Nisrin Elamin - Gulf Capital, Deficient Deserts and Empire-making in central Sudan

In the agricultural Gezira region of central Sudan, the term khalla from the Arabic empty, means open land or expanse and refers to land that is primarily used for grazing animals or rain-fed farming; what is often referred to as ‘the commons.’ Beginning with the provocation that the khalla is “running away from us” due to large-scale Gulf Arab land investments and agribusiness practices, as a Sudanese agro-pastoralist warns, this talk takes up the khalla as method (Khayyat 2022), repository and medium through which to trace and analyse how past and emergent forms of capital accumulation and empire-making, structure everyday life at the edge of the Gezira scheme. The talk draws on Michel Rolph Trouillot’s (1988) insight that landscapes testify to the layering of successive forms of colonial intrusion in a way that unites time. In telling the history of the region through the khalla, this talk lays out some of the ways people have negotiated and contested these intrusions, constructing an archive in the process that testifies not only to waves of dispossession and destruction, but also to processes of recovery and regeneration.
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