Shana Minkin is Associate Professor of International and Global Studies at Sewanee: The University of the South. She elaborates upon the ideas presented in this essay in Imperial Bodies: Empire and Death in Alexandria, Egypt, published by Stanford University Press in 2019. Her latest research is focused on memory, internalized diaspora, and belonging, using the lives and deaths of two Egyptian Jewish sisters as her primary focus. For more on this project, see “Simone’s Funeral: Egyptian Lives, Jewish Deaths in Twenty-First Century Cairo.”