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Intersections Between Class, Race, and Western Intervention in the MENA…

- - - - Schielke explores the middle class in terms of a promise, a pressure, and a claim: an imagined site and standard of normality and respectability that drives peoples aspirations and trajectories”
      - The middle class is described by Schielke as an elusive category, includes various socioeconomic and symbolic positions: old artisan and merchant families, civil servants in public sector, military, oil industry, security, etc
    - - “The more progress the more boredom” “The greater one’s expectations, the deeper the sense of stagnation”
    - - Western Intervention:
        
        Western ideals of economic progress and development indirectly enforced on rural Egyptians via television
      - Race
        
        British expats in Egypt experienced better economic conditions than Egyptian nationals
  - - - Western Intervention
        
        FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), the global governing body for association football which was founded in France and is currently headquartered in Switzerland, placed pressure on Qatar to build the stadium quickly enough to host the 2022 World Cup
      - Race
        
        Those migrant workers who are classed as "unskilled" and are afforded low status tend to come from the Global South (South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa). Therefore the notion of "unskilled" labor becomes racialized since it often exclusively associated with people from countries in the Global South.
  - - - Many Egyptians refer to themselves as middle class; “middle class” life is characterized by comfort and respectability, but it is an aspiration that is rarely attained
    - - Location of system of production determines class consciousness and perspective of people who have same objective relationship to means of production
      - As capitalism develops, relations of production restructure. During such restructuring, political and ideological framework change, and classes are reshaped.
      - Workers' political consciousness is shaped by their employer's class situation
      - Corporatist ideology denies the reality of class conflict, rejects the independent role of the working class, and projects the government as a benign guardian of workers interests
      - Foreign capital and the requirement of colonial power creates the "WORKING CLASS." These workers organize themselves (e.g. trade unions), and collectively act against foreign capital, colonial state, and their managers
      - Classes are historical actors that are the effects of struggles which structured by the totality of economic, political, and cultural-ideological relations (Beinin and Lockman)
      - Class consciousness among Working Class Egyptians stemmed from a shared reality of disappointed aspirations and economic struggle as traders of labor who own zero percent of the means of production
    - - Western Intervention & Class:
        
        European political domination of Egypt after Khedive Ismail tangled with economic exploitation by foreign capital. This exploitation helped perpetuate the poverty of working class Egyptians, restricting them to low socioeconomic positions.
  - - - Benin and Lockman, the frustration that emerged with the entrenchment of neoliberal economics in Egyptian society which generated huge expectations but kept the means to realize such expectations restricted to a priveleged class
      - Anecdote of a village full of people that enthusiastically gather to watch football as a way of distracting themselves from the harsh realities and conditions they must live in ("there are people who watch football because they really love it, but I just don't want to think")
      - ("Here, there is no middle. There are only poor people, and those who are well off are thieves. The country is divided between those who are honest and don't know how to steal and those who are thieves and well off"
      - conceptualization of the middle class as a promise, a pressure, and a claim.
      - The concepts of normality and respectability are associated with specific markers: higher education, position as a civil servant or formal employee, reasonable income, own apartment or house, classy interior, marriage to a "respectable family", english proficiency, possession of many goods, and refined habitus expressed in one's dress, socialization, language, and religiosoity
      - "The aim to belong to an imagined middle of a society, a key component of which is the aspiration to a First World standard of living, has become shared by vastly more people than have the material and habitual means to achieve a middle class existence
      - Social mobility through marriage (typically for women in Egypt)
      - "Although the trajectories involved are strongly gendered, there is a shared sense of what it means to live a good life as a respectable member of society"
- - - - Class
        
        Although it seems like a purely race-based matter, one must keep in mind that the labor system is classed in that the higher class job opportunities are available only to Qatari nationals (or expats from countries positioned at the top of the global capitalist order like the United Kingdom) while the lower positions that are deemed "unskilled" are available to migrant workers from the Global South.
      - Western Intervention
        
        FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), the global governing body for association football which was founded in France and is currently headquartered in Switzerland, placed pressure on Qatar to build the stadium quickly enough to host the 2022 World Cup
        (Desperate Toll Paid In Blood and Sweat Of Migrant Workers)
  - - - Connections
        
        Class: Elite Lebanese outsourcing domestic/reproductuve labor to lower class Asian and African migrants
        
        (Gender): domestic labor in this context is only performed by women
  - - - Connections
        
        Gender:
        
        Tunisian women faced triple oppression:
        
        economic and social disadvantage
        
        patriarchal discrimination due to gender
        
        Dark skin
        
        Class:
        
        People of sub-Saharan African descent were placed at the bottom of the social hierarchy while those who embodied "Arabness" were placed at the top
        
        Western Intervention:
        
        Tunisia was colonized in 1881 and was given independence in 1956. Such colonization economically exploited the country, leaving it vulnerable and weak in the global order by time it was set free. Thus, the country itself is positioned in periphery of the global capitalist order, leaving it's people at a lower socioeconomic status by default relative to Western countries.
  - - - the law helps, but it doesn't remove racist mentalities: “there is the law on one hand and, on the other, there are traditions”
      - "The magnitude of the racialized violence that many individuals experience is so overwhelming that it would be ludicrous to file a case for every racializing act."
        (Parikh)
      - Lack of awareness of Law 50 (even among police)
      - Migration status
        
        “The migration status of an individual governs their level of access to the law.” (Parikh)
        
        Fear of deportation can hinder one's willingness to use law 50 against perpetrators of racial discrimination
        
        Migrants need to have their other vulnerabilities addressed in order for them to be able to use Law 50 effectively
      - The law does little to target structural racism, which is visible in the unequal access to opportunities in education and employment.
      - Law 50 can do nothing about racism in domestic settings
    - - Widespread denial of racism in Tunisia + restricted free speech about it under authoritarian regime of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali (1987–2011)
    - - Activists were labelled as separatist groups causing trouble (social stigmatization of promoting racial justice)
      - Common reference to the 1846 abolition of slavery in attempt to deny the existence of contemporary racism in Tunisia
  - - - analyze the construction and negotiation of the black-maghrebi and black-tunisian identities
    - - “I am Arab by accident… because I was born into Arab culture"... "To me, “Arab” represents the literary texts with which I grew up, and which I read when I was studying for my high school diploma in literature"
        (Arab identity tied to Arabic language)
    - - In France and in North Africa "Maghrebi” is politically and socially constructed as synonymous to the categories of Arab and Muslim and antonymous to the category of Black” (pg. 494)
        
        This contributes to resistance in recognizing African identity
        
        Generally, black Tunisians won’t say they are African, they will say they are just Tunisian
        (since African/anything that indicates sub saharah Africa is seen with a negative connotation due to the history of African enslaveability)
  - - - The division of Africa by Europeans (for example Hegel) has shaped colonial policies and academic perceptions of Africa
        
        German Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel divided Africa into 3 regions
        
        Northwest Africa
        
        Africa Proper (south and west Africa). Africa Proper “provides slaves for the transatlantic trade.”
        
        This division contributes to the colonial perception of Africa as the place of a “people with no history”
        
        European Africa
        
        German Philospher Immanuel Kant: developed formalized racial hierarchy that emphasized the importance of skin color as proof of superiority or inferiority.
        
        4 Categories
        
        the Negro race
        
        the Hun race (Mongol or Kalmuck)
        
        the White race
        (Arabs, Moors, Persian, and Turkish-Tatars were considered sub-categories of the white race)
        
        the Hindu or Hindustani race
  - - - The enslavement of six Sudanese women that preceded the slavery trial of Ali Pasha Sharif (The head of the Egyptian Legislative Assembly who escaped the trial) and the slave traders that sold him the slaves. The trial took place on September 4th, 1894
      - Trade of African slaves was abolished in Egypt in
        1877
      - “What my study challenges in Said’s work is the idea that Egyptians suffered in silence, the idea that many in Egypt did not themselves engage in a discourse of stereotypes and fantasies about the Sudan specifically and Africa in general”
        (Powell)
      - "For many of the British observers, the six slaves were victims, made vulnerable by their skin color. And the women knew themselves to have been purchased, and they considered themselves wrongly enslaved. If they were Muslims, then their religion removed them from the categories of the enslaveable, where polytheistic religious practices were nearly the equivalent of racial distinction."
      - "These nationalist writers insisted that purchasers of Sudanese slaves were actually conduits of a civilizing mission that taught uneducated and unkempt Sudanese girls the finer arts of domestic life and brought to them a sense of Islam not to be found in the Sudan itself."
    - - WESTERN INTERVENTION
        
        The enforcement of anti-slavery policy in both Egypt and Sudan is a direct result of British intervention (e.g. consider the anti-slavery rhetoric of British Army Officer Gordon Pasha in Khartoum referenced in 'River Spirit' (Leila Aboulela)
        
        The 1877 Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention resulted in the abolishment of slavery which was ultimately determined by Great Britain and against elite Egyptian interests.
      - CLASS
        
        Sudanese elites sell lower classed Sudanese people to slavery the slavery markets of Egyptian elite.
        The sellers/buyers and those sold into slavery are classed:
        The slave dealers (like Muhammad Shaghlub) are classed higher than the slaves and probably classed at the same level as the elite Sudanese people who sell them the slaves. The Egyptian elite are classed higher than the elite Sudanese sellers (given that Sudan in a broader sense is enslaved by Egypt) and higher than the Bedouin slave dealers from whom they purchase the slaves.)
        
