Project description
Studying the role of mixedness in shaping Red Sea history
The Red Sea has been extensively studied in African and Middle Eastern Studies. However, the aspect of mixedness has largely been overlooked. Similarly, Critical Mixed Race Studies has not yet explored the topic of mixedness in the Red Sea. This gap in research underscores the necessity of a comprehensive examination of how individuals of mixed heritage have influenced the history of the Red Sea. The ERC-funded REDMIX project focuses on the period from the 1800s to the 2000s. It aims to establish a digital archive on mixedness in the Red Sea through a long-term, interdisciplinary, and bottom-up approach that prioritises the perspectives of mixed-ancestry people and recognises their pivotal role in the history of the region.
Objective
The debate on mixed-race people is gaining momentum, and the Red Sea located at the crossroads of Africa and the Middle East, of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean stands as a privileged venue to investigate mixedness. Focusing on a timeframe (1800s-2000s) marked by increasing mobilities and mixed-race unions and offspring (e.g. Afro-Arabs, Afro-Asians, Euro-Africans), REDMIX investigates the roots and routes of mixed-race people and groups through a bottom-up, long-term, and interdisciplinary perspective, to create a digital archive about mixedness in the Red Sea.
African and Middle Eastern Studies have examined the Red Sea, its mobilities, and its entanglements, but mixedness has remained marginal in their thematic and methodological debate. Critical Mixed Race Studies has explored mixedness as a broad concept referring to individuals of mixed descent, yet without ever digging into case studies from the Red Sea. Thus, an extensive analysis of when, how, and why mixed-race people and groups have negotiated their position at political and social turning points in the history of the Red Sea is still lacking. REDMIX aims to fill this methodological and knowledge gap by overcoming the partitioned approach to the Red Sea and promoting a perspective centred on mixed-race people. The project intertwines African, Middle Eastern, and (Critical) Mixed Race Studies; brings together a rich corpus of archival and oral sources scattered across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; resorts to the digital humanities; and contributes to the conceptual framework of mixedness by applying global microhistory and comparatively investigating different case studies through synchronic and diachronic analyses. As the first comparative investigation into the history of mixedness in the Red Sea, REDMIX will take an active part in the mission of writing a more inclusive history of the area, one that firmly establishes the centrality of mixed-race people.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
10124 Torino
Italy