Martyrs and Migrants

""A historically informed, ethnographically astute, and theoretically subtle book that examines the shifting political landscapes Egyptian Copts in the United States and Egypt navigate and promote. It examines the ways colonial classification systems ... have shaped Egyptian Copts’ perception of themselves and diasporic politics. Candace Lukasik shows how Egyptian Copts are caught up in a discourse of persecution in order to shed light on the violence against Christians in the Middle East and build bridges with the Christian Right in the United States, but are also racialized as the Other since they are Egyptians. This multi-sited ethnography provides a poignant intervention in the studies of minorities by exploring the fraught entanglements of imperial discourses, diasporic and minority politics, and the construction of the self."" -- Zainab Saleh, author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia ""Demonstrates how utterly transnational the Coptic community has become, and how this transnational condition has created both new possibilities and new binds. . . . Whether or not they endorse her framing of Copts’ predicament through the notion of an `economy of blood,’ scholars of the community will find her approach deeply thoughtful and bracing, sparking debate in a field that has remained staid and demure for far too long."" -- Paul Sedra, author of From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt ""Lukasik aptly interrogates a paradox of our time: the tension between transnational, collective and co-opting, Christian theopolitics of kin-blood persecution, and the legal, everyday racialized, painful singularities of diasporic class divisions—through and beyond a Coptic prism."" -- Valentina Napolitano, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto