Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab

Sophia Azeb
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
UC Santa Cruz

My book manuscript, “Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab,” examines transnational Black literature, narrative, festival, and music to explore how varying conceptions of blackness and Black racial, cultural, and political identities emerge from the often contentious encounters between Black writers, musicians, activists, and intellectuals from the Americas, Africa and Europe, and Arabic-speaking North Africans in Egypt, Algeria, and France. I approach canonical Black arts, pan-African, and anticolonial literatures, sonics, and performance alongside heretofore untranslated cultural archives that reveal the extent to which divergent conceptions of Arabness and blackness in North Africa and the broader African Diaspora are always entangled. Utilizing a cultural studies methodology, the project argues that the difficulties and failures explicit across cultural and political invocations of blackness in Afro-Arab contexts produce distinct meanings and alternative routes to theorizing the place of Arabs in scholarly, geographic, and socio-political conceptions of the African Diaspora. The multilingual literary and archival research that structures this project spans much of this diaspora, from the colonial records of the 1920s itineraries of Black American, Caribbean, and African stevedores preserved in the municipal archives of Marseille to the private record collections of former Egyptian military brigadiers in 1970s Cairo.