On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo
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Register: https://bit.ly/OnTheSemicivilizedBookTalk
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Introduced and moderated by
Bill Maurer, Anthropology, UCI and IMTFI Director
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About the talk:
On the Semicivilized by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign
futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire.
Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine
and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality
in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized”
marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence
exercised by those who call themselves civilized.
Originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire, whose perceived “civilizational differences” rendered it incompatible with a Western-dominated global order, semicivilized came to denote lands where unitary territorial sovereignty was stymied at the end of WWI. Elyachar’s theorizing offers a new analytic vocabulary for thinking beyond territoriality, postcolonialism, and the “civilized"/"primitive” divide.
Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.
About the speaker:
Julia Elyachar is an anthropologist, political economist, and award-winning author.
She was trained in anthropology, economics, history of political and economic thought,
political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. She
is an associate professor of anthropology at Princeton University, and associate professor
at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She is a Faculty
Researcher with the Dignity and Debt network and serves on the Executive Boards of
the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Center for
Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.
On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo is available at the Duke University Press website. SPECIAL OFFER: Use coupon code E25ELYCH to save 30% when you order from dukeupress.edu.
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