Mada Masr
By Bayan Abubakr
Oct. 28, 2025

“Across Sisi’s Egypt, post-Assad Syria, and counterrevolutionary Sudan, the pulse of imperialism is alive and well in the heartbeat of the universe. The histories entangled between the creation of the Israeli and Emirati empires reveal how imperialism, in the grammar of the Euro-American nation-building imagination, has sustained itself and developed into a highly sophisticated and precise technology.”

MERIP 315/216
By Bayan Abubakr
Oct. 20, 2025

“The Abraham Accords should not be understood as a discrete diplomatic agreement between empires and dictatorships but as a mechanism by which Sudan’s revolution was absorbed into a wider imperial order. This history is less a story about normalization than about how global powers strategically seize upon revolutionary conjunctures, strip them of their emancipatory potential and recycle them as instruments of authoritarian consolidation and imperial expansion.”

Africa 94, no. 1 (2024): 226–27
By Bayan Abubakr

“Gabay assumes the omnipresent and sweeping force of Eurocentric whiteness. He privileges the white/Black binary as being the defining racial divide and does not engage with the ways in which precolonial racial orders and postcolonial resistance movements informed the creation of categories of difference within the white civilizational project…”

The New York Times
By Bayan Abubakr
July 7, 2023

“If the international community really wants to help, it needs to stop playing God. It must stop counting on military leaders to solve our problems and start directing support to the grass-roots organizations that have been our only salvation. Entrusting the R.S.F. and S.A.F. with Sudan’s future amounts to leaving its citizens for dead, but the international community still has an opportunity to support us in trying to take care of one another — as we always have.”

After Memory: Essays on the Sudanese Archive (Locale SD, 2022): 18-23.
By Bayan Abubakr

“The archive cannot redeem us — is itself unredeemable. Our collective memory, however, can be utilized to hold us and our histories accountable to the principles of restorative justice. When we look inwards, to what we have created, to the worlds that we belong to, to what we have inherited — what can be seen?”

Jadaliyya (re-published original POMEPS article)
By Bayan Abubakr
Sept. 21, 2021

“The displacement of Nubians happened while Egypt was flourishing as a central site of pan-African politics, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Third World solidarity project. Throughout this period, a number of Black intellectuals, radicals, musicians, and writers related to Egypt—real and imagined—through the shared history of struggle in the histories of Atlantic slavery and colonialism. These histories of forced displacement are ultimately a history of the “afterlives” of slavery in Egypt, and a manifestation of the anti-Black logics that situate Nubians as one of the nation’s peripheral ‘others.’”

POMEPS Studies 41 - Racial Formations in the Middle East and Africa (September 2021): 73-80.
By Bayan Abubakr

“If we are able to hold on to the fact that multiple, competing, and sometimes contradictory axes of power can exist in a single space and understand that the identities of oppressed and oppressor are never fixed and always historically contingent, we can see more fully how the displacement of Nubian communities was able to take place amid the articulation of Afro-Arab solidarities and present more clearly the multi-layered nature of violence in a space as dynamic as the Afro-Arab world. In propagating the notion of an emaciated subaltern universalism, we silence the complexities present in the lived experience of Afro-Arabness and Africanity in the Arabic-speaking world.  We must reconfigure and interrogate our current geographies of liberation.”

Africa is a Country
By Bayan Abubakr
June 10, 2020

“Racism is at the very ethos and heart of the modern Sudanese state. As long as “former” structures continue to be relied upon and perpetuated, it will be a fundamental part of every iteration of it. This is the case with the current transitional government. The ghosts of our past mercilessly haunt our present. Racism, like the state’s other technologies of power, is mutating, although it has been muffled by the empty promises of a more politically correct and internationally “respectable” government. It is entrenching itself deeper and deeper into the fold of the Sudanese state.”