The last decade has seen an explosion in studies of race; long an object of interest in studies of the Americas, it is only more recently that ideas of race have both been traced back to their roots on the European continent and been compared to processes of race and racialization elsewhere in the world. This broader temporal and geographical frame has pushed historians and other social scientists to ask themselves: What is race? Is it a universal category, or is it culturally- and temporally-specific? How do cultural, political, religious or scientific ideas create “race”?

The conference “Race and Ethnicity in Africa and Europe,” organized by the Center for Maghrib Studies at Arizona State University and the Akademie für Politische Bildung in Tutzing, Germany, brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who work on these issues. The assembled scholars – historians, anthropologists, legal scholars and theorists – examined different aspects of the making of race in these varied contexts: primarily the racialization of African and African-descended bodies, but also the important role that Jewishness played in forming ideas of race in Europe.

MATHILDE MONTPETIT (New York) began the conference with an investigation sexual anxieties around the Black eunuch in the late medieval Islamicate world, arguing that the eunuch’s impotence meant these anxieties had much more to do with gendered hierarchies than with fears of miscegenation. OUSMANE TRAORÉ (Claremont) then examined resistance to the slave trades – both trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan – in Senegambia and further afield. He argued that three strategies were employed: first, to create a self-protective ethnic state; second, to build healing communities based on African ideas and traditions (like the Hausa in North Africa); and third, assimilation. His presentation focused on the first resistance strategy, looking at the Soninke state of Galanga. Traoré argued that these ethnic states were able to protect themselves from slavery, but also that pre-colonial ideas of ethnicity in Africa were fundamentally fluid; thus, rather than being exclusionary, these ethnic states were able to integrate newcomers. This last point became a topic of great discussion during the question-and-answer session, as conference attendees discussed the meaning of terms like “race” and “ethnicity,” and debated how this fluidity has operated.

Moving the focus to Europe, CHRISTINE HATZKY (Hannover) explored the deep roots of racism on that continent: the concept of limpieza de sangre as mobilized in the late medieval Iberian Peninsula against converted Jews, and its subsequent transfer to the New World. Hatzky argued that this conception of blood purity marks an early melding of biology and culture – a melding that can functionally be referred to as “race,” demonstrating the adaptability of the concept even before the development of so-called “scientific” racism. Further, Hatzky argued, the control over blood purity was inextricably linked to the control of female sexuality, and thus to the enforcement of a patriarchal social order. This interweaving of race and gender was also a major theme of the talk given by TOBIAS KLEE (Berlin), who demonstrated that both sexual and racial stereotypes of Africans were deployed against non-Catalans in the early Catalan nationalist movement.

The following panel further explored the relationship between Jewishness, Blackness and race. Anthropologist PAUL SILVERSTEIN (Portland) examined the sometimes-contentious relationship between contemporary Moroccan Amazigh (“Berber”) politics and the Haratin, i.e. Black inhabitants of the desert oases. Amazigh politics mobilizes nostalgia for Saharan Jews, who through their absence become “good to think” as visions of a latent ecumenism in the region. This acts as a marker of difference with Salafism-tinged Arab nationalism – but is also an ecumenism they believe the Haratin do not participate in. The actual presence of the Haratin, in contrast, creates a different, often-competitive relationship, with ideas of autochtony deployed against them. Combined with a long history of enslavement, Silverstein argued, this has led to a a profound distrust for Amazigh nationalist politics on the part of the Haratin, many of whom are Amazigh-speakers: in their view, the Amazigh nationalist movement’s nostalgic bent seems to resemble a longing towards the old racial order.

