Anna Simone Reumert

ANNA REUMERT, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, received a grant in April 2019 to aid research on “The Etiquette of Migration: Sudanese Labor Practices and Genealogies of Servitude in Lebanon,” supervised by Dr. Nadia Abu El-Haj. Retitled “Following Labor, Future Returns: Sudanese Migrants Between Lebanon’s Crises and Revolution,” this dissertation was based on multi-sited fieldwork in Lebanon and Sudan and follows migrant workers who became caught between two revolutions in 2019-20, examining the relationship between labor, crisis and political subjectivity. Mapping the transregional economies of labor and conflict that have brought generations of Sudanese men to work as servants in Lebanon, the dissertation presents a historical anthropological study of labor, class and race. Linking this history to the contemporary moment of transregional political upheaval, the dissertation is also an ethnography of two revolutions told from the perspective of those who were migrants in one and expat-citizens in the other. The dissertation examines this from four ethnographic perspectives: First, through oral histories with three generations of Sudanese male migrants who witnessed war, revolution and economic crises in Lebanon and in the region, the grantee argues that their stories upset hierarchies of belonging between citizens and migrants. Secondly, through fieldwork in migrant community spaces, political clubs and sit-ins, this work examines how Sudanese migrants in Beirut organize politically and endure material precarity by creating social economies of co-survival. Thirdly, the grantee examines the intersection of gender and racial violence by following Sudanese and Ethiopian migrant families who are subjected to Lebanon’s biopolitical disciplining of migrant reproductivity. Fourth, following migrants back to post-revolution Sudan amid Lebanon’s crisis, it explores how the migrants’ return to rural pastoral communities in western Sudan resurfaced unpaid debts in their relationship to land and kin.