Introduction Slavery and the Racialization of Humanity: Coordinates for a Comparative Analysis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of North African Studies, 2023
This article brings comparative race and ethnic studies, migration studies, and North/African studies together to investigate how local-historical conceptions of blackness intersect with contemporary border policing of “sub-Saharan” migrants. Defining race as a historically-contingent formation, I argue that blackness emerged at various periods in North African history (from the Islamic expansion to the present-day) to signify inferior social status and non-belonging, meanings that are shaped by the practices, discourses, and memories of slavery. This intervention connects critical studies on racialized border enforcement to other processes of social exclusions already at work within North African social space. It fills a critical gap in North African studies by providing a theoretically- and historically-grounded analysis of racial formation (and especially blackness) in the region that will have broad utility to scholars studying marginalization and marginalized people’s political mobilization at various historical moments. Finally, it challenges contemporary scholarship on race as (only) a modern category forged through European colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery.
No One’s Memory: Blackness at the Limits of Comparative Slavery
POMEPS: Racial Formations in Africa and the Middle East, 2021
who are facing mistreatment, racialized violence and occasionally mass deportation. 7 These essays thus adopt a race-critical lens to look at these questions and to examine more broadly how state oppression and human difference (whether coded as racial, ethnic or caste) operates in, inter alia, Nigeria, Israel, Mauritania or Madagascar. able to sidestep longstanding obstacles to their search for Western allies and win over substantial new public support from American progressives. Ultimately, what these essays demonstrate is both the value and limits of the racial frame for understanding identity-centric disputes in Africa and the Middle East. Despite being developed to explore the binary logic of racial conflict in the West, racialization and racial formation provide considerable intellectual traction when applied to regions outside North America and Europe .
So-Called Indigenous Slavery: West African Historiography and the Limits of Interpretation
Postmodern Culture, 2020
This essay explores the mobilization of so-called "indigenous slavery" in the historiography of slavery in West Africa in order to expose the limits of historiographical interpretation and the tensions between black studies and African studies, which are here constituted around a shared negativity. This discussion provides some context for the debates of historians Walter Rodney and J.D. Fage, while also bringing these concerns into explicit conversation with a line of thought in radical black studies, namely Afro-pessimism. Considering indigenous slavery through the critical analytic of Afro-pessimism exposes the role of the paradigm of racial slavery in determining how slavery comes to be understood in relation to nation building in Africa, with Ghana serving as a particular example.
Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, 2016
Despite the scarcity of sources, the history of African slavery has fostered vivid debates over the nature of the institution and the ways in which gender produced different experiences of slavery. Studying the diversity of women’s experiences of slavery since the advent of Islam in West Africa from an intersectional perspective is a crucial step in order to better assess slave women’s agency in shaping the institution.
Menin Anti Black racism as slavery afterlives Anuac
Anuac, 2024
In the aftermath of the 2011 revolutions and protests across North Africa and the Middle East, Morocco has witnessed unprecedented public debates on “anti-black racism” (in French, le racisme anti-Noir) against sub-Saharan Africans and its connections with the history of slavery. By including in the discussion the voices of sub-Saharan African migrants living in marginalized neighbourhoods of Rabat, this paper complicates any linear causality between historical slavery and current racism. It shows how the history of slavery interweaves with colonial racial legacies and hegemonic whiteness, contemporary EurAfrican border regimes and labour exploitation, which all push vulnerable migrants further onto the margins of society. Highlighting the racialized dimensions of the transcontinental management of migration and the ways blackness is racialized through border(ing), this paper conceives of racism in Morocco as a multi-faceted and historically situated phenomenon that requires careful contextualization along multiple histories and lines of difference.
Arba’īn and Bakhshū’s Lament: African Slavery in the Persian Gulf and the Violence of Cultural Form
Antropologia, 2020
Arba’īn names the Shi’a elegiac ritual commemorating the fortieth day of ‘Āshūrā – the 7th century murder of Husayn at the Battle of Karbala. In South Iranian provinces like Būshihr Arba’īn expresses a distinctly black character marked by animation and drumming virtuosity. Iranian filmmaker Nāsir Taqvāī’s experimental ethnographic documentary Arba’īn (1970) chronicles the regional peculiarities of this ritual, reflecting in both its form and content fragile testament to a haphazardly recorded history of African slavery absorbed into oblivion. Drawing upon historiographical, musicological, ethnographic sources and black studies, this article takes Taqvā’ī’s filmic mediation as an occasion to demonstrate the way so-called syncretized forms reveal historical information about slavery in nontransparent ways.
