Julia Elyachar: To start with: why read your recent books, The Surrounds and Remaindered Life, together, and why for CSSAAME? On the journal's website, its goals are stated as seeking to “bring region and area studies into conversation with a rethinking of theory and the disciplines.”1 You are both theorists of the current global condition. And both of you are deeply immersed in the places where you live, think, and work, and from where you theorize. Of course, the books came out at almost the same time. But what beyond this moment is shared? Your books are not about “comparison” or about “comparative studies”—even in the critical way that CSSAAME invoked that phrase at the start. Neither of you is an area studies scholar. There is no “comparing” Africa and Asia in your work. Something else is at play.

But maybe we can start here: When...

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