Introduction

Summary

How did ordinary working people imagine their political communities and futures within displacement and conflict in Khartoum, and how did they try to turn these ideas into action? The introduction sets out the book’s key intervention in African intellectual histories, opening up working-class and displaced people’s political projects outside of print media and universities, built around exploitative jobs, surveillance, and everyday violence and racism within the war. Challenging current political analyses of modern African civil wars, it also explores its wider contributions to ideas of Blackness and racial identification in modern Sudanese and African histories, and to urban histories of displacement and refuge, setting intellectual history within its practical and time-consuming context of long bus rides, paperwork, jobs, and racist policing. The Introduction also outlines the methodological basis in a creative but fragmentary archive and competing translations and interpretations, setting out a structure for the following chapters.