Holding the Map Together: Citizenship and the Geographies of Black Belonging between the two Sudans

This talk examines why South Sudan’s 2011 referendum on self-determination, a process intended to resolve Sudan’s racial conflict, ultimately intensified racialization for South Sudanese who remained in Sudan’s capital. The talk argues that independence functioned less as a resolution of racial injustice than as a reorganization of it, inscribing racial geography into citizenship law. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork, I show how the referendum required administrators to define “the people of the South” by reanimating colonial cartographies of Sudan’s three southern provinces as racialized containers of belonging. These geographic criteria transformed long-standing social differences into rigid legal distinctions, rendering South Sudanese in Khartoum foreign in the city where many were born and raised. Through attention to naming practices, navigating the cost of living, and caring for dependents, I trace how profound geopolitical transformation has been experienced and contested in everyday life. Attending to lives that traverse both of the Sudans, the talk reflects on how such moments also cultivate imaginaries of reunification as dreams of Black world-making after partition.

Speaker Zachary Mondesire, Boston University