Borderlines / /خُطُوط صَدْع

03/04/2024

The second instalment of Zeyad El Nabolsy's interview with Carmen De Schryver is out! Carmen De Schryver and Zeyad El Nabolsy discuss how Hountondji's philosophy can shed light on contemporary debates about Enlightenment, Universality, and Postcolonialism.

Zeyad el Nabolsy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University and Africa editor at Borderlines , interviewed Carmen De Schryver, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College, on her work on Paulin J. Hountondji and how to think about the idea of influence in Afric

28/09/2023

In case you missed this —Olga Verlato discusses 16th century networks of manuscript and printing technologies and cultures across Italy and the Middle East and North Africa, and their modern afterlives in Egypt during the French occupation

The journey of the Medici fonts reveals the multiscalar, transregional, long-durationalprocesses that partook in the early history of Arabic printing, connecting North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean to Southern Europe over the course of more than two centuries.

03/07/2023

In conversation with the recent publication The Annotated Arabian Nights (Seale & Horta, 2021), Faisal Al-Asaad reflects on the Nights' potential to contribute to a burgeoning understanding of commercial or ‘precocious’ capitalism in the medieval Islamic and Indian Ocean world systems.

In conversation with the recent publication of The Annotated Arabian Nights (Seale & Horta, 2021), I ask: can the  Nights  be harnessed to a materialist history of the Islamic Mediterranean and Indian Ocean? Can they be seen as a window into how people struggled

25/01/2023

The third conversation of History Sounds is out! Listen to Andrew Simon as he tells Olga Verlato about the history of cassettes in Egypt... and enjoy some of the songs that filled them!

In the third conversation of History Sounds, Andrew Simon tells Olga Verlato about cassette culture, consumption, taste, and music in Egypt from the 1970s through the 1990s and beyond.

07/01/2023

Throwback to the second conversation of History Sounds 🎧

In our second conversation, we learn about the history of radio broadcasting, live performances, and resistance in Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s with Mejgan Massoumi. Coming up: cassettes and mass culture in Egypt with Andrew Simon

02/01/2023

While we wait for episode three of History Sounds, listen back to the first conversation of the series 🎶

In the first conversation of the Borderlines series History Sounds, Christopher Silver speaks about the history of the recording industry in North Africa from the colonial period through decolonization.

02/11/2022

Listen now | The second conversation of History Sounds is out! Mejgan Massoumi talks about radio broadcasting, live performances, and resistance in 1960s and 1970s Afghanistan

In our second conversation, we learn about the history of radio broadcasting, live performances, and resistance in Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s with Mejgan Massoumi. Coming up: cassettes and mass culture in Egypt with Andrew Simon

27/08/2022

Debarshi Das explores and contextualizes the journalist Abhishek Saha's book on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the state of Assam in northeast India. Following his commentary, we showcase an excerpt from the sixteenth chapter of No Land’s People, which focuses on su***de and the thanatopolitics of the NRC regime.

Running through the book, at a level just below the surface, a constant conversation is at play: a conversation between the dispassionate reporting of a journalist, and his social location. Saha is the grandson of migrants from erstwhile East Bengal and East Pakistan whose grandmother did not make i

11/07/2022

In the first conversation of the Borderlines series History Sounds, Christopher Silver speaks about the history of the recording industry in North Africa from the colonial period through decolonization.

07/07/2022

Listen here! The first conversation of History Sounds is out! Professor Christopher Silver tells Olga Verlato about the history of the recording industry in 20th century North Africa and his new book "Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa."

In the first conversation of the Borderlines series History Sounds, Christopher Silver speaks about the history of the recording industry in North Africa from the colonial period through decolonization.

03/06/2022

We are happy to share Saanika Patnaik's essay titled "Incarcerated Journeys of Rebellion, Interaction, and Belonging—A Glimpse at South Asian Penal Histories in Melaka." This essay centrally locates Melaka within the Indian Ocean world by studying the ties it shared with South Asia in terms of convict transportation.

https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2022/5/24/ncarcerated-journeys-of-rebellion-interaction-and-belonginga-glimpse-at-south-asian-penal-histories-in-melaka

26/05/2022

Bhargabi Das writes a commentary on Andrea Ballestero’s book which explores the dynamic and ambiguous nature of water through her ethnographic fieldwork in Costa Rica and Brazil. Following the commentary, we showcase an excerpt from the first chapter, Formula, of Ballestero’s A Future History of Water, as an invitation to delve into the book.

https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2022/5/9/ballestero-commentary

05/05/2022

Our conversation with professors Hanan Hammad and Deborah Starr on Egyptian cinema, ideology, and society in the 20th century is finally out!
Graphic design and colorisation by Hamada Elrasam

Olga Verlato, PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and Middle East editor at Borderlines, sat down with Professor Deborah Starr, author of Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Modern Egyptian Cinema (September 2020), and Professor Hanan Hammad, author of

28/04/2022

A preview of our conversation on Togo Mizrahi, Layla Murad, and the complexities of Egyptian cinema and nationalism with Professor Deborah Starr and Professor Hanan Hammad is available! Listen now:

Listen to the trailer now! In our upcoming Conversation, Deborah Starr and Hanan Hammad discuss the history of Egyptian cinema and the film industry, and evolving communal relations throughout the 20th century.

