Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan: Politics and the Body in a Squatter Settlement (review)

This is a deeply flawed book about an important group of southern Sudanese women, namely those displaced from the southern Sudan to the shanty towns surrounding the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. Drawing on interviews conducted with almost fifty displaced women, the author sets out to represent these women's voices and agency as they devise gendered strategies of cultural adaptation that, she argues, promote and symbolize the multicultural harmony of a "New Sudan." The author presents her research within a framework of what she calls an urgent, public, humanitarian, and feminist anthropology, whose common denominator she defines as a victim- and women-centered analysis that aims at raising public awareness and influencing public policy.

Abusharaf's book falls short of these ambitious goals in a number of ways. First and crucially, she completely ignores the substantial and relevant scholarship on feminist anthropological methodology, especially as it relates to women's biographical narratives—such as Karin Willemse's study of interviews with Darfur women entitled One Foot in Heaven: Narratives on Gender and Islam in Darfur, West-Sudan (Brill, 2007). As a result, the author never reflects on her own positionality as a foreign-based, middle-class, northern Sudanese woman with a very particular (unionist) view of the future. Abusharaf never asks whether this positionality and the fact that she conducted all her interviews in Arabic (and not in any of the languages of the south, even through interpreters) may have influenced the conversations—and hence her findings and interpretations. She enthusiastically reports on the adoption by the displaced women she interviewed of aspects of northern culture—Arabic, the tobe, henna (and other practices of bodily beautification), intermarriage, religious conversion, and even female genital cutting—and she interprets these as dynamic steps and strategies toward cultural adaptation, harmony, and solidarity and reconciliation with northern Sudanese women.

However, she gives no examples of northern women learning southern Sudanese languages or adopting southern body rituals. That for poor, displaced southern women adaptation may represent simple capitulation to the norms of northern cultural hegemony is not an interpretation Abush-araf seriously considers, although she does report that some southern individuals are critical of such adoptions. Her claim that displaced women in Khartoum's squatter settlements are not passive victims, but, like slum-dwellers elsewhere in the world, dynamic agents who adopt diverse strategies to improve their chances, is an important point, but repeatedly insisting (instead of carefully documenting) that these shantytowns symbolize a multicultural "New Sudan" erases the structural violence that characterizes such living conditions and social positions.

A second methodological flaw is that the author does not provide adequate synchronic or diachronic contexts for the women whose words she quotes. For example, she gives very little concrete information about how and why the individuals she studied were displaced. This means that the precise identity of the perpetrators of the violence that caused their displacement—the Sudanese army, the Popular Defense Forces, the SPLA, Baggara or other militias, or other violent actors—remains completely unexamined. Can women's adaptive strategies be understood without reference to those who violently disrupted their lives and the nature of the violence they experienced? When and how often the author visited the squatter settlements, how long she stayed there, and when and how often she interviewed her informants also remain unclear.

Throughout the book, the author fails to engage with the most relevant and recent scholarship about the Sudan. This is as true for her interpretation of so significant a topic as the historical formation of "Arab" identity (or better, identities)—which she simply attributes to the discredited notion of immigration (30)—as it is for her summaries of British colonial "Southern Policy," or the history of female genital cutting in the Sudan, or the Islamist regime's "civilizational project." Also missing is any reference to northern Sudanese women's dynamic...