African Slaves Research Articles

Musicians, Chariot Bearers, and Ghost Characters: The Spectrality of Black Slavery in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama

The article discusses early modern English plays from the 1590s to the 1610s, set in or referring to the Mediterranean, which feature Black African characters in marginal roles. These characters are ‘spectral’ in that they have no speaking part but appear briefly as attendants, servants, musicians, or indeed slaves. The article argues that their spectrality evokes the presence of Black African slaves in the Mediterranean, which has often been ignored in Early Modern Studies. However, through these characters Black slavery is turned into a mere spectacle, performed for the gaze of the theatre audience in early modern London.

Bigger’s Thing

Abstract This essay argues that, in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Boris Max’s pronouncement to his client, “This thing’s bigger than you,” indicates not only the aporetic status of Black being—and ultimately, all singularities—in modernity but also the process through which this hard knot can begin to be unraveled. The communist lawyer at once identifies his client with Mary Dalton’s murder and its aftermath (“This thing’s Bigger”) and, through the identification, seems to miss the singularity of his being (“bigger than you”). The double gesture repeats Karl Marx’s identification of the proletariat as the particularity that encompasses the “concrete universal.” Condensed in Max’s speech act, Wright’s argument turns Marx’s characterization of capitalist modernity into one of diasporic modernity. In several of his texts, Wright indicates that, while the modern era promised the emergence of this self-determining, rational being, the birth was aborted by the “tragic error” of the African slave trade and the consequent forms of bad faith that are characteristic of modern racial identities. This history of bad faith has prevented the actualization of modernity’s promise; with Boris Max’s formula for Bigger’s aporetic being, Wright seeks to precipitate modernity’s second coming.

A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam in the Eyes of Chouki El Hamel

"Black Morocco" is a study that reveals the historical course of slavery, race and gender issues in North Africa in the context of the relationship between religion and politics. It traces the transmission of the subconscious from the past to the present. The study aims to reveal the silenced history of North African slavery, and endeavors to reveal the demand for truth and justice of the living memory outside the official memory constructed by the power within the scope of remembering and forgetting. The author reflects his professional ethical concerns throughout the work by going beyond the historiography constructed in accordance with the modernity's understanding of history. Accordingly, he has opened historical facts to discussion in the context of confronting the past and tried to present the necessity of this without pragmatic political concerns and free from prejudices.

Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America

ABSTRACT Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of White and Black, adjunct to White privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against Black people. Historical accounts of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans trace their origins to how Asian coolie labor has served to triangulate White capital and African slavery over the course of European modernity. If this is the material history of in-betweenness, what is the psychic corollary of the middle-man thesis? Through an analysis of the Netflix dark comedy series Beef, as well as case histories of Asian American patients and students, we argue that the psychic effects of occupying a racially intermediate position implicate an unexplored terrain of racial rage and racial guilt that Asian Americans are insistently socialized to hold on behalf of others.

Historical shocks and community-based enterprises: the slave trades, family dynamics, and social entrepreneurship in Africa

ABSTRACT This study investigates how exposure to traumatic historical shocks shapes the emergence of community-based enterprises across geographic regions in Africa. Leveraging a family embeddedness theoretical lens in the context of the traumatic background of the historic African slave trades, we theorize that the extent of slave exports is adversely related to cohesion and trust in family institutions in the affected regions, thereby reducing the likelihood of community-based enterprises in the modern era. Nevertheless, we also conjecture that this legacy of social structure disintegration and mistrust created by historical trauma from the slave trades can be relieved through contemporary family embeddedness in entrepreneurial activity. Empirically, we test these hypotheses by merging slave export data from 500 years of the African slave trades with data on 4,685 modern social enterprises across 49 African countries. The results corroborate the main hypothesis and show that the effect of slave exports on the likelihood of community-based enterprises is contingent on family funding and female involvement in social enterprises. These findings highlight the central role of familial dynamics in the link between historical trauma and modern entrepreneurial strategy.

Vulnerability and Dependence in Slavery and Post-Slavery Societies: A Historicisation of the Enslaved Children (Pon Pekpen) from the Bamum Kingdom (West Cameroon)

This article is a reflection on the history of enslaved children (Pon pekpen) in African slavery and post-slavery societies, such as the Bamum Kingdom. This traditional monarchy of the Grassfields of Cameroon, founded in 1394 by Nchare Yen, was one of the largest providers of captives transported to the Atlantic coast and used locally to meet the needs of traditional slavery. In this kingdom, slaves and their descendants, as well as enslaved peoples, represented nearly 80% of the total population. The trade of captives and servile practices left indelible traces, particularly where enslaved children were concerned. So, what did enslaved children represent in African slavery and post-slavery societies, such as the Bamum Kingdom? The aim of this study is to show that the enslaved children were the most vulnerable and dependent members of slavery and post-slavery systems. This study is based on oral, archival iconographic, written and electronic sources, using theories of social dominance and subaltern studies. It clearly shows that the vulnerability and dependence of enslaved children (Pon pekpen) made them special, weak and hopeful links in the slavery system and the persistence of slavery practices. They were mainly victims of traditional slavery and of the trans-Saharan and transatlantic slave trades. Despite the formal abolition of the slave trade and slavery between the 19th and 20th centuries, enslaved children and the descendants of enslaved people continue to be victims of a kind of subalternisation because they are usually considered second-class citizens.

