Anna Reumert is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.
Informed by ongoing ethnographic work with Sudanese migrant workers in Lebanon, her dissertation explores discourses of anti-blackness between Lebanon and Sudan. Documenting the central role Sudanese migration has played in political and cultural formation in the Arab Mediterranean from the time of Ottoman slavery through colonialism till contemporary migrant labor economies, the dissertation project asks: How does blackness travel in the Levant? How does migration construct and disrupt categories of identification, difference and affiliation? The project explores how the movement of Sudanese workers tells a larger story about the shifting frontiers of affiliation, belonging and Othering in the Middle East.