" Anti-black racism " : debating racial prejudices and the legacies of slavery in Morocco
Growing public attention to violence and discrimination against sub-Saharan Africans in Morocco has recently opened a debate on the issue of “anti-black racism” and its connections to the history of slavery. The parallel between current racism and historical slavery offers a powerful narrative to draw attention to the very difficult situations of many sub-Saharan African migrants in Morocco, as well as to the lived effects of the contemporary racial legacies of slavery. Yet, conflating the two issues in linear and unproblematic ways may not help us to unravel the complexity of the socio-political dynamics underway. This paper seeks to unpack the issue of anti-black racism by examining the diverse ways in which the different social actors (sub-Saharan African migrants, students and activists, as well as Moroccan people and human rights activists) I met in Rabat in 2014 engaged with these debates. The paper suggests that current racism against sub-Saharan Africans cannot be conceptualized simply as a living remnant of the Moroccan history of slavery and its 17th century racialization. On the contrary, it contends that historically rooted anti-black prejudices are deeply entangled with and shaped by current media and political discourses, transnational geopolitics delegating border control to North African states and Morocco’s current position in the international political arena.
Slavery, Theology, and Anti-Blackness in the Arab World
Research Africa Reviews, 2021
As a historian, I am interested in accounting for origins and sources. Accordingly, for me, it is important that any effort to understand or explain contemporary anti-Black racism in the Arab world is faithful to the historical processes that produced and normalized that racism. Fortunately, there are sources that we can consult to yield evidence for such historical accounting. On the weight of historical evidence documented in both primary and secondary sources, we can say authoritatively that the enslavement of Black Africans across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean corridors is the bedrock of Arab anti-Blackness. Saharan and Indian Ocean slavery produced and legitimized the constellation of discriminatory attitudes, devaluing epithets, and institutional exclusions we now describe under the analytic rubric of anti-Blackness in the Arab world and in the Sahelian borderlands. Slavery established baselines for intergroup relations and sociological norms. It also shaped a significant aspect of Islamic exegetical practice, inflecting the direction and meaning of jurisprudential consensuses that remain in place as authoritative legal codes in the Muslim societies of the Middle East and the Sahel. These slave trades, one overland and the other seaborne, predated the Atlantic slave trade by several centuries. Therefore, by the basic law of chronological historical causality, neither the trades themselves nor the anti-Blackness that they authorized and democratized in the Arab world could have resulted from Euro-American Atlantic enslavement, colonial racism, and the resulting global entwinement of white supremacy and capitalism. This fact challenges the increasingly prevalent argument that anti-Blackness in the Arab world maps onto and overlapped with the global ascent of white supremacy along with the rise of mercantile and industrial capitalism and colonization. There is a tendency nowadays to analytically conflate European colonization in the Arab world with the rise of anti-Blackness and ideas of Arab superiority. And this is done in a manner that places the blame for anti-Black racism as much on colonialism as on historical, sociological, and theological processes within Arab Muslim society; ones that predated nineteenth century European colonization in the Arab world by many centuries. So widespread has this explanatory template become in certain scholarly circles that conferences and workshops are framed around it as if its verity has been established by scholarly consensus. One recent example is a workshop organized by the Qatar campus of Northwestern University, which framed its November 17, 2020, workshop as a conversation on "Slavery, Colonialism, and Race in the Muslim World." Furthermore, the workshop's electronic poster/announcement invited scholars to register to listen to "panelists [who] will address how processes of enslavement, colonialism, and contemporary prejudice in Muslim societies have racialized "non-white" Arabs and other Muslims, and perhaps even interiorized imported notions
2014 - Call for Papers: The Question of Slavery in Africa: Politicisation and Mobilisation
2014
The analysis of political life in a large number of African countries is incomplete if we do not take into account the claims made about the thorny question of slavery and its legacies. With the emergence of recent emancipation movements, political parties, and organisations initiated by groups with slave status, the fight against slavery and its consequences is currently politicised on local, national, and even international levels. This sometimes also goes hand in hand with increased mediatisation. Using different discourses and collective forms of action according to different contexts and regions, the fight for the recognition and the identity (re-)construction of groups with slave origins can no longer be ignored. (..)