01/03/2022

"Since the Taliban came to power, many are claiming that this is an example of how Western intervention ends up putting in power more hard-line elements that live up to the legacy of anti-U.S. imperialism. Implicitly, this means that any enlightened U.S.-backed leader in Afghanistan becomes a necessary evil. But in your book, you offer a third option; a different historical trajectory and historical contingency during the era of decolonization...The rise and demise of leaders such as Amanullah paved the way for this binary construction in the media of Afghanistan as unable to build its own institutions on the one hand, and on the other hand to the rise of hardline local rulers. That is simply not true." Read more in our interview with Faiz Ahmed out now: https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2022/2/20/interview-with-professor-faiz-ahmed

There is much that could be said about authoritarian leaders or governments actually benefiting from the international community’s debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of the broader systematic destruction and devastation unleashed by outside military powers in both of those countries....

19/02/2022

Pooja Satyogi and Tarangini Sriraman bring together Yael Berda (who works on Israel/Palestine) and Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh (who works on Kashmir) to converse around the theme of archiving surveillance.

What resonated across both Yael and Shrimoyee’s work was an engagement with fluid bureaucracies and a “permanent emergency” that manifested itself through disparate regimes of files and decrees, rule-bound and illegible systems and jurisdictions of law through which Kashmiri and Palestinian su...

07/11/2021

Read this conversation, conducted via written exchange, Borderlines member Tara Giangrande speaks with Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan about his recent book, The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi (2020). Their conversation focuses on the development of Dattatreyan’s theoretical framework, reciprocity in ethnographic research, and questions of race and caste.

https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2021/10/8/thinking-the-globally-familiar-in-hip-hop-and-beyond-ethiraj-gabriel-dattatreyan

“Eventually, the familiar became a way for me to approach what I instinctively felt was the inseparability of affect, infrastructure, mediation, and value and to recognize these different geographic scales were linked through circulating signs.”

12/10/2021

“For those unfamiliar with the complex and fluid markers that constitute the international border between India and Bangladesh in the Northeast India, looking closely at maps is usually the first recourse. Yet, as Malini Sur argues in her riveting anthropological study of the borderlands of Northeast India, the limits of the cartographic gaze and the academic blind spots it engenders is what prompts her study of this region. What then is the remit of this study, its specific intervention in the terrain of ‘borderland scholarship’?”

Check out Madhumita Mazumdar’s reflections on Malini Sur’s book Jungle Passport.

(with editorial inputs from Antara Chakrabarti and Purbasha Das).

https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2021/10/6/reflections-on-malini-surs-jungle-passports-2021

“Sur draws us into the terrifying world of the new border but tempers and humanises her clinical description of the physical infrastructure of fence and tower with a range of ethnographic vignettes that tell a story of transborder kinships, conviviality and unforeseen friendships.”

09/09/2021

We are pleased to share Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman's commentary on Dolly Kikon's Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India. We run this commentary along with a short excerpt from Living with Oil and Coal.

This is the second installment from our new series where we will publish a commentary on a book alongside an excerpt from the text. Stay tuned for more!

https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2021/8/19/making-time-for-gooseberries-haats-memory-belonging-conflict

“A group of young girls, hypnotized by brilliant hair ribbons and bells in a stall, ignored the stray dogs that sniffed their feet and licked their hands. It was the clothes stalls that attracted the largest numbers of buyers. ‘There are no clothing stores in the Rajabari area,’ one resident s...

16/08/2021

"For Arabic-language theory to truly become a resource in Western scholarship rather than an object for analysis, however, we need more than a new hermeneutic. We need this theory to be made available in Western languages. And we need it in volumes, not merely anthologies with a few pages"

Read the Latest piece on Borderlines: Simon Conrad in conversation with Angela Giordani and Hicham Safieddine on Arab Marxism and Nationalism Liberation, and the process of translating selected writings of Mahdi Amel.

For Arabic-language theory to truly become a resource in Western scholarship rather than an object for analysis, however, we need more than a new hermeneutic. We need this theory to be made available in Western languages. And we need it in volumes, not merely anthologies with a few pages-long excerp