Fall 2025 History GU4709 section 001

Race and Enslavement in the Middle East

Race Enslavement - Middle

Call Number 12951
Day & Time
Location
W 10:10am-12:00pm
To be announced
Points 4
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Type SEMINAR
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

This research seminar explores the nexus between race and enslavement in the Middle East and broader Indian Ocean world. This course will re-envision the contours of the Middle East as part of a larger geography that extends beyond Southwest Asia and North Africa, highlighting its deep ties to what is often called “Black Africa.” It also looks at Blackness within the Middle East and examines its long history of belonging, exchange, and migration. It investigates the kinds of knowledge production required to erase these ties and connections, and to produce a vaguely “brown” racial sphere that both homogenizes the Middle East and removes any references to Blackness from its history and societies. Throughout the course, we will probe the memories and legacies of enslavement across the Middle East and Indian Ocean world. How has enslavement and the lives of those enslaved been remembered, defined, written about, and narrated in both academic and non-academic texts? What were the factors that enabled remembering or forgetting these pasts and the people’s lives they controlled? And how do these narratives relate to the questions of race? This course considers narratives and their afterlives from throughout North Africa, the Nile Valley, West Asia, and South Asia.

Web Site Vergil
Department History
Enrollment 0 students (10 max) as of 2:06PM Friday, April 4, 2025
Subject History
Number GU4709
Section 001
Division Interfaculty
Section key 20253HIST4709W001