The MELA Social Justice Committee will host a virtual lecture with Matthew Hopper as 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. The lecture will be on March 18th, 2021, at 11AM EST (UTC -5). This lecture *will not be recorded*, so we hope you can join us live!
Please register for the lecture here: http://bit.ly/MELAHopper
Enslaved Africans and their descendants contributed in vital ways to the economy and culture of eastern Arabia. Global economic forces, especially international demand for Gulf pearls and dates, drove demand in the Gulf for slave labor from Africa. The reversal of those trends in the 1930s spelled economic collapse for the Gulf and an eventual end to the slave trade. This presentation traces the origins of the African diaspora in eastern Arabia, explores the lives and labors of enslaved Africans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and discusses the significance of the African legacy in the Gulf today.
Matthew S. Hopper is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His book, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), was a finalist for the 2016 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA (2006), M.A. in African Studies from UCLA (2000) and M.A. in History from Temple University (1998). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University (2009), a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2015), and the Smuts Visiting Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge (2016). He has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and Fulbright-Hays, and his writing has been published in Annales, Itinerario, and the Journal of African Development. He is currently writing a history of liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean world.