"The khalla is running away from us”: Gulf Capital, Deficient Deserts and Property-Making in Central Sudan

The CMES Reframing Conflict: Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan and Syria in Context series presents

Nisrin Elamin
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto

Discussant: Zachary Mondesire, Assistant Professor, International Relations, Boston University Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies

In the agricultural Gezira region of central Sudan, the term khalla means open land or expanse and refers to communal land that is partly used for grazing animals or rain-fed farming; what is often referred to as ‘the commons.’ Beginning with the provocation that the khalla is “running away from us” due to large-scale land investments and agribusiness practices, this talk takes up the khalla as method (Khayyat 2022), repository and medium through which to trace and analyse how past and emergent forms of capital accumulation and empire-making, structure everyday life at the edge of the Gezira scheme. It draws on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1988) insight that landscapes testify to the layering of successive forms of colonial intrusion in a way that unites time. In telling the history of the region through the khalla, this talk lays out some of the ways people have negotiated and contested these intrusions, constructing an archive in the process that testifies not only to waves of dispossession and destruction, but also to processes of recovery and regeneration.

Nisrin Elamin is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled: "Stratified Enclosures: Land, Capital and Empire-making in central Sudan" which focuses on Saudi and Emirati investments in land and community resistance to land dispossession in the agricultural Gezira region. In addition to scholarly articles, Nisrin has published and co-written several op-eds for Al Jazeera, the "Washington Post", Okay Africa, Hammer and Hope and the "Egypt Independent". Before pursuing her Ph.D., Nisrin spent over a decade working as an educator, organizer and researcher in the US and Tanzania. She is also the co-founder of the Sudan Solidarity Collective which formed in the aftermath of the current war to support local emergency response rooms (ERRs) and other mutual aid networks leading relief efforts in the face of a largely absent international aid community and civilian state. The collective has been raising funds for the ERRs through political education and teach-ins and is organizing around more just Canadian immigration policies.

Contact: Liz Flanagan