On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo

On the Semicivilized by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped-and blocked-sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire, whose perceived “civilizational differences” rendered it incompatible with a Western-dominated global order, semicivilized came to denote lands where unitary territorial sovereignty was stymied at the end of WWI. Elyachar’s theorizing offers a new analytic vocabulary for thinking beyond territoriality, postcolonialism, and the “civilized"/"primitive” divide. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix Introduction. On the Move  1 1. Fixing Space, Moving People  35 2. Infrastructures of the Semicivilized  59 3. Sorting Things Out  86 4. Commons Goods  108 5. Phatic Labor and the Channels of Commerce  129 6. Across the Barzakh  152 Notes  179 References  195 Index  221

About the Author :
Julia Elyachar is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and author of Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo, also published by Duke University Press.

Review :
“Situating herself in the ‘middle’ of the ‘east,’ Julia Elyachar unsettles the barnacled and cruel binaries of civilizational discourses by exploring the statutory infrastructures of extraterritorial articulation, population mobilities, and commerce in post-Ottoman geographies, and in Cairo in particular. Creatively recuperating all the shaken ways of feeling, moving, and acting in common that exceed the confines of territorial capture and unitary sovereignty, On the Semicivilized is a channel to an entire world of embodied operations fueling insurgently quotidian collective lives. Long-standing notions of improvement are dissected and refused, and it would be hard to foresee how anyone could ‘improve’ on this genealogy of the nuts and bolts of urban power and political affect.” - AbdouMaliq Simone, author of (The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture) “In this wide-ranging and engaging book, Julia Elyachar documents the political despair and sense of endlessly delayed futures that characterize lives in Cairo since the defeated revolutionary movement of 2011 while evoking the destructiveness of the new military regime. On the Semicivilized is a thoughtful and nuanced account for all those who want to sense the forms of life that followed from an abortive neoliberalism and a defeated popular revolution.” - Timothy Mitchell, author of (Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil)