Abstract
Those who have followed Sudan’s conflicts over the years would be hard-pressed to read yet another analysis of Sudan’s infamous “identity crisis.” Refreshingly, Fadlalla does not come at the identity problem through its “roots”—be they political, historical, environmental, as has been the preoccupation of so much previous scholarship but at its performative encounters, the highly mediatized stories of ethnic and gender violence that have carved a groove in our minds through the humanitarian and human rights activism of the last three decades. Sudan’s conflicts are not reducible to an Arab versus African ethnic and racial problem, but are linked with interests and events taking place at a global scale. Such dynamics work to inscribe the dichotomies of Arab/African, Muslim/Judeo-Christian, North/South in Sudan as givens. While these polarizations may have been designed in the colonial and postcolonial era, they have been forcefully implemented as a nation-building strategy in the post-Cold War era, linked with Sudan’s pan-Islamist vision in opposition to pan-humanitarianism, as a proxy for “the West.” And, leading up to the secession of South Sudan in 2011—the time period of the author’s fieldwork—they have been instrumental to transnational discourses by rights activists in opposing Sudan’s Arab-Islamic government, in part justifying this separation, but also the neoliberal grip that humanitarianism sustains over its subjects. These constructs, she argues, may have little in common with realities and aspirations for the host of Sudanese living in Sudan or the diaspora, who must therefore rearticulate them to their own interests.