Race in Transit

with Randa Tawil

hosted by Sam Dolbee

| At the turn of the twentieth century, large numbers of people from Ottoman Syria began to settle abroad, giving birth to the modern Arab-American diaspora. Yet for generations, what was lost in the history of their becoming American is the changes that happened along the way, as people undertook arduous and sometimes circuitous journeys across a world of both unprecedented mobility and scrutiny of migrants. In this interview with Randa Tawil about her new book, Race in Transit, we explore that liminal zone and the many itineraries of the early Syrian diaspora as reflected across archives in Beirut, Marseille, Liverpool, Manila, Washington, D.C., Michigan, and Texas. At every stage of their journeys, race played a role in the fate of these migrants, but as Dr. Tawil explains, it was far from a stable category. In crossing the globe, Syrian migrants also crossed a "global color line" and passed through shifting legal and conceptual boundaries that defined the politics of migration.         

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At the turn of the twentieth century, large numbers of people from Ottoman Syria began to settle abroad, giving birth to the modern Arab-American diaspora. Yet for generations, what was lost in the history of their becoming American is the changes that happened along the way, as people undertook arduous and sometimes circuitous journeys across a world of both unprecedented mobility and scrutiny of migrants. In this interview with Randa Tawil about her new book, Race in Transit, we explore that liminal zone and the many itineraries of the early Syrian diaspora as reflected across archives in Beirut, Marseille, Liverpool, Manila, Washington, D.C., Michigan, and Texas. At every stage of their journeys, race played a role in the fate of these migrants, but as Dr. Tawil explains, it was far from a stable category. In crossing the globe, Syrian migrants also crossed a "global color line" and passed through shifting legal and conceptual boundaries that defined the politics of migration.

    

Contributor Bios

Randa Tawil is researcher, writer, and lecturer at the University of Washington who writes about migration, US empire, and the Middle East. Her new book, Race in Transit: Tracing the Politics of Migration from Ottoman Syria through US Empire, follows the itineraries of migrants across Europe through the Americas, arguing that the infrastructures of migration set up by empires--that is, the shipping companies, public health professionals, agents, and border inspectors--produced the conditions that rendered migrants desirable or undesirable far before they met US borders. She also has writing featured in The Washington Post, Margins, and Open Democracy, as well as academic journals.

Sam Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power is out now with Cambridge University Press.

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Credits

Episode No. 599
Release Date: 16 October 2026
Sound production by Sam Dolbee
Music: Blue Dot Sessions
Images and bibliography courtesy of Randa Tawil

Further Listening

	Deporting Ottoman Americans	589 6/20/26	All's Fair in Love and War
	Randa Tawil	478 9/28/20	Zeinab's Odyssey
	Rawan Arar, Andrew Arsan, Reem Bailony, Neda Maghbouleh	436 11/25/19	Narrating Migration
	Sarah Abrevaya Stein	434 11/20/19	Family Papers and Ottoman Jewish Life After Empire
	Devi Mays	417 7/4/19	Mexico and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora
	Ian Nagoski	412 6/1/19	American Music of the Ottoman Diaspora

Images

A drawing of Isle du Frioul, the island that housed the quarantine for the city of Marseille, 1902. Source: Adrien Proust and Paul Faivre, Rapport sur les améliorations à apporter au functionnement du service sanitaire dans le port de Marseille et au lazaret du Frioul (Melun, 1902)



Three Syrians detained at the US-Mexico border circa 1910 (National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC)



A Syrian woman waits at a train station in Mexico. Source: National Archives and Records Administration

Select Bibliography

Albrecht, Charlotte. Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling. University of California Press, 2023. 

 

Can, Lâle. “Pilgrimage, Pandemics, and Precarity,” History of the Present 13, no. 1 (2023) 45-51. 

Fairchild, Amy L. Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Gualtieri, Sarah. Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California.: Stanford University Press, 2019.

Hartman. Saidiya. Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. W.W. Norton, 2019.

Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Khater, Akram. Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon 1870- 1920. University of California Press, 2001.

Lake, Marilyn, and Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

McKeown, Andrew. Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders. Columbia University Press, 2011.

Mongia, Rodhika. Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State. Duke University Press, 2018.

Wolfe, Patrick. Traces of History: The Elementary Structures of Race. Verso Books, 2016.