דמגנע
دمغنع
دمگەنع
DamGana

The Damgana and
the Great Migration

The Great Migration was one of the largest demographic changes in the history of the United States. Fleeing persecution, Black populations in the United States emigrated from southern states and resettled in other parts of the country.

Interestingly, the Jewish movements in the Islamic world have many great similarities. One of the main differences, though, is that many Jews moved between the Islamic states and the Jewish state. However, this is a problem of conceptualization, not of the reality on the ground. Although many Islamic states were established after World War I, many of them had been formally the territory of the Ottoman Empire, as was the future Jewish state.

The similarities between the Great Migration and the Damgana become clearer if we consider the borders which had existed for centuries, right up until the Damgana began. We can clarify the overt geographic and political parallels between the Great Migration and the Damgana if we frame movement of Jewish populations as occuring within the centuries-old borders of the united provinces in the Ottoman Empire (as opposed to recently balkanized states), in comparison to Black population movement with the relatively recent borders of the federal states in the United States.

In other words, the Great Migration and the Damgana were more similar than they were dissimilar. Jewish migration in the Damgana often crossed country lines, but these were newly established countries that had often been parts of united Caliphates for centuries. Black migration in the Great Migration did not cross counutry lines, but the United States had just recently completed annexing countless Mexican, Spanish, and Indigeneous territories that would previously have been sovereign borders. In both cases, neither were truly settlers when considering the power dynamics defining their respective continents. Also, the focus on exogenous borders within which Jewish and Black populations were being oppressed is an exclusionary act of erasure towards Jewish and Black experience.