Important update, 9/23/20: The link for this lecture has been changed. Please click here to join! No registration required!
Zavier Wingham will give a talk on, “Notes from the Field: On Researching Blackness, Slavery, and the African Diaspora in the Ottoman Empire!” The lecture will be held on September 24th, 2020, at 12PM EDT (UTC -4). It will not be recorded, so we hope you are able to join us live!
If you are willing, please donate to our GoFundMe Campaign, which will enable us to offer an honorarium to the speakers. As of this post, we are 3/4 of the way to our goal of funding our entire first season– we are so grateful to everyone who has donated and hope you can help us get the rest of the way!
Notes from the Field: On Researching Blackness, Slavery,
and the African Diaspora in the Ottoman Empire
Part of the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA) Social Justice Lecture Series 2020-2021 season, Stories and Silences: Research on Race in the Middle East.
we wanted to be alive long
enough to bear witness
–Asiya Wadud, Syncope (2019)
What, if anything, remains in the wake – the aftermath – of slavery?
–Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman empire experienced a revival in the black slave trade. As a result of the Egyptian occupation of Sudan in 1820 and the Ottoman occupation in 1835, enslaved Africans entered Ottoman markets, thus forming a stronger link between the imperial center and its frontiers. Often, Ottomans disregarded ethnic and geographic distinctions between Africans and instead projected their own ideas of difference, labeling them zenci (black) and/or Arap (Arab). In this same period, the empire sought to modernize its functions in relation to western Europe and many Ottoman elites seized upon hierarchical civilizational discourse, and in doing so, metaphors of slavery and race. This talk explores the historical background of blackness, slavery, and the African diaspora in the Ottoman empire, as well as (un)disciplinary methods and archival aspects of research.
Zavier Wingham is a PhD candidate in the joint program for History and Middle East and Islamic Studies at New York University. His dissertation research explores how changing Ottoman elite conceptions of race, slavery, and blackness in the Ottoman Empire contributed to new forms of racialization of enslaved and manumitted Africans between the 1840s and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, as well as how Africans in the Ottoman empire experienced these processes of racialization and sought to create new kinds of community and ways of living.