Übersicht
There is no doubt that the Islamists’ rise to power in the 1980s has put
Sudan at the center of transnational media attention. Consequently, the
worldwide resurgence of conservatism and right wing politics reanimated
a politics of fear and reproduced new clashing discourses over identity
and citizenship. Within these contexts, Amal Hassan Fadlalla examines
how the production and circulation of violence narratives about Sudan’s
conflicts branded humanity in a neoconservative fashion and shaped the
practices of Sudanese activists and their allies in the United States,
the Sudan, and online. In many temporary and newly formed humanitarian
publics, she argues, the ethno-gendered representation of Sudanese men a
and women as victims and survivors is transformed into powerful
narratives that won them the status of role models within the human
rights and humanitarian fields. These representations harden already
existing gender, ethnic, and class divisions and highlight the post-Cold
War politics and confrontations among different national and
transnational actors over the meanings of rights, sovereignty, and
global citizenship.
This talk is based on Fadlalla’s newly released book “Branding Humanity:
Competing Narratives of Rights, Violence, and Global Citizenship,” in
which she treats Sudan—a dispersed nation due to sixty years of violent
conflicts—as a site for examining these historical shifts and tensions
before the country’s division into two nation states in 2011.
Amal Hassan Fadlalla is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Women’s
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 Master’s degree in
Anthropology from the University of Khartoum, Sudan, and a Ph.D. from
Northwestern University, United States.
She is the author of Branding Humanity: Competing Narratives of Rights,
Violence and Global Citizenship (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2018) and Embodying Honor: Fertility, Foreignness, and Regeneration in
Eastern Sudan (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). She is
also the co-editor of the book, Gendered Insecurities, Health and
Development in Africa (Routledge, 2012), and the Humanity Journal Issue:
Human Rights and Humanitarianism in Africa (Volume 7, No. 1, Spring
2016). Some of her other publications appear in: Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society, Urban Anthropology, Identities: Global
Studies in Culture and Power, and in the School for Advanced Research
(SAR) advance seminar series edited volume: New Landscapes of
Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America, 2008.
Professor Amal Hassan Fadlalla is the recipient of many prestigious
awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council, Harvard
Population and Development Center, the Woodrow Wilson Center for
International Scholars, the Human Rights and Humanity awards from the
University of Michigan, and the Mercator fellowship from the Special
Priority Programme “Adaptation and Creativity in Africa” of the German
Research Foundation at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.
