Resisting blackness, embracing rightness: How Muslim Arab Sudanese women negotiate their identity in the diaspora

Abstract

This article considers how a Muslim cultural discourse of ‘propriety’ has influenced Muslim Arab Sudanese ethnic identity in two locations and time periods in an expanding diaspora. Focusing in particular on women and their embodied practices of whitening and propriety in Egypt in the nineties and the United Kingdom a decade later, I argue that the recent turn towards Muslim expressions of Sudaneseness is a form of resistance to racial labelling. While Sudanese have rejected being labelled ‘black’ in Egypt and in the UK, their renegotiation of a Muslim religious identity in the diaspora nevertheless confirms a racialized Sudanese ethnicity. This study contributes to the rethinking of ethnicity in a transnational space where ethnic nationalism and globalized Islamic discourse intersect with local histories and hierarchies of race and gender.

Keywords:

• Race
• Britain
• Egypt
• Sudanese diaspora
• women
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants in the workshop ‘Muslim Women’ in Europe: Bodily Performances, Multiple Belongings and the Public Sphere, and especially the organizers, Annalies Moors and Ruba Salih, for their contributions to my thinking on this topic. Amira Abderahman, Melanie Adrian, Nadje al-Ali, Katherine Donahue, Usama Hasan, Steve Howard, Reina Lewis, Peter Morey, Amina Yaqin, and Andrew Yip provided helpful comments along the way. The input of two anonymous reviewers helped me to sharpen the piece significantly. Finally, I am very grateful to Elizabeth Bishop for her intellectual insights, and to Nancy Doherty for her superb editorial support.

Notes

1. Fieldwork with Sudanese families based in London is ongoing.

2. The National Islamic Front changed its name in 1998.

3. See, for example, the Sudanese author Tayib Salih's novel Season of Migration to the North.

4. Hey Chocolate, Hey Caramel!

5. The 1905 Aliens Act is widely seen to have heralded an era of anti-Semitic treatment of Jews and other ‘aliens’, while racist treatment of the Windrush migrants from the Caribbean pointed up an implicit inequality between black and white members of the Commonwealth.

6. Kosovan Albanians arriving in the UK in 1999 were warmly welcomed.

7. FGC is also known as female genital mutilation (FGM). Although I recognize the gendered relations of power that perpetuate damaging genital surgeries for Sudanese (and other) girls and women, I prefer the term ‘cutting’.

8. This tribal marking, applied to women and men, is often referred to as mi'a hit'aashir, ‘one hundred and eleven’, and describes three parallel vertical lines on each cheek, although some northern Sudanese tribes used different symbols.

9. Arabic for ‘yellow’ and the preferred skin colour for women.

10. Spelling as in original; posted by ‘SYA’, 5 January 2006, http://www.sudaneseonline.com.

11. Today, Arab identity is largely attributed to those who speak Arabic and feel themselves to be Arab, though Arabs recognize (and find kinship links with) tribal lineages arising from the Arabian peninsula. An ‘Arab’ ethnicity in Sudan and Egypt arises from a complex interaction of political project (i.e. the unifying ‘Arab’ Nation) a wish to distance themselves from undesirable social groups, and practices designed to highlight their membership of desirable groups.

12. BME (Black Minority Ethnic) is a widely-used British policy term that indicates commitment to ‘diversity and equality’ in social services.