In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks acro... more In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks across the Ottoman Empire and throughout Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Unlike the Atlantic trade, slavery in this region crossed and mixed racial and ethnic lines. Fair-skinned Circassian men and women were as vulnerable to enslavement in the Nile Valley as were teenagers from Sudan or Ethiopia. Tell This in My Memory opens up a new window in the study of slavery in the modern Middle East, taking up personal narratives of slaves and slave owners to shed light on the anxieties and intimacies of personal experience. The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries later confronted - or not - the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these vocabularies of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2007
“I have heard, Salim,” said my master, “that you are a good dancer and singer. I wish you to show... more “I have heard, Salim,” said my master, “that you are a good dancer and singer. I wish you to show my guests what you can do!”
For many years, I felt locked out of the intimate spaces in Virginia Woolf’s fiction. I read A Ro... more For many years, I felt locked out of the intimate spaces in Virginia Woolf’s fiction. I read A Room of One’s Own as an undergraduate, but my experience of the book was overshadowed by a workshop I attended soon after that reading, in which Toni Morrison elegantly, eloquently, and angrily criticized the unconscious privilege she read in Woolf’s need of an isolated and private room for writing. Black women writers, I remember Morrison saying, had never, historically, enjoyed that kind of spatial privilege. They would have worked in these rooms, yes, but only to clean them. That statement repelled me from Virginia Woolf for decades. Yet Alison Light’s searching and beautifully written Mrs Woolf and the Servants has brought me back to the writer. Light’s book insistently keeps Virginia Woolf in full view of her female servants, rewriting the author’s biography to keep her life in close connection to those who worked for her parents, her sister, her husband, and for her. As Light describes these connections, she also writes the story of British service. This encompasses even more than labor history: “it’s hard to resist the conclusion that the history of service is the history of British women” (xv). What has kept the histories of these women in service out of the light is a blinding combination of British class prejudice, misogynistic revulsion from working women’s physicality, Victorian prurience, and, finally, documentation. What records did the servants ever leave? The real source of privilege, as Virginia Woolf certainly knew, was having the proper documents and therefore being fully present in all aspects of British political society. In the larger domain of the British empire, the correct legal identification papers, diplomas, and licenses embodied the difference between social inferiority and true political and economic autonomy. Even upper-class women struggled against their own legal and economic dependence; Light shows the frustration with which Virginia Woolf mourned her own lack of education (266). For women in service, many of them from the rural poor or urban orphans sent from workhouses, such documentation seems unimaginable. Their work was done without contract and with very little education. The limits of Virginia Woolf’s otherwise powerful imagination left her maids-of-all-work, cooks, and cleaners as silent as the mute subalterns lamented by theorist Gayatri Spivak and other scholars of colonialism. Even their labor barely registered as work for the upper classes considering their “servant question.” As Light writes, “servants were an
In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks acro... more In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks across the Ottoman Empire and throughout Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Unlike the Atlantic trade, slavery in this region crossed and mixed racial and ethnic lines. Fair-skinned Circassian men and women were as vulnerable to enslavement in the Nile Valley as were teenagers from Sudan or Ethiopia. Tell This in My Memory opens up a new window in the study of slavery in the modern Middle East, taking up personal narratives of slaves and slave owners to shed light on the anxieties and intimacies of personal experience. The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries later confronted - or not - the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these vocabularies of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Journeys from the Fantastic to the Colonial... more List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Journeys from the Fantastic to the Colonial 2. Black Servants and Saviors: The Domestic Empire of Egypt 3. The Lived Experience of Contradiction: Ibrahm Fawz's Narrative of the Sudan 4. The Tools of the Master: Slavery, Family, and the Unity of the Nile Valley 5. Egyptians in Blackface: Revolution and Popular Culture, World War 1 to 1925 Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index
... Page 3. PRINCETON SERIES ON THE MIDDLE EAST Bernard Lewis and Andras Hamori, Editors THE AFRI... more ... Page 3. PRINCETON SERIES ON THE MIDDLE EAST Bernard Lewis and Andras Hamori, Editors THE AFRICAN DIASPORA IN THE MEDITERRANEAN LANDS OF ISLAM Thl, On ... paper) ISBN 1-55876-275-2 (pb: alk. paper) 1. Slavery and IslamMediterranean Region. ...
... I am very grateful to Nabila al-Assiouti, 'Abbas al-Tuns... more ... I am very grateful to Nabila al-Assiouti, 'Abbas al-Tunsi, Zaynab Taha, and Raghda al-'lssawi for their encouragement and their imaginative ... shortly after the emergence of the first Egyptian patriotic rebellion, known as the 'Urabi rebellion after its leader, Colonel Ahmad 'Urabi. ...
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1999
The medieval Arabic cartography of Africa outlined a paradoxical continent of facts, myth, and my... more The medieval Arabic cartography of Africa outlined a paradoxical continent of facts, myth, and mystery. Ever since the great geographers such as al-Idrisi, al-ʿUmari, al-Masʿudi, and Ibn Battuta traveled to and wrote about Africa, the map of Black Africa became a combination of mystical and empirical knowledge, the result of, in the words of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, “the interplay of the ideological and the cognitive.” These kinds of maps were very illustrative of certain classificatory categories in which Africans in general were known, and where cultural boundaries were drawn between more specific areas, such as Egypt and neighboring African kingdoms. Merchants and traders also contributed to the mapping of the frontier to Egypt's uppermost south, the vast territory known as bilāad al-sūdān.
