Paper short abstract:

The paper explores horse racing as a liminal world and odd imperial debris where politics of class and race are played out on horseback and where the poor and unlucky gamble their last hopes. It addresses complex situated power dynamics in a region that has always defied simplistic categorizations.

Paper long abstract:

Horse racing is one of the Mediterranean topoi par excellence, ranging from mounted bullfighting in Spain, the palio in Italy, to the racing traditions in North Africa. Thereby, horse racing is more than an equine sport: It is a ritual, a cultural performance, and a political arena (Silverman 1979). The race track opens up to a liminal world.

With British colonial rule expanding in North Africa and the Middle East, horse racing became widely popular. Race tracks were mushrooming in Tunis, Alexandria, Cairo, Khartoum, Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad forming a horse racing network and regional equestrian culture where colonial officers and local elites played out politics of class and race on horseback (Cassidy 2002, Thompson 2012).

Fast forward to 2015, when I conducted research on Arabian horse breeding in Egypt, I found these race tracks still present. Deprived of their colonial prestige, however, they were now located in an invisible, liminal world where the poor and unlucky gambled their last hopes and fortunes.

The paper visits these race tracks and conceptualizes them as odd imperial debris (Stoler 2008) that enables racegoers to perform liminal practices of gambling and resistance. Expanding the view to the Arab Gulf states, new race tracks are built and a new equestrian culture emerges that re-appropriates its colonial origins as genuinely Arab cultural heritage.

Exploring the marginalized and liminal world of horse racing contributes to a better understanding of the complex power relations and situated political dynamics in a region that has always defied simplistic categorizations.