Research
“Economy of Blood: The Persecuted Church and the Racialization of American Copts”
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Since the 1990s, attacks on Egyptian Copts have been made legible to American (particularly evangelical) audiences through the moral imaginary of the “Persecuted Church,” which argues that Christians around the globe are persecuted more than any other time in history. Images of bloodied Egyptian Coptic bodies have circulated among Western Christian religio-political networks in an “economy of blood,” an imperial economy of Christian kinship that performs the double movement of glory and racialization. This double movement has placed American Copts in a bind, whereby indigenous Coptic collective memory of blood and persecution has intersected with the political, theological, and affective kinship formations of this economy of blood. This article analyzes how the contemporary remapping of Eastern Christian traditions, like that of the Copts, produces effects on a geopolitical scale, and examines how this reconfiguration unfolds whiteness and Western Christianity.
“Postcolonial Solidarities: Oriental Orthodox Kinship in an Age of Migration”
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This article attends to contemporary Oriental Orthodox solidarity as postcolonial condition and to the possibilities of communal belonging along different planes of theo-political intelligibility. Oriental Orthodox debates around, what I call, the “social hierarchy of theological truth” are mired in colonial histories of civilizational order and the production of collective experience of Byzantine and Islamic subjugation. The project of making Oriental Orthodox experience visible in the contemporary moment as perennial persecution and perpetual subjugation precludes analysis of the workings of this neo-imperial system that utilizes certain narratives of Oriental Orthodox while precluding the collective’s historicity and its enmeshment in other radical frameworks of solidarity. I argue that contemporary Oriental Orthodox experience must be historicized as a means to understand the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which such an identity is ascribed, debated, or embraced. By historicizing the identity such a process has produced, I ethnographically trace how such processes are unmarked in the everyday interactions of Oriental Orthodox in the United States—in the ways history, theology, and collective memory are debated and politicized in the present.
“Conquest of Paradise: Secular Binds and Coptic Political Mobilization”
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This article explores conflicts within the Coptic community in Egypt related to problems of definition and representation. Coptic groups that emerged from Egypt’s 2011 revolution brought these tensions to the fore. Groups such as the prominent Maspero Youth Union (MYU) [Itihad Shabab Maspero] were formed to contest the hegemony of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egyptian national politics. The MYU and others have attempted to reconstruct social boundaries drawn by the Church and the state, promoting political secularism as a solution to inter-communal strife and remedy to intra-communal conflict over the position of the Coptic Orthodox Church as the sole representative of the community. At the same time, the group has emphasized their Coptic identity through religious symbols and imagery at protest events, as depicted at the Maspero memorial march in 2012. While the MYU officially endorsed secular governance as a means to overcome sectarianism, its actions also made visible internal conflicts over the representation of Coptic identity in contemporary Egyptian society. Although the promise of secularism and equal citizenship is not specific to the Coptic or Egyptian context, this article focuses on its paradoxical effects within the Coptic community and its relationship to the state.