Professor El Hamel discusses the emergence and evolution of ideas of race and color in the Middle East and North Africa. This lecture is mainly interested in racial constructs built around notions of color and lineage. It traces distinct genealogies of race and racism to the beginning of the Islamic empire.

This talk traces the Ottoman roots of the post-imperial political order in the Middle East through an analysis of the inter-imperial contest over Ottoman autonomous provinces.

Professor Hamit Bozarslan will discuss these three regimes. They are not the only anti-democratic ones that exists in the contemporary world, but they share some features that one cannot easily find elsewhere.

Against the erasure of the central role of the Palestinian question in the emergence of grassroots antiracist discourses in postcolonial France, Professor Olivia Harrison mines the journals, tracts, photographs, and video fragments that constitute the incomplete and fragmented archive of these movements for evidence of a distinctly transcolonial form of antiracist activism, grounded in anticolonial solidarity with Palestinians.

Atef Moatamed is a professor of physical geography at Cairo University and founder/director of the House of Geography for geographic studies.