But my other response to you is to ask why the investment in and privileging of certain epistemic categories of domination as opposed to others? The question of migrant labor illustrates how race and class and geography and history are intertwined in very specific ways—the Middle Eastern cases (whether the Gulf or in Lebanon) are indeed different from that of the history of migrant labor in the United States, which has always been implicated in settler colonialism.
This quote made me pause and evaluate the framings and vocabulary that we use in understanding the Middle East. Is it proper to use vocabulary that is very inherently rooted in particular Western realizations of race and racism in a completely different context? We discussed in class, for example, how the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire and slavery as a whole was different from the Atlantic slave trade. Yet, simply even the word 'slavery' evokes certain images and meanings that are not cognizant with the Ottoman definition. The same can be said about the milieus of English, Western European-colonial-influenced vocabulary.