Candace Lukasik’s Martyrs and Migrants is a unique addition to the existing literature on American Copts and Middle Eastern Christian migration. This multisited ethnography of Coptic Orthodox communities in the US (especially Jersey City) and in the Upper Egyptian village of Bahjura elucidates the contemporary politics of migration and the transnational dimensions of Coptic belonging and exclusion. Lukasik argues that diaspora encounters with US empire transform Coptic understandings of kinship and memories of martyrdom (recent massacres of Coptic Christians). While Copts in Egypt negotiate between the Coptic Orthodox hierarchy’s national unity narrative and ideas of Coptic religious difference from Egyptian Muslims; in the US, Copts espouse spiritual kinship with conservative Christians and, simultaneously, face American Christian racism.The first of the book’s five chapters locates the arrival of Coptic immigrants to the US since the 1970s against the backdrop of American “persecution politics” in the late twentieth century. The growth of the American Christian Right and US geopolitical ascendancy in this period shaped how Coptic immigrants engaged in political activism and articulated their identities for Western audiences. For American evangelicals, theopolitical narratives about Muslims persecuting Copts provided the impetus for an expanding movement on behalf of persecuted Christians worldwide.Chapter 2 introduces readers to Bahjura, a remote village that has been shaped by forces of empire and by the growing internationalization of Coptic identity. These local-global connections are on display, for example, in parish centers where the Coptic Orthodox Church assists its flock in submitting applications for the Diversity Visa Lottery, improving their chances of selection for a US Green Card. Facilitated by the church, increasing Coptic emigration has elevated feelings of Christian–Muslim sectarianism in Egypt while also generating a sense of global Coptic kinship.The third chapter demonstrates that persecution politics are key to the processes of asylum-seeking in the US. Lukasik finds that American interest in Coptic precarity since the 2011 Egyptian revolution has caused a change in Coptic “legal legibility” (or perceived legal status) in US courts. Rather than evaluating individual Coptic applicants’ experiences of discrimination in Egypt, judges now recognize Copts as a persecuted people, distinct from Egyptian Muslims, and approve the vast majority of their asylum cases on this basis. This legal redefinition, Lukasik argues, has reshaped diasporic Coptic subjectivity and circled back to negatively impact Egyptian Christian–Muslim relations.Chapter 4 centers on American Copts navigating their own racialization in US society amidst post-9/11 rhetoric about terrorism and Islam. Although Lukasik notes that some Copts critique the Islamophobia of US empire, she finds that the threat of being labeled as a dangerous Arab or Muslim has prompted many Copts to reconfigure their identities. They have sought access to white power through their Christianity and participated widely in US security networks. For example, Copts have joined law enforcement in large enough numbers that there now exists a St. Mark Coptic Law Enforcement Officers Society within the NYPD.The fifth and final chapter addresses American Copts’ translations of US culture wars in their efforts to preserve “traditional values.” In particular, Copts have joined the Christian Right in opposing LGBTQ rights and have voiced concerns about public school curricula on gender and sexuality. Notably, despite a shared political conservativism between Egyptian Christian and Muslim immigrants, the campaign for conservative solidarity has more often built on ideas of Christian kinship.Migrants and Martyrs neither discounts the suffering of Copts as religious minorities in Egypt nor embraces the persecution narrative as the definitive mode through which to understand Coptic experience. Instead, Lukasik both identifies dominant discourses of transnational Coptic identity and brings to light alternate Coptic perspectives. One such unconventional account comes in the conclusion, which explores an alternative site of research in Nashville. Faced with inequalities there, the largely working-class Coptic community has mobilized political alliances with other communities of color, disrupting the predominant mode of Coptic persecution politics and elucidating the contradictions to the immigrant’s American dream. Such examples discourage readers from viewing Copts only through the martyr-migrant binary (where Coptic martyrs are either claimed as Christian kin in the US or racialized as outsiders). The reality is far messier and more resistant to essentialization.Readers will gain a wealth of insight on Copts in Egypt and the US, along with historical background on British colonial legacies, Egyptian independence post-1952, and the shifts in conservative American Christian politics since the Cold War. While the engrossing accounts of Lukasik’s interviews and interactions with transnational Copts will draw in readers of all academic levels, the deeper, denser analytical portions of the book are more suited to upper-level students and scholars. This study is groundbreaking in its transnational approach to Coptic life and should be of interest to researchers working in a variety of areas, including anthropology of religion, Middle Eastern studies, migration studies, Christian–Muslim relations, and American evangelicalism. For scholars of world Christianity, the book offers a window into the neglected subject of Middle Eastern Christianity and would yield fruitful comparative insights if read in tandem with studies on other diaspora churches in the US.
Deanna Ferree Womack (Sun,) studied this question.