Narrating the Enslaved, the Outcast, and Marginalized: Slavery in the Islamicate World

Catalog description

What did it mean to be enslaved in the nineteenth-century Muslim world? This course explores the history and lived experience of slavery across the Islamicate world, tracing a period of profound transformation shaped by the age of abolition, modernizing reforms, imperial ambition, and the birth of modern nation-states. Grounded in a comparative review of slavery's deep historical roots across societies, we will move beyond legal and economic histories to center the voices of the enslaved themselves, drawing on historical fiction, contemporary novels, memoirs, and first- hand narratives from across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, East Africa, and the broader Muslim world. We will engage with slavery as a multidimensional institution, exploring its economic logics, its gendered structures, and its deep entanglement with race, religion, and human dignity, while keeping at the center of our inquiry the long shadow slavery casts into the present. Among the questions we will ask are: What did it mean to be enslaved in an Islamicate household, palace, or trade network? How did emerging discourses of freedom, human rights, and abolitionism reshape, but not erase, the social hierarchies slavery had produced? How were categories of race politically formed and contested, and how were whiteness and blackness constructed, represented, and mobilized in literature, law, and social life? And how does testimony, the enslaved person's own voice, differ from, and unsettle, both literary representation and the official historical record? Throughout, we pay particular attention to figures who existed at the margins: the concubine, the castrated man, the freed slave, the domestic servant who was never quite free, those whose stories most powerfully reveal what bondage meant, and what it left behind.