Current research: Kosba’s current research project investigates the cyclicality of (re)territorializing resistance to white supremacy in different forms of Black activism as manifest in the lives of Dusé Muhammad Ali, David Graham DuBois, and Mostafa Hefny. Despite possessing different socio-cultural capital, Ali, DuBois, and Hefny share the burden of physically moving across the Atlantic, forging new political pathways to exist in a world that privileges whiteness beyond simply escaping it, and navigating multilayered processes of conversion, identity reconfiguration, and network building. More importantly, in their re-territorializing approaches and journeys, relocating their struggles against white supremacy from one geography to another, not only did they grapple with the triangulated effect of the African, American, and European presences, but also the discursive “Arab” presence, and how it complicates the (re)formulation of African diasporic identities. In this project, Hefny, an Egyptian Nubian, is a point of entry into the past, an intellectual bridge connecting two critical (yet understudied) Pan-African pioneers––DuBois and Ali–– and complicates their intellectual legacies.
Tracing and centering the intellectual paths and political choices of these African diasporic men helps us understand the historical and theoretical dialectics of race in Egypt and the United States, the roles of political and religious conversions, and Arabness and Islam, in shaping their intellectual trajectories and their political and theological liberation. Through a close reading of their published autobiographical texts as primary sources, this project conducts an interdisciplinary analysis that juxtaposes Ali’s, DuBois’, and Hefny’s liberation projects with Malcolm X’s. The cyclicality of reterritorializing Black resistance to the lens of white supremacy, vis-à-vis Malcolm X’s political liberation theology, explores the ways in which the three men’s legacies can enrich and complicate our perceptions of Arabness, Africanness, Blackness, and the multidimensionality of Afrocentrism, Black nationalism, Black Orientalism, and Arab Africanism.
Kosba will continue to work on this project in her capacity as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA) at Rutgers University in September 2024. Her project contributes to the center’s theme, “Black Power and White Supremacy: The Cyclical Dialectics of Power.”
Milestones, publications: In December 2024, Kosba’s peer-reviewed article, “Islam and Race in Egypt,” will be published in The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Race edited by Zain Abdullah, Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University. This article argues that to understand the complexity of identity formation among contemporary Egyptians, we must grasp how the interlocking legacies of the Arab conquest, Ottoman rule, and Western European colonialism impacted Egyptian nationalists’ identity and thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. Tracing key historical threads of race and Islam, through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s theory of time, this article will help us think of the complexity of modern Egyptian identity as non-fixed, oscillating back and forth between two dichotomous Black and White worlds.
In June 2024, Kosba submitted the second draft of “Becoming Black, (un)Becoming Arab: Affective Geographies and the Search for Identity Beyond Whiteness,” for Centering the Margins: Reimagining the Field of Arab American Studies volume edited by Danielle Haque and Waleed F. Mahdi. This article builds on her dissertation titled, The Race Question: Egyptian Intellectualism on the Periphery of the African Diaspora, and published work. It centers on Mostafa Hefny’s socio-political activism and pursuit of a Black liberation theology that abandons Arabness and Islam. Examining Hefny’s unique struggle against racism and racialization, Kosba argues that Hefny’s longstanding legal battle with the United States government against his misclassification as “white” is a form of resistance where Egypt and the United States function as geographies of affect.
Additionally, in August 2024, Kosba completed her article, “From Encyclopedia to Afropedia: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Encyclopedia Africana and the Souls of the Egyptian Africanist Folk,” and submitted it for review in an academic journal. This article historicizes the Egyptian contribution to the Encyclopedia Africana Project (EAP), which was launched by W.E.B. Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s, and examines the extent to which Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Africana (1999) project has undermined EAP. With the support of the Africa World Initiative, Kosba conducted archival research at the W.E.B. Du Bois Centre and the George Padmore Research Library on African Affairs for this article as a part of her trip to Accra, Ghana in August 2023 to attend the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).
Significant Developments: On April 29, 2024, with the support of the Africa World Initiative (AWI), the Program in African Studies (PAS), the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), and the Department of Near Eastern Studies (NES) at Princeton University, Kosba collaborated with Dr. Mounia Mnouer, Amazigh scholar and lecturer at NES in organizing the “Africa in North African Imagination” interactive symposium. The symposium featured a small group of North African scholars, as well as Princeton’s graduate and undergraduate students to reimagine and re-negotiate North African identities beyond essentialism and ethno-centrism.
In her Spring 2024 course, Kosba taught “Race and Islam in Africa and the Diaspora: Theories and Approaches.” Cross-listed in the Program in African Studies and the Department of African American Studies, this capstone seminar provided a survey of critical theories and approaches to studying Islam in Africa and the African diaspora focusing on the history of slavery and racial formation. With the interdisciplinary approach pursued in this seminar, students investigated conflicting narratives of Islam toward slavery, how they have been employed, as well as their impact on Muslims in general, and Black and non-Black Muslims in particular.
In October 2023, Kosba was invited to participate in the “Narrating Nubia” workshop organized by Professor Yasmin Moll at the University of Michigan, held in Ann Arbor. Kosba’s presentation was titled, “Egyptian race-consciousness through Nubian Eyes.”
On April 10, 2023, Kosba delivered a presentation titled, “Translating Egyptians: Race-Consciousness of 1960s Egyptians in the African American Imagination,” hosted by the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication (PTIC) and Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS). The presentation provided a reading of David Graham DuBois’s understudied novel … And Bid Him Sing and how it grapples with issues of representation, displacement, authenticity, roots and routes, language, class, and race.
In the Spring of 2023, Kosba taught “Race, Religion, and Literature of Africa and the African Diaspora,” course. This course explored the place of colonialism, racism, and religion in shaping modern literature and aesthetics of Africa and the African Diaspora. In addition to understanding how writers on the continent and elsewhere have negotiated different conceptualizations of the African diaspora and different forms of religion in their aesthetics, students read modern and contemporary literature as points of cultural and religious translation, and as sites for the construction of Pan-African identities.