From the Margins: The Lives and Labor of Yemen’s “Undesirable” Subjects (1890-1960) with UC Presidential Posdoc Scholar Gokh (Gurkha) Amin

Lecture poster on Yemen (1890–1960) with archival photo and event details

Event Date

Location
Sproul 912

This talk follows the lives of social outcasts and marginalized Black people who lived and moved across Southern Arabia in the first half of the twentieth century using deportation records, petitions, and criminal cases. These include street performers, sex workers, sanitation laborers, and others who colonial officials labeled as “undesirables.” Moving across Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Southern Arabia, these subaltern actors reveal the porous contours of an “Oceanic Yemen,” a global space that reincorporates Southern Arabia into its historic oceanic networks and makes legible Yemen’s deep links to the Horn of Africa. The talk centers these individuals’ labor, mobility, and gendered experience to unpack the complex subject and racial formations unfolding in twentieth-century Southern Arabia and broader region. It asks who were the men and women that made up the social margins of this global space? How does their labor and gendered experience challenge our understanding of gender and sexuality? And what do these internal outsiders teach us about how categories of race, Blackness, and caste overlapped and operated in the twentieth-century Middle East and beyond?