Article of the Month - December 2023
 “‘There is No Race Here’: On Blackness, Slavery, and Disavowal
in North Africa and North African Studies”
(Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen: Anthropology, Yale University)

Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, “‘There is No Race Here’: On Blackness, Slavery, and Disavowal in North Africa and North African Studies,” The Journal of North African Studies 28 (2023): 635—665.

Read the article here.

Keywords: North Africa •  slavery • migration • blackness • racialisation • global black studies

Abstract:
This article brings comparative race and ethnic studies, migration studies, and North/African studies together to investigate how local-historical conceptions of blackness intersect with contemporary border policing of ‘sub-Saharan’ migrants. Defining race as a historically-contingent formation, I argue that blackness emerged at various periods in North African history (from the Islamic expansion to the present-day) to signify inferior social status and non- belonging, meanings that are shaped by the practices, discourses, and memories of slavery. This intervention connects critical studies on racialized border enforcement to other processes of social exclusions already at work within North African social space. It fills a critical gap in North African studies by providing a theoretically- and historically-grounded analysis of racial formation (and especially blackness) in the region that will have broad utility to scholars studying marginalisation and marginalised people’s political mobilisation at various historical moments. Finally, it challenges contemporary scholarship on race as (only) a modern category forged through European colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery.

Nomination Statement:
Much of what is being written on the history of race and racism in the pre-Modern West assumes an essentially Eurocentric perspective: presenting racism and colorism as phenomena that anticipate the binary of “global North” and “global South” and viewing racism through the prism of the modern European and Atlantic world and as a product of European ideas of “whiteness.” Based on fieldwork in present-day North Africa, Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen’s “‘There is no race here’” suggests a far more complicated history of race and racism here from the Middle Ages to the present, in which fluid and situational ethno-racial categories are imagined and deployed in response to changes in hierarchies of social power, while those who construct and deploy these categories deny their very existence. The conclusions of this thought-provoking article can be applied to regions outside of the Maghrib across the broader West.

Authors’ Comment:
Atlantic theories with which I was most familiar did not fully explain how race operated as a category of difference in my ethnographic data. At the same time, race was undertheorized in migration literature on/of the region. I turned to historical research on race, enslavement, and identity in the region to develop a more robust and relational framework for identifying blackness’s emergence and operations in the present. Since researching and writing the article, I have returned to the book manuscript with a much more nuanced understanding of blackness’s longue durée in the region and its political salience in the present-day “crisis” of migration in the Mediterranean.

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See the other Articles of the Month here.