Introduction: confronting the legacy and contemporary iterations of racial politics in the Middle East

Abstract

This special issue explores the extent to which race and racialization offer us an explanatory framework to study the contemporary politics of identity in the Middle East today. Most studies of the Middle East commonly presume that the race signifier is reserved for the juxtaposition of “Black ” and “White” identity to which the Arab, Persian and Turkish world counts itself as exterior. Up until now, few works on the Middle East have discussed race as central to their analysis. Our aim is to remedy this shortcoming. Crucially, we ask what can a consideration of racialization reveal about structures of oppression in the Middle East? Adopting race as the focus of enquiry allows us to unpack what we are really talking about when we talk about difference in the region: the reproduction and resilience of power and the insidious, harmful mutations of identity-based discrimination in unequal societies.