RACHEL SMITH (Los Angeles) presented the historical case study of Daniel, an Ethiopian student who was recruited by, a Franco-Jewish educational organization named the Alliance Israélite Internationale during the late nineteenth century. Following concerns about Christian Europeans missionizing among the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews), Joseph Halévy led a mission there and returned with Daniel, who became a media sensation that led to intense discussions about the possibility of Black Jews. Smith argued that Daniel’s case demonstrates the way that Jews engaged in their own project of racialization, setting boundaries between insiders and outsiders, and showed that this project spread through the actions of non-state actors like the Alliance Israélite. ANDRAS L. PAP (Budapest) then provided a comparative legal analysis of race and ethnicity, demonstrating how the lack of definition of these terms in the legal literature has caused confusion in implementing anti-discrimination laws.

The two following papers each examined the presence of racialized Others within Europe itself. SAM CHERRIBI (Atlanta) argued that it is only by understanding Islam as race that the deep divisions in European societies, particularly the Netherlands, can be understood. TRACY DENEAN SHARPLEY-WHITING (Nashville) examined the career of Alexandre Dumas, framing her presentation around his exclusion from the Académie Française during his lifetime and his reinterment in the Pantheon in 2002. Whereas most French biographies gloss over the role that French racism played in his life, Sharpley-Whiting sees his bon-vivant, swashbuckling lifestyle as a reaction to his racial marginalization. Racist pamphlets, trafficking in racist stereotypes, portrayed him as a “mulatto” who presented himself as white while a Black man lurked underneath; through projects like the Château de Monte Cristo and through his private life (especially his love of self-photography), he proudly claimed his status as Other.

The racialized Other was also a topic throughout BAYAN ABUBAKR's (New Haven) discussion of the Tārīkh al-Sūdān. This historical-sociological text was written in 1903 by a Naʿum Bey Shuqair, an officer in the Anglo-Egyptian army during the occupation of the Nilotic Sudan. Abubakr argued that Shuqair’s production of a racial taxonomy places this work within the intellectual tradition of the Naḥdal she argued further how heavily the European colonial project relied on taxonomies that emerged during the Ottoman period. In Shuqair’s taxonomy, Blackness and Arabness existed on opposite poles, with Blackness symbolizing a resistance to modernity and everything Arabs were not.

Geographer RASHAD SHABAZZ (Tempe) analyzed the present state of anti-Black racism. Drawing on the Afropessimist tradition, especially the work of Frank Wilderson, Shabazz argued that anti-Black racism can be defined as the centrality of people of African descent in marking the distinction between human and non-human. In Hegelian terms, he proposed, there is a thesis-antithesis position between Black as non-human and white as human: this produces not only dialectical tension but also creates Blackness as the thing against which the human and the white are defined. Shabazz argued that whereas previous political movements have allowed People of Color to “spiral towards whiteness,” and thus towards humanity, full emancipation cannot be achieved this way because, within the system, Blackness is necessary to construct the human. Thus, unless white people are willing to give up “the human,” these projects are doomed to failure. Following Shabazz’s talk, there was a discussion of the relationship between this argument for the centrality of anti-Black racism and Hatzky’s presentation about Jewishness as the root of European racism.

MOSTAFA MINAWI (Ithaca) presented a study from his upcoming book1, analyzing the racial intimacies in Arab-Ottoman imperialists in early twentieth-century Istanbul. Minawi demonstrated that there was an increasing slippage between the term arap (ostensibly, Arab) and Blackness; although Arab-Ottomans never used arap to refer to Blackness, Turkish-Ottomans often did. While this word has been often read as relatively innocuous, Minawi showed that as early as the 1890s, arap regularly had negative connotations. He argued that the use of arap in the nickname of the much-reviled leader Arap Iszet was intentionally insulting, connecting him to the history of African. More broadly, and in a way that spoke quite directly to Abubakr’s paper, Minawi argued that race has been understudied in Ottoman history. Though race was not explicitly used in bureaucratic functions of the Ottoman Empire, it does not mean that the Ottoman empire was immune to these contexts; race played a key role in how the Ottomans perceived the world around them.

