Since the early 20th century, a community of African pilgrims and immigrants from Chad, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan called Jerusalem’s old city their home. This community came to be known as the African community of Jerusalem (al-Jaliya al-Afriqiya), and is part of the Palestinian community of the old city, additionally some of its members became refugees in Amman- Jordan in the aftermath of the 1967 war. In this talk I attempt to elaborate on the question of race and racialization. Building on Stuart Hall’s conception of race as a sliding signifier, and of racialization as a process that produces race differently in the different locations of space, time and contexts. I ask the questions: How is the African community of Jerusalem differently racialized in the context of Jerusalem and in the diaspora in Amman? What do these processes reflect on their respective contexts? These questions are part of a larger PhD dissertation project, preliminarily titled “Jerusalem and its Diasporas: Becomings of The African Community of Jerusalem”. Through locating the community on both sides of the river Jordan; the multiplicity of the research sites reveals and locates the different intersections of community belonging, racialization, nationalism, and histories of migration as well as experiences of refuge/diasporization, which shape the community on either side of the border, and speaks to the becomings of the African community of Jerusalem.
Noura Salah Aldeen is a doctoral student of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna, and an ÖAW Doc fellow at the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Chair: Birgit Englert
Tuesday, 21st November 2023, 5:15 pm
Department of African Studies - Seminar room 1
University Campus, court 5.1., Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna
afrika@univie.ac.at, afrika.univie.ac.at
