Takwin Jins, Formulating Racializing Assemblages in Modern Egypt

Abstract

Departing from my encounter with an archive of manumission certificates, (tadkhaker hureyya) issued from 1881-1905 this thesis investigates racializing assemblages in modern Egypt. Rather than applying the anglocentric term ‘gender’, I craft an intersectional and interdisciplinary feminist method drawing from the semiotics jins in Arabic as race and sex, or sexed race. Ultimately I show how the differences of jins overwrite and underwrite formulations of jinseyya, or citizenship. I begin by constellating archives at the margins of discourses on Arab modernity and Afro-Arab political solidarity; this accomplishes the double task of outlining the meta-narratives in which I intervene while fleshing out the substance from which racial and civilizational anxieties materialize. I historicize the emergent tensions between African American and Arab racial epistemologies of the late twentieth century by turning to the late nineteenth century, specifically Frederick Douglass’ Orientalizing memoirs of Egypt. Alongside his writings I situate Arabic racial epistemologies elaborated by Rifa al-Tahtawi and Jurji Zaydan within the modernizing efforts of the Egyptian state thereby showing that the liberalizing projects of the Arab Renaissance, or Nahda, were also raced/sexed projections. Furthermore, I tease out how inter-ethnic mixing was central to the operation of political and libidinal economies and the question of Egyptian origins. Finally, I turn to the manumission certificates. Contextualizing them within a genre of biometric documents, I grapple with their role within the consolidation of citizenship as colonial subjectivity. This highlights the imbrication of the processes of racialization and imperial abolition documenting formerly enslaved people as subjects. Pointing to the overlapping of European and Egyptian civilizing projects, this chapter furthers the critique of Nahda liberalism. Confronting the dense descriptions of the people recorded on the documents reveals how racial epistemologies were transcribed onto the flesh. Ultimately, this thesis does the work of takwin, assemblage to narrate how race emerges on textual and physical bodies.