Transnational Anxieties examines how American religious and political focus on the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians has transformed Coptic identity in an era of migration to the United States. In commemorating martyrs and in making visible the plight of Christians back in Egypt, Coptic immigrants in the United States have engaged a new political subjectivity in a way that has transformed traditional forms of sociality, as well as religious practices and ecumenical efforts. The dissertation tracks this transformation starting with the socioeconomic reorganization of postcolonial Egypt, which created a new political order and presented challenges for an emerging national minority. These postcolonial challenges have traveled with Coptic immigrants to the U.S., intersecting with extant American racial and religious logics.
With the end of the Cold War, the United States emerged as the world’s sole superpower, and the geopolitical enemy shifted from Communism to Islam. For American geopolitical and religio-political forces, the Copts offered a striking portfolio of imagery as Christian victims of Islamic terrorism. Copts became part of a broader discourse on persecuted Christians, emphasized by American evangelicals and, by the late 1990s, politicians as well. After 9/11, such discourses were amplified as the fight against terrorism became the central focus of American security directives and shaped foreign policy interests. Within this new era, Coptic Christians in the U.S. were not only understood as a community persecuted under Islamic rule by Washington D.C. policymakers and politicians, but many Copts also simultaneously became the targets of the War on Terror’s racial logics of securitization. These American contexts have transnationally circulated back to Egypt, as well. Through social media interactions and communal connections with Coptic-Americans, Copts in Egypt have varyingly begun to interpret their minority status in a new way, through the different narratives and representations of their diaspora counterparts.
While Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt have oscillated between conflict and cooperation, animosity and friendship, transnational kinship connections have offered new reading practices and matrices of analysis. The dissertation ethnographically examines these circulations and feedback loops between the United States and Egypt and interrogates how Coptic encounters with American structures of religious-racial power alter the terrain of life for this transnational community.
