Ali Nobil Ahmad
Research Project
In search of Sayad: Critical explorations into the life and times of the twentieth century’s most important sociologist of migration
Project Abstract
This project explores the work of Algerian migration sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad in the context of the momentous changes he lived through: colonial occupation; decolonization; postwar migration from Algeria to metropolitan France, and the formation of a postcolonial Maghrebi diaspora in Europe under conditions of racism and socio-economic marginalization. It does so with a view to shedding new light on the contemporary significance of Sayad’s legacy, particularly in Anglophone spheres, where his contribution to the study of migration is under-appreciated.
Although it is an individual project, In Search of Sayad aims to foster collaboration between and among the small community of experts in France and beyond whose writings and exchanges have already drawn attention to the many facets of Sayad’s work. This includes recent inquiries uncovering his intellectual exchanges with Pierre Bourdieu, whose sociology developed, in its early stages, in dialogue with Sayad during the 1960s, under conditions of extreme colonial violence.
In Search of Sayad
Born in Algeria in 1933, Abdelmalek Sayad was arguably the most important migration sociologist of the twentieth century. He died in Paris in 1998, a research director at the French CNRS and at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, where his writings on the North African community in France were central to the introduction of the study of migration in French social sciences. In a wealth of critical essays published over decades, Sayad exposed the dehumanizing and distortive impact of state-centric discourse on ‘immigrants’, and broke new ground in conceptualizing migration as a process in which emigration cannot be ignored. Though he wrote mostly before the mainstreaming of feminist theory within the discipline of sociology, his insights into the lived and psychological dimensions of migrancy, along with his attentiveness to corporeal experience, underscore the relevance of his writings for understanding the dynamics of race, gender and social class in migration processes.
Why then, has he remained such an obscure figure outside France?
Despite his extraordinary contribution to the study of migration, Sayad’s writings are under-valued within the Anglophone disciplines of migration and cultural studies. This is in stark contrast to the highly valorized works of Pierre Bourdieu, with whom Sayad collaborated at key moments in their respective intellectual formations in Algeria and then France.
It is also in contrast to the high profile of British Anglophone post-colonial and diasporic intellectuals, whose heavy imprints on the aforementioned disciplines have developed in relative isolation from the French sociological tradition: Figures such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, whose immense contributions to the study of trans-Atlantic phenomena relating to British colonialism and its migratory legacies tend to be studied separately from the Mediterranean world that underpins Bourdieu and Sayad’s ideas.
Drawing inspiration from the work of Camilla Hawthorne and other scholars seeking to bridge this trans-Atlantic / Mediterranean divide, In Search of Sayad seeks to bring the work of Sayad into dialogue with an unlikely range of Anglophone interlocutors through juxtapositions, comparisons and where possible, intellectual cross-fertilizations.
Context and Objectives
The political backdrop of this project is the construction of an acute sense of crisis around extra-European migration and the presence of Islam in Europe. Both are viewed through the prism of paranoid, racial-demographic anxieties, articulated, for instance, in Renaud Camus’ infamous theory of ‘Great Replacement’ – a perversely inverted fantasy in which white Europeans are being displaced by hordes of barbaric, dark-skinned Islamic invaders.
Sayad’s corpus is explored as a critical resource for confronting the contemporary intellectual and political challenges thrown up by this climate: restrictive borders, escalating racism and ever-harsher conditions for migrants and refugees in France and other European countries.
However, it is a notable development that amidst the export of European immigration controls to North Africa through so-called ‘externalization’ policies, countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria are themselves being enveloped within this new racial formation, albeit through a strengthening of historic forms of anti-Black racism dating back centuries in Arab society. Tunisia’s President Kais Saied’s shocking articulation of demographic racial replacement theories in which Arabs are supposedly being displaced from their own domains by ‘Sub-Saharan’ migrants is one illustration of this phenomenon. Others include the inhumane, often deadly deportation of Black migrants by Algeria in a strip of Sahelian desert between itself and Niger, and the brutal killing of dozens of Sudanese asylum seekers in the Spanish-Moroccan border enclave of Melilla in June 2022.
There is no easy antidote to this racialization of migration on both sides of the Mediterranean, which has taken on increasingly deadly forms since the development of mass, northbound irregular migration from across Africa over the last two decades. Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon researchers and advocates of humane and socially just migration policies to combat the degeneration of European and indeed North African politics through the adoption of new strategies of persuasion, civic education, and pedagogy that reach beyond the academy. One such approach is the development of alternative bodies of knowledge that challenge the construction of restrictive borders between Europe and North Africa, and within Africa itself. By highlighting the ideas of a thinker whose work emphasized migration as a manifestation of connectedness between sending and receiving societies – and by enabling its circulation in new spaces – this project seeks to make a modest contribution to the development and dissemination of one such body of knowledge.
Biography
Ali Nobil Ahmad is a researcher, journalist, and political consultant with expertise in migration, political ecology, and media practice. He has a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence and is a former recipient of The Guardian’s Scott Trust bursary for journalists. He has taught humanities, social science, and film studies in Pakistan and the US. His monograph on human smuggling from Pakistan to Europe, ‘Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration’, was published in paperback by Routledge and Oxford University Press.
Beyond academia, he has extensive experience in curating public programmes featuring screenings and academic talks. He has also worked as a policy analyst in the humanitarian and development sector, in advocacy, and international project management in the field of migration governance.
