Making racism: Racial Relationships, Identity, and the State in Colonial Sudan, 1898-1956

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Racism and racial relations are a core issue in Sudan's long history of conflict. Sudan has the sad record of being the country with the longest civil war in Africa (1955-1972 and 1983-2005), and racism is seen as one of the major causes of conflict betwe en Northern and Southern Sudan. Also within Northern Sudan, racial relations feed a constant low-intensity social strife. Thus racism is seen as opposing the 'Arabs' of the North from the 'Africans' of the South. This is one of the reasons given for the p lanned separation of the country, and in 2011 the Sudanese will be called to decide whether the North and the South will be divided or not. The proposed post-doctoral project shall investigate the construction of racial relations in the colonial Northern Sudan. This has special significance for broadening our understanding of what triggered the many conflicts of the country. In this project I will analyze the emergence of racist ideology and relations during the colonial time by researching into three d omains: the colonial state's racist attitudes and practices, the process of construction of 'Arabness', and the parallel construction of 'Blackness'. From the theoretical point of view, the project will make use of a branch of social theory called theor y of racial formations. Accordingly, I consider racism as a political construct, a set of relations, and as a historically determined and dynamic process. Racism informs behaviours and beliefs of individuals, but individuals still retain the power of infl uencing it in several ways. I aim to show that racist relations in colonial Sudan were ridden in ambiguities, changed over time, and never went unchallenged. Methodologically, the project will rely on British archival sources, on Arabic literary sources, and on interviews collected during fieldwork. It will be facilitated by my previous research and by a well-established network of informants, but will embrace new avenues both theoretically and empirically.