The final panel featured two anthropologists discussing processes of racialization on the contemporary African continent. JONATHAN GLASSMAN (Chicago), synthesizing recent histories of racial thought in Africa, examined how nationalist discourses have become racialized in post-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa – in part as a response to anti-Black racism. Contrary to the ideals of pan-Africanism, there has been a phenomenon of rejection of other Africans in African states, particularly Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa. In conversation with Traoré’s discussion of the long history of ethnicity in Africa, Glassman argued that these phenomena must be analyzed not only as the result of colonialism but also in their convergence with local ideas and indigenous discourses. Looking particularly at Côte d’Ivoire, Glassman proposed that xenophobia against Sahelian migrants from the north and Côte d’Ivoire is linked to the idea of the country as exceptional, founded on both colonial anthropology and pan-African humanism. The Baule (south Ivoirians), in this framework, are uniquely well-placed for modernity – rendering immigrants, especially Muslims, suspect.

Finally, ROGAIA ABUSHARAF (Doha) presented preliminary results from a new ethnography considering colorism in the Sudan. As Abubakr discussed, there is a long history of hierarchization based on skin color in the region (what Abusharaf called “brown chauvinism”), deeply linked to competing ideas of Arabness and Blackness. Abusharaf argued that for women who bleach their skin, bleaching is conceived of as a ritual process. Using a variety of methodologies – participant observation in a beauty salon and market, interviews and social media – Abusharaf showed that skin bleaching in this context is closely related to ideas of freedom and unfreedom, as well as visibility and invisibility: a lighter-skinned woman is both more visible and more free. Contrary to otherwise conventional discourses about identity in Sudanese society, discourses around skin bleaching present ideas that challenge reductive reasonings about self-hate and body dysmorphia.

Conference Overview:

Michael Mayer and Chouki El Hamel: Welcome Address

Section 1. Race and Slavery in Precolonial Islamic Africa

Mathilde Montpetit (New York University): Eunuchs, Sexual Anxiety, and the Making of Racial Difference in the Late Medieval Islamicate World

Ousmane Traoré (Pomona College, Claremont): Resisting Racial Slavery at Home and Abroad: Ethnic State and Healing Community as Political and Religious Strategies

Section 2. Racism in the Case of Spain and Colonial Latin America

Christine Hatzky (Leibniz Universität Hannover): The Origins of Racism in the Histories of the Iberian Peninsula and Colonial Latin America (15th–18th centuries)

Tobias J. Klee (Freie Universität Berlin): “African Backwardness in Spain”: Catalan Racialisation of Spain

Section 3. Blackness, Otherness and Jewishness in Africa and Europe

Paul A. Silverstein (Reed College, Portland): Berbers, Blacks, Jews: The Racialization of Indigeneity in Amazigh Politics

Rachel Smith (University of California, Los Angeles): African, Jewish, and Black: Racial Politics and the Jewish Civilizing Mission

Andras L. Pap (Center for Social Sciences, Budapest): Whites? Jews, Albinos and Others: Racial Categorization, Classification and Inbetweenness. A Legal Inquiry.

Section 4. Blackness and Colonialism

Sam Cherribi (Emory University, Atlanta): Framing Islam as Race in the Netherlands

Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Vanderbilt University, Nashville): A Twenty-First-Century Right to Correct Nineteenth-Century Wrongs: Concepts of Race, French Racism, and the Adventuresome Life of Alexandre Dumas

Bayan Abubakr (Yale University, New Haven): Racialized Modernities in Tarīkh al-Sūdān

Section 5. Race and Ethnicity in the 19th and 20th Century

Rashad Shabazz (Arizona State University, Tempe): Black Internationalism and Race

Mostafa Minawi (Cornell University, Ithaca): Black and White of Late Ottoman Imperialists

Jonathan Glassman (Northwestern University, Chicago): The Racialization of Civic Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Africa

Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf (Georgetown University, Doha): Dark Knuckles: Preliminary Thoughts on Skin-Bleaching in Khartoum

Note:
1 Mostafa Minawi, Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire, Stanford 2022.