Lecture. "The March of Humanitarianism: 'Clooneyal' Visibilities and the Fragmentation of the Sudan."

PICS Human Rights Fellow Lecture

Professor Fadlalla will use George Clooney’s activism for Sudan to show how the intersection of human rights and humanitarian politics construct a grand narrative of rescue and salvation that trumps Sudanese activists’ questions of unity, sovereignty, and inclusive citizenship. She argues that, in the case of Africa in general and Sudan in particular, the grand visibilities constructed through such politics produce ‘subaltern visibilities’ and relegate African subjects and their political affairs to the affective realm of humanitarian politics that undermine local histories and socio-economic and political struggles.

Amal Hassan Fadlalla (associate professor of anthropology, women's studies, and Afroamerican and African studies) has been named a CICS Human Rights Fellow for 2012-2013. She is the author of Embodying Honor: Fertility, Foreignness, and Regeneration in Eastern Sudan (Madison: the University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). Her recent publications appear in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, volume 37, No. 1, 2011; Urban Anthropology, volume 38 (1), 2009; and in the School for Advanced Research edited volume New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America 2008. She is also the coeditor (with Howard Stein) of Gendered Insecurities, Health and Development in Africa (Routledge 2012). Her interview on Sudan’s Secession and the Future Ahead, was published in the Fall 2011 issue of the II Journal (Volume 1, No. 1).

Professor Fadlalla will develop and teach a course in Winter 2013 on “Human Rights and Humanitarianism: The Fight for Justice and Development in Africa.” As part of the CICS Human Rights Fellowship she will also deliver a public lecture on “Fighting with Human Rights: Transnational Activism, Humanitarianism, and Development in Africa,” and will publish an article in the II Journal on Feminizing Africa: Humanitarianism, Celebrities, and Development in Africa.