‘There is no race here’: on blackness, slavery, and disavowal in North Africa and North African studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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 marginalisation and marginalised people’s political mobilisation at various historical moments. Finally, it challenges contemporary scholarship on race as (only) a modern category forged through European colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery.