| In the run up to the 2011 referendum on South Sudanese independence, popular and political discourse reveals a heightened nationalism around the formation of the 'New Sudan', a contested and as yet unrealized political entity but one that offers hope for peace in the region. Members of the US-based diaspora are bound up in this process through transnational practices of citizenship and nationalism. Through a feminist geographic lens I examine the varied ways in which this nation is constructed, bounded and reproduced in the everyday and activist politics and performances of gendered bodies The project draws upon in-depth interviews, participant observation and visual and textual discourse analysis conducted between January 2007 and August 2008. In three case studies, I find that the new nation is brought into being in the diaspora. Firstly, through interviews with South Sudanese women in the US I show how their experiences of displacement and resettlement have troubled gendered norms, shaping their transnational connections to home and their practices of citizenship. Secondly, I examine how the Miss South Sudan-USA beauty pageant, a community-based cultural event, works to feminize Sudanese land and territory and provides a particularly faith, class, and race-based embodiment of the nation in becoming. Lastly, I explore the recent forging of diasporic feminist and nationalist activist projects, where the empowerment of women and nation are bound up with the nurturing of the new nation. Deeply inflected by histories of faith, class and ethnic-regional conflict and marginalization, each of these examples reveal how ongoing faith, ethnic-regional and class-based tensions shape the ideal 'South Sudanese' body, citizen and territory. In this moment of political tumult, this study of nationalism and citizenship provides a feminist, transnational, and diasporic lens on the formation of a 'New Sudan'. |
