Re-Politicising Poverty: Relational Re-conceptualisations of Impoverishment

This collection of essays extends cross-disciplinary conversations between co-authors that began as part of a podcast series by the Relational Poverty Network, “New Poverty Politics for Changing Times”. The authors engage impoverishment as a relation, as an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political-economic injustice and socio-legal control. Across various sites, the collection’s essays trace poverty politics, providing conjunctural and multi-scalar analyses that illuminate the operations of power in producing impoverishment. They direct our attention beyond topics typically associated with poverty studies, showing how processes such as bordering, migrant illegality, racial capitalism and caring community politics intersect in poverty politics today. Our introductory essay argues for a relational poverty analysis that addresses the entanglements of cultural politics, those that produce classificatory schemes, together with political-economic processes that produce various forms of poverty politics in the current conjuncture. We chart thinkable and unthinkable poverty politics across the collection’s essays in order to analyse current hegemonic formations of poverty governance as well as alternative imaginations and actions that are resisting and reworking relations of impoverishment. Ultimately, this collection expands vocabularies and analytical repertoires for understanding the ongoing ways in which impoverishment is produced and resisted, positing relationality as key to re-politicising poverty towards a more just future.     

A Tale of Two Yusifs: Recovering Arab Agency in Palestine Exploration Fund Excavations 1890–1924

The scholarly literature on the history of archaeology and archaeological organisations in late nineteenth/early twentieth century Palestine focuses almost exclusively on the Western excavators and scholars who headed this work. But Arab workers did the bulk of the actual digging, and on a daily basis they were often overseen by fellow Arabs as foremen and gang leaders. This paper applies lessons from relational history as it has been used in Levantine intellectual and labour contexts to understand the roles of two particular men, Yusif ‘abu Selim' Khazin and Yusif Khattar Kanaan, who worked for the Palestine Exploration Fund between 1890 and World War One, acting as foremen, researchers, site directors and many other roles for Frederick Bliss, R.A.S Macalister, and Duncan Mackenzie. Despite their often slim and ghostly presence in the records, in which both men are often referred to only by their shared first name, the writings of Bliss and Macalister reveal them to have been indispensable on-site and as offering insights and knowledge which influenced how both archaeological finds and indigenous life in Palestine was understood.     

‘Cloths with Names’: Luxury Textile Imports in Eastern Africa,c. 1800–1885

In the nineteenth century, a vast area of eastern Africa stretching the length of the coast and into the reaches of the Congo River was connected by long-distance trade mostly channelled through the Omani commercial empire based in Zanzibar. As studies have recently shown, a critical factor driving trade in this zone was local demand for foreign cloth; from the 1830s the majority of it was industrially made coarse cotton sheeting from Europe and America, which largely displaced the handwoven Indian originals. Employing archival, object, image and field research, this article demonstrates that until 1885 luxury textiles were as important to economic and social life in central eastern Africa, textiles known to the Swahili as ‘cloths with names’. It identifies the thirty or so varieties which élites — and, increasingly, the general population — selected for status dress and gifts, instrumental in building the commercial and socio-political networks that linked the great region. Finally, it shows that the production and procurement of most varieties remained in the hands of Asian textile artisans and merchants; most prestigious and costly were striped cotton and silk textiles handcrafted in western India, and in the southern Arabian nation of Oman. European industrial attempts to imitate them were hampered by several factors, including their inability to recreate the physical features that defined luxury fabrics in this region — costly materials, rich colours, complex designs and handwoven structures.