“I Want My Children to Know Sudan”: Narrating the Long-Distance Intimacies of Diasporic Politics

Attending to the gendered intimacies of diasporic politics offers rich insights for studies of transnationalism, nationalism, and citizenship. This article focuses on South Sudan and the narrative accounts of thirty U.S.-resettled women collected in the transitional era prior to independence in 2011. Their stories point to the embodied nature of political subjectivity enacted during this time through everyday parental acts in the United States, care for family in South Sudan, and emergent community-based engagement and activism in and between both places. This work extends studies of transnationalism, nationalism, and citizenship by drawing on the productive junctures of feminist political and emotional geographies. It does so first by attending to oft-marginalized and gendered subjects and spaces of politics and, second, by recognizing the intimate and affective scalings through which long-distance political subjects distantly engage with, take responsibility for, and actively remake their home. Here I pay attention to the work of feelings: grief, nostalgia, worry, excitement, ambivalence, and anger that drive and are evoked by long-distance nationalisms and citizenships. Intimately binding distant places, people, and moments, they demonstrate the emotional valence of diasporic politics. Finally, this article calls for empirical attention to new nationalisms and citizenships emerging through places like the contemporary South Sudan, those with histories of multiple colonialisms, marked by shifting geometries of power, and shaped from afar by the political intimacies of the diaspora.