of new media technologies, have contributed to hardened social boundaries, heightened moral panic, strategically deployed identity politics, and new alliances and solidarities. The soaring rates of political violence and increasing levels of poverty and social insecurities have also led to new patterns of migration as victims of war and political prosecution flee their homelands. Sudan, as a mobile nation, offers an exemplary site for examining these historical shifts and tensions, in particular because of the competition among Islamists, secularists, and humanitarian actors and activists about the meaning of rights, humanity, and national and transnational affiliations.

In the context of the Sudan, and since the Islamists’ ascendance to power in the late 1980s, sharia moral codes have presented a new model for national identity, linked to a pan-Islamist transnational vision. At the same time, many transnational actors, including Sudanese opposition politicians and activists, have relied on the circulation of narratives of ethnic and gender violence in their alliances and in their contestation of the Islamist state and its inability to protect and incorporate its minority citizens. These transnational alliances have enabled Sudanese political opposition actors and activists to insert themselves into an imagined transnational community governed by human rights and humanitarian legal and moral codes. Such contestations, however, deploy deep-rooted polarization of ethnic identities and present a narrow definition of political violence characterized by the languages of gender, ethnic, and religious suffering. That interpretation of violence and ethnic suffering allows for the visibility and recognition of Sudanese conflicts based on the refashioning and rearticulation of new gendered and racial identities. And these new identities, in turn, position some refugees and immigrants, especially those from South Sudan and Darfur, as visible national and global citizens, while overshadowing the experiences of many secular activists in exile, including Muslim Northern Sudanese secular actors and activists.

My engagements, conversations, and interviews with dispersed Sudanese actors—whether Northern, Southern, or Darfurian Sudanese—have alerted me to the challenges of doing ethnography at moments of heightened political tension and debate. Although many anthropologists have urged a more flexible understanding of time and space in contexts of transnational mobility, my ethnographic efforts to map such flexibility onto fragmented landscapes have often been disrupted by the simultaneous instability and fixity of events that shaped the process of interviews and other field engagements.⁸ Transnational Sudanese and their allies occupy divided spaces and time zones in different diasporic locations. Many of them have reimagined and reinvented these transnational places in various ways, thereby renegotiating the meanings of rights, humanity, and national and transnational solidarity and belonging.

My access to these disrupted spaces and social networks was not always possible and was often constrained by my own social position as an elite Northern Sudanese American woman. In such situations, working with field assistants and following debates within my trusted networks on social media and other cyberdigital publics provided a way to bypass some of the restrictions associated with mobility, identity, and access to particular sites. The multisited/multifaceted ethnography that I offer here presents a timely exercise of how to map both the abundance and the paucity of interactions and the narrations of suffering, rights, and humanity during heightened moments of political tension, violence, and mobility.⁹ It seeks to record and register the voices and perspectives of social actors and activists whose aspirations are shaped by their divided multiple identities and their conflicting imagination of national and transnational citizenships. The competing narratives of these actors and activists, their visible and invisible voices, their divisions and collaborations, reflect their fragmented places and differential positions in an uneven and ever-changing sociopolitical landscape that defies the simple categorizations of here versus there, us versus them.

Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s arguments regarding the role of print media in shaping national imagination, I contend that the circulation of narratives of ethno-gendered violence and suffering in the media (including mainstream print and digital), as well as other sociopolitical venues, manifests exceptional historical moments when both national and transnational visions about rights, humanity, and citizenship collide. To this end, I illustrate how narratives of violence and suffering in Sudan’s ethnic conflicts have informed the national and transnational imaginings of many actors and activists, and have been, in turn, deployed, debated, and nullified in the process of reterritorializing Sudan and its ethnic identities.¹⁰

Many anthropologists have situated ethnic violence and confrontation within the contexts of mobility, social communication, and the diminishing sovereignty of nation-states in the global South. Such scholars as Fredrik Barth, for example, argued in the 1960s that ethnic boundaries and identification are markers of cultural difference that change according to social interaction and processes of inclusion and exclusion.¹¹ Increasing processes of neoliberal globalization and the escalation of war and ethnic conflicts in the 1990s shifted academic attention to the study of political violence and its manifestations in cultural discourses and practices of ethnic and national belonging. Reflecting on Liisa Malkki’s insightful work among the Hutu refugees in Burundi, Arjun Appadurai showed how processes of globalization and increased media representation reproduced ethnic violence in the form of labels and terminologies that serve new frameworks of identity, entitlement, and spatial sovereignty.¹² Appadurai’s focus pointed to state techniques that aim to control people’s bodies and movements and exacerbate situations of ethnic violence and uncertainty across social and national borders.

Building on these ideas in this multifaceted ethnography, I examine the contested meanings of narratives of ethno-gendered violence in the context of competing intellectual projects of national and transnational citizenship and belonging. I contend that such competition produces a culture of vulnerability and moral panic over the meanings of rights, humanity, and ethno-national and transnational affiliations. These clashing national and transnational sentiments—played out across ethno-gendered national borders, bodies, and places—generate new interpretations of violence and engender new forms of identity politics and transnational solidarity. For many Sudanese transnational actors and activists, the definition and imagination of the Sudanese nation-state since the 1990s, especially when it was on the brink of separation, relied on the circulation of labels, terminologies, and narratives of ethno-gendered violence that trumped the Islamists’ grand narrative of national sovereignty and transnational affiliation. The rearticulation of political violence into a simple understanding of suffering inflicted on ethnic minorities by the inhumane acts of the Islamist state, however, ignores the political tension and clashes between the West and the East over meanings of sovereignty, rights, humanity, and socioeconomic alliances after the fall of communism. Such effacement also undermines secularists’ imaginaries, translocal histories of struggle, global neoliberal economic policies, and experiences of mobility and relocation. These interrelated political and socioeconomic realities shape the fluidities and fixities inherent in the imagination of national and transnational belonging and the alternative interpretation and representation of violence, suffering, and humanity offered by many interlocutors.

Clashing Visions: A Short History of Conflict, Violence, and Dispersal

For many of the secular Sudanese social actors and activists that I interviewed during my fieldwork in the Sudan and the United States,