Economy of Blood: The Persecuted Church and the Racialization of American Copts

Abstract

ABSTRACTSince the 1990s, attacks on Egyptian Copts have been made legible to American (particularly evangelical) audiences through the moral imaginary of the “Persecuted Church,” which argues that Christians around the globe are persecuted more than any other time in history. Images of bloodied Egyptian Coptic bodies have circulated among Western Christian religio‐political networks in an “economy of blood,” an imperial economy of Christian kinship that performs the double movement of glory and racialization. This double movement has placed American Copts in a bind, whereby indigenous Coptic collective memory of blood and persecution has intersected with the political, theological, and affective kinship formations of this economy of blood. This article analyzes how the contemporary remapping of Eastern Christian traditions, like that of the Copts, produces effects on a geopolitical scale, and examines how this reconfiguration unfolds whiteness and Western Christianity. [racialization, Christian kinship, economy of blood, Persecuted Church, American Copts]