Location: Robert S. Blank Forum, PCPSE, 2nd floor, 133 South 36st St.

On the Semicivilized is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized.

Julia Elyachar is associate professor of anthropology and international studies at Princeton University. As an economic and historical anthropologist working in the Middle East, she enquires the histories of markets, commerce, and financialization in the everyday economic life of the region.