Episode 5: Economics, Expertise, and Revolution in Postcolonial Sudan

In this episode, Edna Bonhomme is in conversation with Dr. Alden Young, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UCLA. Dr. Young traces the impact of multiple colonialisms in Sudan under the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and the British Empire. Critiquing reductive historiographies of the civil wars in Sudan and discussing recent protests in Khartoum and throughout Sudan, Dr. Young connects how petroleum, mining, and austerity measures under former President Omar al-Bashir and the IMF relate to the ongoing economic crisis as well as have led to extensive resistance against imperialist structures in Sudan, highlighting especially the activism and theoretical works by Sudanese womanists. Dr Young also addresses postcolonial Sudan, economic science, and planning by Sudanese experts.

Team

Edna Bonhomme is an activist, historian, writer, curator, and lecturer whose research interrogates disease, gender, surveillance, and embodiment. Edna earned a PhD in history of science at Princeton University with a dissertation that examined plagued bodies and spaces in North Africa and the Middle East. Her creative work is guided by diasporic futures, herbal healing, and bionic beings. Follow her on Twitter @jacobinoire.

Kristyna Comer studies art history and cultural studies at Humboldt University in Berlin where her research focuses on public museum collections in Berlin and past and current demands for restitution, reparations, and repatriation.