The Dual Edges of Faith: the Role of Religion in Colonial Spain and the Triangle Trade

This essay explores the intricate and multifaceted relationship between religion, power dynamics, and the Triangle Trade in colonial Spain. By looking at the role faith plays as the driving force for conquest and a tool for legitimizing exploitation. This essay provides a nuanced comprehension of the intricacies that significantly influenced the fate of the Spanish colonies, intricately dissecting the interaction between religious zeal, imperial aspirations, and economic interests while delving deeply into the missionary endeavors of explorers, the institutionalization of labor through the encomienda system, and the darker aspects of the Triangle Trade, including the exploitation of African slaves. This exploration brings to light how the Catholic Church, in collaboration with the Spanish Crown, intricately molded the historical trajectory of the Spanish colonies. The essay acknowledges the inherent contradictions in using faith as a tool for power and control, prompting readers to critically engage with the profound complexities embedded in this historical narrative.

An Abolitionist Vicious Circle: Slaving, Antislavery, and Violence on the Shores of Lake Tanganyika at the Onset of Colonial Occupation

ABSTRACT In the late nineteenth century, abolitionists felt entitled to use all possible means to save the African victims of the slave trade. As European imperialism rose, abolitionism legitimized interventionism. This article explores how a major humanitarian movement could sanction colonial occupation and the violence that accompanied it. It also examines the position of African slaveholders who resisted the entrenchment of European rule and defended an order in which slavery was common. It focuses on two main actors: French Captain Leopold Joubert, Catholic royalist and former pontifical Zouave who supported Cardinal Lavigerie's Missionaries of Africa and Belgian King Leopold II's allegedly abolitionist endeavours; and Tippu Tip, a trader and slaver who, like Joubert, worked for self-styled abolitionists such as Leopold II and the Sultan of Zanzibar. The connected microhistories of these men show how the international problematization of African slavery fuelled both European imperialism and anti-colonial resistance, while also creating circumstances in which enslaved persons emancipated themselves. The article investigates the moral perceptions of individuals whose sense of self was predicated upon values embodied by Europe's monarchies, the papacy of Rome, and the sultanate of Zanzibar. Faced with what they perceived as existential threats to these institutions, they responded with rising radicalism.

Girmityas' Portrayal in Ashwin Desai’s Inside Indian Indenture: An Apprehensive Study

Indentured system was highly tormented form of slavery began when the Britishiers faced the lack of labourers at the sugar, cotton and tea plantation due to the end of African slavery . In this system millions of Indians were contracted to work in the 19 British colonies included Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, South Africa on low wages.Girmityas refers to those bonded indian slaves who agreed to migrate to british colonies in order to escape from the poverty and famine of british india with dream of getting a life of roses without having any idea of difficulties that they were going to face .Some were also defrauded into Migration without any complete knowledge. They were recruited on different plantations by signing a contract of four to five years with the condition of providing the return amenities at the end of their contract however only seldom time it happened. Many died during the journey that took 10 to 20 weeks and many tried to return to their homeland however , failed. In Literature the representation of these turmoiled indentured labourers were first began in Caribbean literature by ARF. Webber, V.S Naipaul, Ashwin Desai etc. In Ashwin Desai’s Inside Indian Indenture we get the realistic and authentic portrayal of the biography of indentured labourers who were ignored by the history. This book seeks to give voice to those unvoiced people whose stories still remained unknown to the masses . This book is a journey through all those silenced, ignored indentured labourers who were tormented by the hardships showered on them by the proprietors.

Contextualized Rights as Effective Rights to All: The Case of Affirmative Action in Brazil

This article explores how two main narratives about slavery may lead to varying perspectives on social rights. Some collective narratives endorse a superficial idea of equality of rights, neglecting factors such as race and ethnicity, while others reject this apparent universalistic view, promoting more effective, de facto equality. The latter narrative supports horizontal redistribution, strongly contrasting with the former. Using Brazil’s affirmative action programs for Black students as a case study, this article will address two prevalent national narratives about the slavery of Black Africans and persons of Black African descent. Only one of those narratives could lead to what I would identify as a “contextualized theory of rights,” ensuring horizontal equality amidst a backdrop of brutal slavery and structural racism. This narrative offers a plurally faceted, dialogical approach to rights that can respond to the needs of differently situated individuals. The article will explore the evolution of such a collective narrative in Brazil’s race relations.

