CSSH congratulates Julia Elyachar (“Mappings of Power: The State, NGOs, and International Organizations in the Informal Economy of Cairo” (45-3, 2003)) upon the publication of her new book, On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2025). The book is described thusly:
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.
Congratulations also to Courtney Handman (“Language at the Limits of the Human: Deceit, Invention, and the Specter of the Unshared Symbol” (65-4, 2023)), whose new book Circulations: Modernist Imaginaries of Colonialism and Decolonization in Papua New Guinea has just been published by University of California Press. The press writes,
In Circulations, Courtney Handman examines the surprising continuities in the ways that modernist communications discourses shaped both colonial and decolonial projects in Papua New Guinea. Often described as a place with too many mountains and too many languages to be modern, Papua New Guinea was seen as a space of circulatory primitivity—where people, things, and talk could not move. Colonial missionaries and administrators, and even anticolonial delegations of the United Nations Trusteeship Council, argued that this circulatory primitivity could be overcome only through the management of communication infrastructures, bureaucratic information flows, and the introduction of English. Innovatively bringing together analyses of radios, airplanes, telepathy, bureaucracy, and lingua francas, Circulations argues for the critical role of communicative networks and communicative imaginaries in political processes of colonialism and decolonization worldwide.
