'The Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo'
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Main Building
- Room
- R201
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
Join the Walter Rodney Collective for an in-depth conversation with Julia Elyachar about her book, On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (2025).
On the Semicivilized by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilised in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on 30 years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorises a global condition of the 'semicivilized' marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilised.
Originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire, whose perceived 'civilisational differences' rendered it incompatible with a Western-dominated global order, semicivilized came to denote lands where unitary territorial sovereignty was stymied at the end of WWI. Elyachar’s theorising offers a new analytic vocabulary for thinking beyond territoriality, postcolonialism, and the 'civilised'/'primitive' divide.
Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.
About the series
The Histories of Capitalism and Race seminar series by the SOAS Walter Rodney Collective is back in semester 2 with an exciting line-up of speakers! Our theme for this semester is Environment and Infrastructure II, and we invite you to join us for book discussions with Sharad Chari, Julia Elyachar, Mattin Biglari, and Nasser Abourahme.
Organisers
The Walter Rodney Collective is a new research cluster in the School of History, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS, University of London. We are named after the influential pan-African, Marxist scholar-activist, Walter Rodney, who studied for a PhD at SOAS between 1963 and 1966.
About the Speaker
Julia Elyachar is an anthropologist, political economist, and award-winning author. She was trained in anthropology, economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. She is an associate professor of anthropology at Princeton University, and associate professor at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She is a Faculty Researcher with the Dignity and Debt network and serves on the Executive Boards of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies.
Event poster