In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks acro... more In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks across the Ottoman Empire and throughout Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Unlike the Atlantic trade, slavery in this region crossed and mixed racial and ethnic lines. Fair-skinned Circassian men and women were as vulnerable to enslavement in the Nile Valley as were teenagers from Sudan or Ethiopia. Tell This in My Memory opens up a new window in the study of slavery in the modern Middle East, taking up personal narratives of slaves and slave owners to shed light on the anxieties and intimacies of personal experience. The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries later confronted - or not - the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these vocabularies of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2007
“I have heard, Salim,” said my master, “that you are a good dancer and singer. I wish you to show... more “I have heard, Salim,” said my master, “that you are a good dancer and singer. I wish you to show my guests what you can do!”
For many years, I felt locked out of the intimate spaces in Virginia Woolf’s fiction. I read A Ro... more For many years, I felt locked out of the intimate spaces in Virginia Woolf’s fiction. I read A Room of One’s Own as an undergraduate, but my experience of the book was overshadowed by a workshop I attended soon after that reading, in which Toni Morrison elegantly, eloquently, and angrily criticized the unconscious privilege she read in Woolf’s need of an isolated and private room for writing. Black women writers, I remember Morrison saying, had never, historically, enjoyed that kind of spatial privilege. They would have worked in these rooms, yes, but only to clean them. That statement repelled me from Virginia Woolf for decades. Yet Alison Light’s searching and beautifully written Mrs Woolf and the Servants has brought me back to the writer. Light’s book insistently keeps Virginia Woolf in full view of her female servants, rewriting the author’s biography to keep her life in close connection to those who worked for her parents, her sister, her husband, and for her. As Light describes these connections, she also writes the story of British service. This encompasses even more than labor history: “it’s hard to resist the conclusion that the history of service is the history of British women” (xv). What has kept the histories of these women in service out of the light is a blinding combination of British class prejudice, misogynistic revulsion from working women’s physicality, Victorian prurience, and, finally, documentation. What records did the servants ever leave? The real source of privilege, as Virginia Woolf certainly knew, was having the proper documents and therefore being fully present in all aspects of British political society. In the larger domain of the British empire, the correct legal identification papers, diplomas, and licenses embodied the difference between social inferiority and true political and economic autonomy. Even upper-class women struggled against their own legal and economic dependence; Light shows the frustration with which Virginia Woolf mourned her own lack of education (266). For women in service, many of them from the rural poor or urban orphans sent from workhouses, such documentation seems unimaginable. Their work was done without contract and with very little education. The limits of Virginia Woolf’s otherwise powerful imagination left her maids-of-all-work, cooks, and cleaners as silent as the mute subalterns lamented by theorist Gayatri Spivak and other scholars of colonialism. Even their labor barely registered as work for the upper classes considering their “servant question.” As Light writes, “servants were an
In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks acro... more In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks across the Ottoman Empire and throughout Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Unlike the Atlantic trade, slavery in this region crossed and mixed racial and ethnic lines. Fair-skinned Circassian men and women were as vulnerable to enslavement in the Nile Valley as were teenagers from Sudan or Ethiopia. Tell This in My Memory opens up a new window in the study of slavery in the modern Middle East, taking up personal narratives of slaves and slave owners to shed light on the anxieties and intimacies of personal experience. The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries later confronted - or not - the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these vocabularies of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Journeys from the Fantastic to the Colonial... more List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Journeys from the Fantastic to the Colonial 2. Black Servants and Saviors: The Domestic Empire of Egypt 3. The Lived Experience of Contradiction: Ibrahm Fawz's Narrative of the Sudan 4. The Tools of the Master: Slavery, Family, and the Unity of the Nile Valley 5. Egyptians in Blackface: Revolution and Popular Culture, World War 1 to 1925 Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index
... Page 3. PRINCETON SERIES ON THE MIDDLE EAST Bernard Lewis and Andras Hamori, Editors THE AFRI... more ... Page 3. PRINCETON SERIES ON THE MIDDLE EAST Bernard Lewis and Andras Hamori, Editors THE AFRICAN DIASPORA IN THE MEDITERRANEAN LANDS OF ISLAM Thl, On ... paper) ISBN 1-55876-275-2 (pb: alk. paper) 1. Slavery and IslamMediterranean Region. ...
... I am very grateful to Nabila al-Assiouti, 'Abbas al-Tuns... more ... I am very grateful to Nabila al-Assiouti, 'Abbas al-Tunsi, Zaynab Taha, and Raghda al-'lssawi for their encouragement and their imaginative ... shortly after the emergence of the first Egyptian patriotic rebellion, known as the 'Urabi rebellion after its leader, Colonel Ahmad 'Urabi. ...
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1999
The medieval Arabic cartography of Africa outlined a paradoxical continent of facts, myth, and my... more The medieval Arabic cartography of Africa outlined a paradoxical continent of facts, myth, and mystery. Ever since the great geographers such as al-Idrisi, al-ʿUmari, al-Masʿudi, and Ibn Battuta traveled to and wrote about Africa, the map of Black Africa became a combination of mystical and empirical knowledge, the result of, in the words of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, “the interplay of the ideological and the cognitive.” These kinds of maps were very illustrative of certain classificatory categories in which Africans in general were known, and where cultural boundaries were drawn between more specific areas, such as Egypt and neighboring African kingdoms. Merchants and traders also contributed to the mapping of the frontier to Egypt's uppermost south, the vast territory known as bilāad al-sūdān.
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