Candace Lukasik’s Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire stands as the first full-length ethnographic study to offer a nuanced and multilayered anthropological analysis of how immigrant Copts in the United States interpret their political positioning and religious identity within the framework of the American Christian imaginary of Eastern Christian persecution. Building on earlier scholarship on the politics of minoritization in Egypt, the book illustrates how Copts’ collective memory of persecution and history of long-standing minoritization within Egypt inform their transnational alignment with American Christian conservatives. Central to Lukasik’s argument is the symbol of the iconic figure of the Coptic martyr, where the US support for Copts becomes contingent upon their martyrdom narrative—their targeting by Islamic sectarian violence in Egypt. As a result of this conditionality, Copts engage in “claims-making practices […] in their advocacy, and in their own identity formation as immigrants and citizens in a conservative American Christian landscape” (p. 4).
Martyrs and Migrants spans two decades of research and is grounded in a decade of fieldwork and interviews with Copts across diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, from Upper Egypt to New York, New Jersey, and Nashville. Its personal stories and communal narratives bring readers closer to an emic understanding of the affective dimensions of Coptic diasporic life. While Lukasik’s analysis of these interviews eloquently captures the nuances of the Coptic experience to gain political legitimacy, it foregrounds the role of hegemonic conservative Christian America in shaping Copts’ (re)construction of their social, political, and economic subjectivities through tropes of martyrdom, salvation, and cultural allegiance. These alliances, she notes, are not merely ideological; they are embedded in US imperial narratives that instrumentalize religious persecution, shaping identity formation while simultaneously obscuring the economic and racial experiences of minority communities. Through this lens, Coptic religious identity becomes entangled in American “culture wars,” where the collective memory of Coptic persecution becomes a mechanism of political legibility and belonging.
The book skillfully situates Copts within broader discourses of empire, racialization, and religious nationalism, examining the multilayered dynamics of belonging and exclusion in the American sociopolitical landscape. The book reveals the paradox at the heart of what Lukasik terms “persecution politics” or the strategic deployment of religious suffering to forge diasporic alliances, whereby “Copts are caught between their racialized migration and the theopoliticization of their bloody martyrdom” (p. 177). This paradox is crystallized in Lukasik’s assertion that “empire can be both the sickness and the remedy,” capturing how imperial structures simultaneously generate conditions of marginalization and provide the frameworks through which minoritized communities seek recognition (p. 210).
To unpack this paradox, Lukasik embeds the contemporary experiences of Copts within a transhistorical framework of imperial power and racial logic. The book traces the historical positioning of Coptic representation in British colonial narratives that elevated Copts as racially distinct, direct descendants of ancient Egyptians, and therefore superior to their Muslim compatriots. Lukasik compellingly demonstrates how such constructions of ethno-religious superiority are reconfigured in the American context, where racial classification and the politics of immigrant identity introduce new axes of marginalization. The book highlights the formation of diasporic subjectivity at the intersection of inherited colonial imaginaries and emergent US racial and religious orders.
Particularly compelling is Lukasik’s novel analysis of how post-9/11 securitization in the US has collapsed Arab identity into a monolithic Muslim category, thereby erasing the visibility of Christian Arabs such as the Copts. The book captures how Copts have navigated this terrain by actively asserting their religious and ethnic distinctiveness from Muslim communities to resist homogenizing narratives and to secure their place within dominant frameworks of Christian Americanness. Equally important has been Copts’ condemnation of anti-Christian America seen as a threat to their religious identity: “In these diasporic and transnational renderings of long-standing and reinvigorated US culture wars, Coptic Christians have reimagined their Christianity, not just in opposition to Islam and Muslims, but also under new itineraries of secular threat” (p. 177).
The book’s bipartite structure effectively supports its central project of interweaving the themes of martyrdom and migration. The first section, “Scales of Blood,” offers a fresh analytical lens that interrogates the entanglement of American political ideologies, particularly the rise of the Christian Right and its immigration and asylum policies from the end of the Cold War to the present, with Coptic transnational identity formation. This approach reveals how macro-level geopolitical shifts shape not only patterns of movement but also diasporic narratives of persecution and belonging. It also offers a critical reinterpretation of earlier scholarship on the political advocacy of Aqbāṭ al-mahjar (diasporic Copts) who mobilized discourses of religious victimhood to garner US support for Copts in Egypt. However, Lukasik also questions the limits of this victim-centric framing in obscuring Copts’ struggle to fit into the American racialization discourse. The book invites a reconsideration of American moral economies that can delimit the possibilities for immigrant integration and self-representation.
The second part, “Communities of Blood,” extends the book’s critical framework by examining how Copts engage in the politics of translation and interpretation in the US to actively (re)construct and assert their Copticity amid the history of their marginalization in Egypt. This section traces transformative historical periods, such as the aftermath of the January 25, 2011 Egyptian Revolution and the Maspero Massacre, to illustrate how Copts rearticulated their Christian identity and claims to citizenship, challenging the Egyptian nation-state’s hegemonic rhetoric of national unity to erase religious difference. Here, Lukasik highlights the ambivalent space Copts occupy as a religious minority who, once in the US, become racialized subjects encountering a terrain of racial and religious categorization within overlapping regimes of national and imperial power.
A particularly illuminating dimension of Martyrs and Migrants lies in its interpretive lens on the Coptic diaspora’s responses to contemporary American social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights, and their support for right-wing politicians, such as Donald Trump, in the 2020 US presidential election. Drawing on interviews, Lukasik illustrates how many migrant Copts valorize economic success as an aspirational goal and symbolic embrace of capitalist ideals that resonate with conservative American Christianity. This economic positioning also serves as a means of distinction from socioeconomically marginalized groups, particularly Black communities, revealing how racial hierarchies are negotiated within immigrant identity construction. Lukasik argues that Coptic alignment with the American Right is a mechanism to counteract the enduring “legacies of minoritization in Egypt,” assert moral authority in a new national context, affirm conservative values, and safeguard their religious identity (p. 199). Here, the inclusion of Coptic views and practices around abortion within Egypt could have further elucidated the book’s contention about transnational recontextualizations of Coptic positions across cultural and national boundaries, capturing the contingent nature of diasporic identity formation.
By centering the US imperial narrative that casts Copts as victims in need of rescue while eliding their experiences of racialization, Lukasik engages a crucial and underexplored discourse: how Copts navigate the racial logics of American society. She demonstrates that diaspora identity is actively constructed within intersecting systems of race, religion, and empire. Her analysis brings to the fore the racial anxieties faced particularly by immigrant, first- and second-generation Copts, who often encounter racialized expectations and exclusions in educational and professional spaces. The book opens an essential line of inquiry into how immigrant religious minorities contend with US racial hierarchies while seeking visibility and legitimacy.
Overall, Martyrs and Migrants is a seminal ethnographic contribution that lays a vital foundation for future scholarship on identity formation among migrant minorities, especially among descendants of diasporic Copts, and the shifting hierarchies of belonging in transnational contexts.
