“‘The colonial semiotic invention of ‘citizenship’: The colonial apartheid system in Sudan (1900–1948)”

Ashraf Abdelhay holds a doctoral degree in the field of sociolinguistics from the University of Edinburgh. He works for the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (Qatar) as an associate professor in the program of linguistics and Arabic lexicography. He has published a number of articles in peer reviewed journals and has co-edited some books in the field of decolonial sociolinguistics, language policy, and language and conflict. The current project he is developing (with Sinfree Makoni and Cristine Severo) addresses the sociolinguistics of protesting.

Understanding the ongoing armed conflict in Sudan requires a critical engagement with the broader historical context of Western colonialism as it played out in Sudan. In this talk, I will examine the construct of ‘citizenship’ within the framework of the British colonial apartheid system in Sudan (1900–1948). I will explore how this construct functioned as a structuring element within colonial discourses of stratification, regulating mobility across indexically charged geographies in Sudan. Additionally, I will demonstrate how the racio-semiotic apartheid regime in Sudan reshaped time, dress, space, and language/literacy, with the goal of inventing geopolitically demarcated, self-contained ‘races/tribes’. These underlying colonial structures of racialization would later shape the expectations and experiences of who should be ‘recognized’ as a ‘citizen’ in post-colonial Sudan. I argue that the term ‘colonial peace,’ used by the Resistance Committees in the context of the December Revolution of 2018, should be understood within the context of the modern paradigm of war, rooted in these colonial policies and practices of racial differentiation.

*This speaker will be presenting virtually on Zoom; however, we will be hosting a watch party with refreshments in 335 Willard Building. *