DISPLACED IN DARFUR: Gender, Politics, & Sexuality in a Sudanese Squatter Settlement April 12, 2007

A lecture with Rogaia Abusharaf
Thursday, 12 April, 7:00 PM
Altschul Atrium, Altschul Hall

In February 2007, the crisis in Darfur, Sudan, will enter its fourth year. In that time, more than 400,000 people have died and 250,000 have been displaced in a calculated military campaign designed to rid Darfur of a number of ethic groups - among them, the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa tribes - whose populations, in seeking to compel the Sudanese government to address underdevelopment and the political marginalization of their respective regions, were cast as a threat to the political status quo. Described by António Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as "the largest and most complex humanitarian problem on the globe," the atrocities in Darfur have taken a profound toll on the region's women. Targeted by the Janjawid militias, women and girls in alarming numbers have suffered abduction, rape, torture, murder, and forced displacement at the hands of their countrymen. On Thursday, April 12, join us as Rogaia Abusharaf addresses the human rights issues that must be at the heart of any discussion of political violence in the Sudan, and the incalculable effects of that violence on the selfhood and identity of Darfur's women.

Rogaia Abusharaf is the director of the Pembroke Center's research initiative on Gender and "Traditional" Muslim Practices, a three-year project including faculty workshops, roundtables, and conferences. Among Abusharaf's publications is Wanderings: Sudanese Migrants and Exiles in North America, one of the first books devoted to the experience of Sudanese immigrants and exiles in the United States. She is also editor of the forthcoming Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives. Her work has received support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Royal Anthropological Institute and Durham University Anthropology Department in England, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study Center, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the MIT Center for International Studies.