Beyond the Mountains: Social and Political Imaginaries in Gilgit-Baltistan (Raachi, 2024) is a multilingual, indigenous volume and collaborative research endeavor with the aim of decolonizing knowledge. This talk will focus on the politics of race and anthropology historically in Gilgit-Baltistan, the necessity of local knowledges, and rethinking publishing and the academy in this historical conjuncture.

In the fall of 1920, the Egyptian police found seventeen female corpses buried under the floor of five houses in the working-class district of Labban, Alexandria. Several men and women were charged with the mass killing, yet two sisters among them – Rayyā and Sakīna – came to be remembered as its main perpetrators. This paper interrogates the genealogy of such representation. It seeks to show how, months before the trial and with no police evidence, the Egyptian press presented Rayyā and Sakīna as the masterminds of the crimes and Rayyā, in particular, as the boss of the gang.