        Only Egyptian elites had the financial capacity to access Sudanese slaves
  - - - Black nationals mistaken for black sub-saharan africans, called “وصف” and “عبد”
      - Racism in North Africa is deeply rooted in the memorization of slavery
      - Western Sahara Morocco, and Algeria = anti-racism movements repressed
      - Discrimination based on skin color or slave past
      - Ideology of slavery conflated to that of racial hierarchy
    - - Why is Blackness is associated with inferiority and servility while Arabism is associated with superiority?
        
        Ideas
        
        The history of colonization in North Africa serves as a false proof that Arabs are superior to indigenous Berbers and other North African populations.
        
        What defines who is enslaveable is a group’s inability to protect itself from threats in a particular point in time and space
        
        Paradox: Black North Africans actively participate in the reification of racial categories
        
        “Black North African populations are not silent objects upon which racial discourses are constructed. They actively elaborate on racial categories. As much as light-skin individuals belonging to majority groups stigmatize Blackness, North African activists of slave descent and other black activists tend to cultivate and reinforce race formation because their strategic choices to mobilize supporters and claim equity are often based on racial categories.” (Hahonou)
        
        "Intentional Collective Amnesia"
        
        "North African traders and consumers benefitted from Barbarian (Berber) slave trade. Slavery pirates from the Ottoman provinces of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli captured and enslaved 1 to 1.25 million Europeans who were sold on various North African slave markets between the sixteenth and the middle of the eighteenth century." The enslavement of Europeans continued up until the 1830's.
        
        How did the association between whiteness and enslaveability disappear?
        
        Maybe: military power gave Europeans the ability to protect themselves from threats AND to be a threat, allowing them to reshape the narrative of their historical enslaveability as they refocused global perception of enslaveability onto the Orient.
- - - - Foreign occupation by locals is seen as domination, not liberation. (Despite U.S. claims to "liberate" the people of Iraq from it's dictatorship
      - occupation from foreign countries never leads to stable and long-term institutions
      - Iraq was already fragmented along ethnic, religious, regional, and tribal lines. This already fragmented political landscape made U.S. occupation even more harmful and make stability even more vulnerable since there is no political choice that can please every side.
        This relates to the challenges that Great Britain faced when colonizing Palestine and trying to mediate between the Palestinians and the Jews in the rise of both Arab and Zionist nationalism. (Jonathan Newsinger)
      - The reliance on foreign control and occupation undermines the sustainability of the institutions that are designed to govern the nation. This leads to the crumbling of government when the occupying force leaves.
        
        Criticism:
        The occupying force should have never been there in the first place
      - Economic and institutional reforms made by the occupying force generally favor local elite that comply with foreign interests instead of the welfare of other natives.
  - - - Imperial Interests of British control over Palestine: dominate critical military trade routes + access oil
      - 1947 partition plan that divided Palestine into two separate states: one Jewish state and one Arab state. This was proposed by the UN after the British Mandate in Palestine collapsed
      - During the mandate, the British used military rule, emergency laws, settlement searches, and an imperial policing system that resembled the counterinsurgency tactics it used in Ireland. For example, the 1936–39 Arab Revolt was crushed using home demolitions, curfews, mass administrative detention, and collective punishment. The British tried using the same tactics to crush the insurgency of the United Resistance Movement which involved the combined efforts of the Jewish Assembly (who controlled the Haganah military force), the IZL, and LEHI. This movement began in 1945 and the British were unsuccessful in their efforts to crush it because they relied on old tactics that they leveraged in other colonies and they had weak military intelligence.
    - - British framing of resistance as tribal and uncivilized
    - - The British attempted to colonize the province of Ulster in the late-16th century. This failed attempt led to a 9 year war
        In 1603 Ireland was subjected to loyalty to the English crown and an anglicized legal system (English also became the official language) through the Treaty of Mellifont.
        The British planned to colonize Ulster again in 1608 under the notion that the people of Ulster were uncivilized and their land was underpopulated.
        The British and Scots plotted to divide the province of Ulster (Norther Ireland) into six counties under British control: Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone, with two additional territories under Presbyterian Scottish control: Antrim and Down. These lands were to be confiscated from the native Irish. Garrisons (British troops) were placed all throughout Ulster in case of another Irish revolt. Natives were banned from working and living on the lands and were relocated. The objective was to completely colonize Ulster with protestant Brits and a select handful of Irish elite that would be loyal to the British crown.
  - - - The underlying western assumption is that women's development should play out in the same way that it played out in the West in which women increasingly took on traditionally male-dominated jobs. In reality, many women in the Middle East who graduate with their bachelors desire to marry, have children, and take care of household related matters instead of working (and of course there are women who see work as freedom from social constraints and expectations as well). For example, of the mom who said it is great to be home after retiring (conversation between Anwar and Lena; Adely)
      - Reading Connections: Troubling the Political: Women in the Jordanian Day-Waged Labor Movement (Sara Ababneh)
        
