Same but Different: Displaced Afterlives in Cairo

Abstract

My research asks what remains after catastrophes that do not clearly end but instead extend and reshape themselves, and how people shift to make room for life in the open-ended. When enforcement against refugee communities in Cairo intensified in January, daily life stopped, then resumed, “same, but different,” becoming yet another iteration of displaced life recalibrating and thereby enduring. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that this intensification does not mark a departure into a new carceral order, but rather reveals the convergence of a global, anti-migrant order built on confinement and expulsion with a pre-existing regional one, in which experiences of securitization already structure everyday life and speech in the Arab world. 

I trace how this order persists and is resisted: in a temporality of waiting and permanent temporariness; in the coded warnings and jokes through which refugee and Egyptian communities speak about enforcement; in how solidarity is unmade and remade; and in fractures that emerge in one’s sense of self. My Palestinian, Sudanese, Syrian, Eritrean, Yemeni, Somali, and Egyptian interlocutors sit differently within this field, revealing the complexity of the space rather than a single hierarchy of vulnerability. By mapping out these intersecting experiences, I suggest that attending to afterlives, rather than a moment, shows how life is lived when catastrophe becomes ordinary.
 

Bio:
Banan Abdelrahman is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines how refugee communities in Cairo, including Palestinians displaced by the Israeli genocide in Gaza alongside Sudanese and Syrian refugees, navigate and make sense of life amid cyclical catastrophes, bureaucratic erasure, and securitization. Her research draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo and her work as an organizer with communities affected by immigration detention in the United States.