Africa at Noon

media release: Every Wednesday at noon — since 1973! — African Studies Program faculty, students, and community members have gathered for AFRICA AT NOON, a one-hour weekly lecture series bringing diverse African research from scholars around the world to a campus and community audience.

“Beyond Affective Violence: Embodying Suffering, Performing Citizenship."

Speakers: Amal Fadlalla

Zoom: To access the event directly, click here. For dial-in information, click here.

BIO: Amal Hassan Fadlalla is Professor of Anthropology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests and teaching focus on global issues and perspectives related to gender, health, reproduction, diaspora, transnationalism, population, development, and human rights and humanitarianism.  She holds a B.Sc. and Masters degree in Anthropology from the University of Khartoum, Sudan (1985,1992), and a PhD from Northwestern University, United States (2000). She is the author of Branding Humanity: Competing Narratives of Rights, Violence and Global Citizenship (Stanford University Press, 2019) and Embodying Honor: Fertility, Foreignness, and Regeneration in Eastern Sudan (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).

TALK DESCRIPTION

The turn and return to the body from the 1980s and until this moment has produced a rich plethora of ethnographies, often saturated with anthropological optimism, that encourage us to write with and engage our interlocutors to highlight issues of marginality and exclusionary tactics of citizenship. Although these debates have opened many venues to think about the future in the present tense, they also produced new questions about the ability of anthropologists to do more to address the unsettling landscapes created by old empires and new competing ones. How can we look here, there, and elsewhere, at the same time without falling into the trap of old methodologies and linear trajectories of civility and progress? In this talk, I highlight the meaning of citizenship rights in the context of the Sudan/s, and I show how this discourse of rights created new competing transnational spaces of citizenship. I also show how these spaces have attracted new social actors and activists, such as the “Lost Boys” of Sudan, who embody suffering and perform citizenship on the global political stage.