Between Worlds: Identity, Survival, and Epistemic Making in Modernities of the Global South (1860–1933)

How should we make sense of the life of an ordinary Egyptian who worked in China for thirty-two years in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century? Centering on the persistent crises, dislocation, and partial belonging that Ahmed Fahmy (1860–1933) experienced while moving along a gamut of linguistic, religious, geographic, and epistemic spaces in Egypt, Great Britain, China, and the United States, this article unpacks the complexity of Fahmy’s identities. His Afro-Asian transregional life reflects not simply the hybridity of a modern subject but also the contradictions of modernity in the Global South and the interplay of global structure and individual agency. For people like Fahmy, life is a fractured and contingent process where identity negotiations and survival were themselves forms of world-making.