What Color Is Trans? Notes on Trans Historiography in the Afterlife of the East African Slave Trade

What Color Is Trans? Notes on Trans Historiography in the Afterlife of the East African Slave Trade

Ugly Past/Insensitive Present: Blackface in Persian Popular Entertainment

Abstract: This article is a scholarly expansion of my previous public writing in HowlRound entitled “Iranian Blackface Clowns are Racist, No Matter How You Sugarcoat Them in Obscure Archaic Mythology.” In the essay, I argue siāh-bāzi, an Iranian form of popular entertainment that features a main character in blackface, is indeed a racialized mockery of the African slaves who were brought to Iran from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries. In the present article, I delve deeper into the history of slavery in Iran as a context for sāh-bāzi . I also analyze the embodiment techniques in siāh-bāzi to demonstrate its racial connotations .

Reconsidering the Curse of Ham in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Canaan, “Vitious Race,” and Renaissance Biblical Commentary

ABSTRACT John Milton writes in Paradise Lost of a “vitious Race,” which many scholars have taken to signal his endorsement of the slavery of Black Africans. Yet these scholars often mistakenly associate Milton’s language with certain contemporary views that were indeed racist. For Milton, the “curse” on the “vitious Race” does not refer to a European subjugation of Black Africans in the slave trade but is at once more general and more specific. He subsequently in the epic applies this curse specifically to Israel’s conquest of the Canaanite people while also suggesting the impact of the curse on many “Nations,” including his own England.

The Abolition of Slavery in Africa's Legal Histories

AbstractThis introduction contextualizes the special issue's articles in the broader continental dynamics. It discusses the Eurocentric bias of the historiography and suggests that the view that Europe was responsible for the legal abolition of slavery in Africa should be nuanced and qualified. Some independent African polities abolished slavery before Europe's colonial occupation. Nowhere did European abolitionists encounter a tabula rasa: African polities had complex jurisdictions, oral or written, which formed the normative background against which slavery's abolition should be studied. To do so, however, it is misleading to imagine abolitionism as a unitary movement spreading globally out of Europe. What happened differed from context to context. Normative systems varied, and so did abolition's legal processes. This introduction examines the dynamics that led to the introduction and implementation of anti-slavery laws in African legal systems. It recenters the analysis of the legal abolition of slavery in Africa around particular African actors, concepts, strategies, and procedures.

Lot's Daughters and Naomi and Ruth: Of “Moral Love” and National Myths

ABSTRACTThis essay argues that the book of Ruth's reopening of Israel's history and national mythology functions in such a way as to redeem, as it were, the plight of the subaltern Moabite—a plight begun with the daughters of Lot in Genesis 19. A parallel is then drawn with the 1619 Project, the recent journalistic project which posits the entire historical sweep of African slavery in North America since 1619 as the defining arc of the United States' founding. As theoretical frames, the essay draws on the work of literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (including her concept of “moral love”) and political philosopher Arash Abizadeh. In so doing, the essay illustrates how a “functionalist” approach to biblical ethics that balances the content of the biblical narrative with attention to how the text functions in its broader context can provide guidance for contemporary ethical application.

The Long-term Impact of the Historical Slave Trade in Africa on Contemporary Industrialization

The Long-term Impact of the Historical Slave Trade in Africa on Contemporary Industrialization

“In the Name of the God of All Names: Yahweh, Obatalá, Olorum”: The 1981 Quilombos Mass as an Ecumenical Pilgrimage in Brazil

AbstractOn November 22, 1981, thousands of laypeople, along with bishops, priests, and theologians, gathered in Recife to celebrate the Eucharist. Offered during a military dictatorship in a period of popular insurgency, the Quilombos Mass mourned the death of millions in the African slave trade, sought pardon for the Church's past sins, and celebrated the resistance of Blacks in Brazil and beyond its borders. The acclaimed Black Brazilian pop star and activist Milton de Nascimento collaborated with an activist poet and three bishops to produce a multimedia performance; in the spirit of liberation theology, it was marked by striking visuals, dance, music, and the invocation of the sacred. This article draws on reportage, speeches and correspondence, military court and intelligence records, published interviews, and the author's interview with one of its composers. It offers a close textual analysis, with attention to Catholic theological debates, as well as an analysis of the performance itself, drawn from video recordings and bringing attention to aspects neglected by most commentators, who refer only to the album, as it was finally produced. Initially stifled by the Vatican, Milton's masterpiece, issued as an album on vinyl and performed in paid concerts, became a powerful cultural reference for activists, serving as a touchstone for a strategic alliance between Black activists and the liberationist Church.

