Between Two Africas: “Nubia in the Ethnographic Imagination”

This paper explores the region and anthropologized people, of Nubia, examining how they are produced as (inhabiting) a borderland between two Africas- North Africa and Africa “proper.” By studying three museological movements in which the ethnographic appears and vanishes, together with two literary test animated by ethnographic concerns with representing Nubian people, Alirio Karina explores how the disavowal of the ethnographic (in all of its racial and cultural senses in Sudan and Egypt is an attempt to narrate of capitalist modernity in terms of ancient lineages, and against any sense of relation to the rest African continent, Karina argues that, in resurfacing the ethnographic, we may find a resistant frame through which to think Africanity north of the Sahara.

Alirio Karina is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness Department, with designated emphasis in the Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Alirio’s dissertation examines ethnographic photographs, objects and text representing British Africa, exploring how these materials produce ideas of race, culture and continent that have shaped and may yet transform African political possibility.

Friday Forum for Graduate Research is supported by the Graduate Student Association, the Humanities Institute, and the following departments HAVC, Literature, History of Consciousness, Psychology, and Education.