        Abebneh: the DWLM adapted itself to the needs and social obligations of women so that they could actually be involved in the movement without neglecting the responsibilities they deemed most important. This is significant because it was a movement that achieved practical social change through a framework that designed for an Eastern context (as opposed to Western movements which comprise restrictive bureaucracy that only make full women's participation possible in a Western context).
        
        Class Connections
        
        This movement was aimed at enhancing the conditions of day-waged worker Jordanian women who had low socioeconomic positions (many elite Jordanian women didn't participate in solidarity because their economic needs were already met).
      - "It seems clear that the economic mandates of development and Western-dominated financial institutions are culpable for devaluing noneconomic contributions and economic
        contributions that do not fit into preferred categories of wage-earning labor." (Adely)
      - "Families and "male culture" are
        essentialized as the traditional realms of backwardness and patriarchal oppression that
        need to be combated through modern education."
        This was in response to western framing of women as "achieving despite their obstructing family structures" that undermined the reality that many women act on their own accord and desire to live traditional lifestyles that the West deems "backwards" and a trap of patriarchy (this is consistent with typical Orientalist thought)
  - - - Rejection of Western saving narratives by framing struggles around imperialism, occupation, and community survival instead of patriarchy
      - The embracement of essential identities for women as mothers and nurturers as strategic resistance against politically deceitful Western framing of women as "oppressed" and "needing of liberation from abusive and violent men"
      - Instead of conforming to Western feminist ideals, Afghan women mobilized gendered roles as a source of
        strength for themselves, their families, and their communities by embracing caregiving, education,
        and community survival through the organization of informal schools, mutual-aid networks, etc.
        (This strategic instrumentalization of femininity as a means of occupation resistance is observable in the Algerian War for Independence in which women weaponized their femininities and leveraged French essentialized assumptions of Arab femininities in a collective effort against French colonization.)
  - - - Race
        
        'River Spirit' alludes to the racial discrimination that Sudanese people faced in Egypt due to their dark skin and histories of enslaveability.
        
        Through the fictional narration of a Sudanese merchant named Yaseen to traveled to Cairo to study at al-Azhar University, we can observe that it was common for negative things to be said of Sudanese people, especially when it came to intermarriage between Egyptians and Sudanese. It was common to essentialize Sudanese people as simpleminded, and uncivilized. These underlying social attitudes brought much tension between Yaseen and his Egyptian wife
        
        Akunay's experience of racial and class attitudes in Al-Ubayyid: "Sometimes Buthaima sneered at her, often kind, but she and her sisters were always superior because Akuany was an orphan, because they were dark-brown and she was dark-black, because they were circumcised and she was not.”
      - Class
        
        Yaseen's decision to travel to Egypt to study at al-Azhar University was completely based on financial pressure and a desire for social mobility and economic stability.
        
        Akunay came from a small village therefore compared to Yaseen's family in Al-Ubayyid, she was ranked at a lower social class. Yaseen's family in Al-Ubayyid were likely ranked at a lower class than his family in Khartoum, the capital. All people in Sudan (from villages and major cities alike) are ranked lower that people from all social strata of Egyptian society. People from all strata of Egyptian society were ranked lower than all the British.
        
        Class Indicators: circumsision, place of origin, manner of speech, religiosity (which takes different forms based on gender), skin color, nationality, family ties
  - - - This western framing of the local male population of an occupied territory (in this case Iraq) is used to legitimize the occupier's control and detachment from international human rights regulations.
        
        Connections
        
        Race + Class:
        
        U.S. soldiers from disadvantaged and marginalized backgrounds (e.g. African American and Latino communities) benefitted from the inversion of hierarchy in which local Iraqi men were subjected to their force and control
  - - - "The officials of the French administration in Algeria, committed to destroying the people's
        originality, and under instructions to bring about the
        disintegration, at whatever cost, of forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality directly or indirectly, were to concentrate their efforts on the wearing of the veil, which was looked upon at this juncture as a symbol of the status of the Algerian woman."
        
        Connections
        
        Gender:
        Here we see an intersection between a gendered practice (wearing a veil) and colonial repression of culture and any marker that can form a collective national conscience.