Children, Agricultural Labor, and Engagement à Temps in the 1820s Senegal River Valley

I examine the preference for children under engagement à temps (indenture) in Senegal, especially the Senegal River Valley, in the 1820s. In the late 1810s and early 1820s, Senegal’s administrators wished to build cotton and indigo plantations in the Senegal River Valley to replace profits lost after the turbulence of the Age of Revolutions, especially the loss of colonial Haiti, which had been France’s most profitable colony. However, France’s 1817 prohibition of the slave trade signaled to administrators that they would have to obtain non-enslaved workers for the plantations they wished to build. Thus, they created rachat (redemption) and engagement à temps. Under this system, Senegal’s administrators, colonists, and habitants bought captives on African slave markets, “redeemed” the captive from slavery, then forced a fourteen-year engagement à temps contract on the individual with the promise of eventual “freedom” from servitude. Senegal’s administrators, especially Governor Jacques François Roger, prioritized obtaining children, whom they defined as anyone under the age of sixteen, for this practice because they saw children as a docile labor force which would more easily take root in the colony, especially in its nascent plantation sector. By acquiring children, Roger hoped to create highly coercible workers committed to agriculture who would not abandon the plantations after the expiration of their contracts. Using correspondence among Senegal’s administrators, I trace the reasoning behind the preference for people under the age of sixteen, in addition to the two primary mechanisms used to acquire children. The first mechanism was rachat. An examination of rachats registered at Bakel in 1825, located in the notarial archives of St Louis at the Archives nationales du Sénégal, reveals that 59.5 per cent of rachats involved people under the age of sixteen. Second, the September 28, 1822 decree that regulated engagement à temps in the colony stated that any child born to a mother working as an engagée à temps had to work for the mother’s engagiste until the age of twenty-one, the age of majority in French legislation, in exchange for the care they had received in childhood. While this group of children did not experience rachat, the law enabled administrators to take advantage of their physical labor in addition to the reproductive labor of their mothers. I argue that the abolition of the slave trade forced French administrators, colonists, and habitants in 1820s Senegal to envision new ways to build a stable laboring population for the plantation economy they hoped to build along the Senegal River; because of free labor shortages in the region, rachat and engagement à temps appeared to be a solution. Children, seen as malleable and more coercible than adults, came to be seen as a key component of this workforce because administrators and colonists hoped they would grow up to be adults loyal to the French colonial economy. I also argue that historiographical methodologies pioneered by scholars of gender and reproduction under Atlantic slavery provide a useful way of grappling with the perspectives of people forced into engagement à temps. Overall, a focus on the importance of children to engagement à temps allows us to probe the continuities that tie together slavery and the slave trade, on the one hand, and on the other, the forced labor practices proliferated alongside abolition.

“Our blood is becoming white”: Race, religion, and Siddi becoming in Hyderabad, India

Abstract“Our blood is becoming white.” This was a constant lament I heard from siddis in contemporary Hyderabad, India—third‐ and fourth‐generation descendants of East African slaves and soldiers recruited by the local ruler or Nizam in the 1860s to form the African Cavalry Guard in his army. The article explores this siddi lament and the multivalent symbols—of color, blood, affect, belonging—latent in it. It draws on fieldwork conducted over the course of the last decade among siddis in Hyderabad, ambivalently situated as Indian citizens who are racialized as “Black” in an Indian and global order that denigrates Blackness and marked by their religious identification as Muslim in a virulently Hindu nation. The article unpacks these contexts, exploring the forces of empire and region and constructions of race, gender, and religion that have prodded and inflected siddi processes of becoming. In so doing, it unearths the ways in which Blackness, Muslimness, and masculinity are constituted as (intersecting) social and political categories, caught in the dialectics of alienation and intimacy, belonging and otherness, with enduring effects on the lives and cosmologies of siddis in Hyderabad and on the contemporary politics of race, gender, and religion in India.

Abolicionismo e escravagismo no Padre Antônio Vieira: uma controvérsia anacrônica

This article analyzes the controversy about slavery produced by commentators in the works of Antônio Vieira. In addition to being a great speaker, the Jesuit was famous for his defense of the American Indians, having even influenced Portugal's legislation on indigenous slavery and was expelled from Maranhão for such opinions. Yet, when it comes to African slavery, Vieira's texts prove to be more conformist. Thus, commentators were divided into classifying the author either as abolitionist, or as a slaver. However, a contextualization of Vieira's ideas within the thoughts of Iberian Scholasticism allows a better understanding of his legacy and may dispense with such labels altogether.