Sudanese Intellectuals in the Global Milieu: Capturing Cultural Capital propels Sudanese intellectuals into the global intellectual milieu and argues for their place in world intellectual history. The contributors posit that Sudan is currently in its most uncertain and perhaps most generative period, as the unrest, conflicts, and upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries threw Sudanese intellectuals and activists into identity, economic, environmental, religious, and existential crises. Despite these crises, the unrest has created a period of knowledge production and cultural production in Sudan. The contributors to the collection are Sudanese intellectuals who explore the history and evolution of knowledge production, thought, and cultural capital in Sudan.

This is the first book of its kind on Sudan, and arguably one of the first in North Africa. We are part of an emerging, more cosmopolitan approach that calls for a reassessment of ideas about not only the concept of identities, but also about migration and technology, especially social media. Our essayists engage in redefinitions, the broadening of our key variables, the linking and intersecting of concepts, and the investigations of methods and ethics, and opt for an approach that is, at once, culturally specific to Sudan (one of the most fluid social landscapes in the world) and transnational. Our essays address the narrowness of studies of migration and note the almost total neglect in the broader Sudan literature of the rise of technology-mobile telephony and social media, in particular. Furthermore, our essayists address the near neglect in the Sudan literature of certain categories of people, such as youth, or certain diverse spaces, such as neighborhoods or gold mines. We have also been attempting to move away from the nearly stereotypic descriptions of Sudan to deal with topics that align Sudan with transnational issues and themes, knowledge production among them. This multidisciplinary collection of essays is the first comprehensive work to grapple explicitly with the question of knowledge production in such a diverse social landscape. We discuss the impact of current trends in information technology and contemporary forms of identity and mobility on knowledge production. These issues are pertinent for different sectors such as academia, government or business, and, as we demonstrate, reveal a myriad of possibilities for studying diverse population groups like youth, women, diaspora, or specific political contexts such as conflict or oppression.