Sophia Jahadhmy

Overview

Sophia is a PhD candidate at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center. She studies the construction of identity and race-making on the Swahili Coast through the legacies of enslavement, communal, colonial, and state violence, and anti-imperialism. Sophia's dissertation theorizes how different processes of race-making throughout East African history culminated in contestations over historical narrativization, enslavement, racial self-identification, quests for autochthony, and the resulting communal and state-sponsored violence in postcolonial Tanzania and Kenya. She simultaneously engages with the forms of cohabitation that existed on the Swahili Coast before colonialism, and the revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist Pan-African potential of Zanzibar during the class struggle leading up to independence in the 1960s. Sophia's work seeks to read the Swahili Coast's complex and radical histories in relation to the rest of the continent, the Indian Ocean, and the African diaspora to critique and question the conditions of possibility for alternative forms of politics and identity today.