Join the Center for the Middle East and North Africa for a presentation by Gukha Amin.  Her talk follows the lives of social outcasts and marginalized Black people who lived and moved across Southern Arabia in the first half of the twentieth century using deportation records, petitions, and criminal cases. These include street performers, sex workers, sanitation laborers, and others who colonial officials labeled as “undesirables.” Moving across Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Southern Arabia, these subaltern actors reveal the porous contours of an “Oceanic Yemen,” a global space that reincorporates Southern Arabia into its historic oceanic networks and makes legible Yemen’s deep links to the Horn of Africa. The talk centers these individuals’ labor, mobility, and gendered experience to unpack the complex subject and racial formations unfolding in twentieth-century Southern Arabia and the broader region. It asks who were the men and women that made up the social margins of this global space? How does their labor and gendered experience challenge our understanding of gender and sexuality? And what do these internal outsiders teach us about how categories of race, Blackness, and caste overlapped and operated in the twentieth-century Middle East and beyond?

Gukha Amin is a historian of modern Yemen and a current UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. She is interested in questions of race and racialization in the Middle East and North Africa. Her book project, The Nesting Margins: Identity and Belonging in Oceanic Yemen is a social history of racial and social minorities living and moving across late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Southern Arabia. Gukha is the founder and curator of The Global Yemen Project, an ongoing digital humanities project that narrates the global histories of an “Oceanic Yemen” through the lives of those on the margins of Yemeni society.

Presented by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. Lunch will be served during the talk.