This panel investigates "blackness" as a lens for understanding social relationships in the broader Middle East. While the dominant historiography has prioritized religion, ethnicity, and class for understanding social, political and cultural history, this panel offers race as an alternate category of analysis. The region's long entangled history of enslaving peoples from sub-Saharan and East Africa shaped the visuality of blackness in this region, from Anatolia to Arabia to Iran and Swahili Coast.
The panel begins with a discussion on the identity of the Swahili Coast. The first panelist interrogates "Arab" and "African" as useful or accurate labels, arguing against simplistic colonial or pan-Africanist debates that place the region neatly in either category. Instead, this panelist uses archival and anthropological sources to propose an approach that incorporates race, Africanity, and Islam in a cohesive manner.
Continuing the negotiation of blackness and modernity, the second panelist discusses the legacies of slavery and visuality of blackness in Iranian blackface theater during the mid twentieth century. By presenting references to the Qajar court as timeless fictions, the theater upheld racial hierarchies while erasing a tangible history of slavery. Drawing on photography, film, political caricatures and other textual sources, the author of this paper argues that blackface theater served as a major conduit between slavery and abolition, maintaining the rigid racial hierarchies of enslavement in Iran while simultaneously erasing the history.
Following this line of representation of racial stereotypes, the third panelist examines the use of the "Arab Nurse/Arab House girl" archetype (Arap Kizi/Baci) in Turkish television programs and commercials from 2015. While traditionally faceless, modern representations of the character enlist an overweight man in black body paint and a wig to portray a gender-bending, race-bending caricature of black slaves.
Finally, the panel concludes with an discussion of Afro-Turkish identity through an analysis of the "Calf Festival" (Dana Bayrami), an Ottoman-era festival that only recently re-emerged as an annual festival in modern Turkey. Through an analysis of newspapers, digital paraphernalia, and oral history interviews, this panelist argues that the (re)inception of the Calf Festival in 2006 has provided a public space for negotiating and articulating a black identity in an otherwise non-black society.
While exploring different regional foci, these papers interrogate blackness as a useful category across the broader Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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Mr. Nathaniel Mathews
Historiography of the Swahili Coast has been plagued by a great deal of confusion and equivocation with regards to race. Early colonial scholarship on the Swahili celebrated them as an 'Arab' civilization in contrast to the uncivilized 'tribal' Africans they were surrounded by. Nationalist era scholarship emphasized the 'Africanity' of the Swahili in step with postcolonial aspirations for Pan-African freedom. Frustrated with these interminable debates, many scholars simply declared that the 'Swahili are the Swahili', even though many so-called Swahili would take exception to that term.The identity of the Swahili goes to the heart of the elusive historical meanings of 'Arab' and 'African.' this paper proposes a new approach to race, Africanity and the study of Islam together that transcends these dichotomies.
Placing disparate sources in the same frame-- classic black nationalist historiography, British Orientalist letters to Swahili elites, the classic debate between Ali Mazrui and Wole Soyinka in the pages of Transition magazine, and Swahili poetry, this paper critiques as inadequate both black nationalist and Arabocentric approaches to the study of the Swahili. While the former can often devolve into a form of what Sherman Jackson calls 'black Orientalism', the latter is often overdetermined by elitist, textually based approaches that represent Swahili society and history as an organic whole, lost to colonialism, rather than an ongoing terrain of debate, already striated by racial hierarchy, into which colonialism inserted itself. Furthermore these representations portray not a clash of civilizations between Islam and Europe, but an "embrace of civilizations" between Muslims and Europeans that relies on colonial representations of the African as a figure lacking civilization. These representations can lead to a form of nostalgic romanticism arguably as dangerous, if not more so than 'black Orientalism'.
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Beeta Baghoolizadeh
1929 marked the end of legal slavery in Iran, guaranteeing the manumission of all slaves on Iranian soil. Most slaves in Iran at the time had been of African ancestry, and their enslavement had fostered a rigid racialization that equated slaves as black and vice versa. In the years following abolition, public references or lingering footprints of Iranian slavery were erased in the name of modernization. The dismantling of the slavery as a legal institution, however, failed to undo the decades that crystallized racial hierarchies, and the legacy of slavery vividly thrived in blackface theaters. As a result, blackface theater served as the conduit between the slaving past and “Westernizing” present. Blackface theater, or “playing black,” (siyah-bazi), liberally drew upon Qajar court references in a detached manner, decontextualizing a distinct history of late nineteenth-century slavery into a timeless comedy. Peddling stereotypical imagery used to mock black eunuchs in the Qajar court, blackface theater played a significant role in conveying racial stereotypes in the absence of slavery. On stage and on film, blackface actors assumed the role of a court eunuch who served as a close confidant to the king or other members of nobility. Eunuch’s bodies became synonymous with blackface theater, drawing laughter with their pidgin Persian, goofy posture, and licentious jokes. As time passed, their roles as slaves grew more vague, their castrations ignored, but their blackness exaggerated. This paper investigates blackness as a commercialized commodity in the absence of slavery.
This presentation considers the visuality of racial hierarchies that survived abolition in 1929. Focusing on the period between 1930-1965, this paper analyzes theater, political caricatures, literature, and poetry that incorporated crude representations of African slaves in the absence of slavery. Legible and palatable to Iranian audiences, blackface theater created a vernacular memory of slavery that replaced the trauma with grotesque comedy.
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Zavier Wingham
After nearly ninety years of state enforced silence, a once lost festival made a boisterous return to the streets of Izmir, Turkey in 2006. Black bodies filled the street, gleefully announcing the return of Dana Bayram? and staking a public claim to the streets. Afro-Turks, or the descendants of African slaves from the Ottoman Empire, have long existed in modern day Turkey, along with Dana Bayram? (Calf Festival). During the Ottoman Empire, the festival was held over a few weeks and held various reasons ranging from religious to economic. Central to the festivities was rejoining as a community and reuniting families that might have been split from one another. With the institution of the Tekke ve Zaviyeler Kanunu (The Turkish Law of 1925 Closing the Dervish Lodges), the festival was banned and eventually disappeared in the 1960s. While the current reincarnation of the festival lacks in culturally specific elements such as a godya (spiritual leader) and healing ritual dance, creating and building community has remained key. Since its (re)inception, the festival has transformed from a local event to an international space. In particular, this paper explores how the festival has began to act as an arena of “live dialogue” between AfroTurks and other black subjectivities and through this space, continue to assert a black identity within an “atypical” context.
What does one make of this emerging diasporic voice? How, in a locality where these diasporic formations are constantly rebuffed with nationalism, might we assess the festival’s recent international scope? Through the use of newspaper articles, the AfroTurks organization’s website, Afrikal?lar Kültür Dayan??ma ve Yard?mla?ma Derne?i (African Cultural Solidarity and Cooperation Association), and the Tarih Vakf?’s (History Foundation) oral history of Afro-Turks,this paper examines how a sense of internationalism is crafted through discourse surrounding the festival, the Afro-Turks articulation of their history, and explore what kind(s) of dialogue has been created as a result. This work, quite like the subject, relies on a diverse array of literature, from diaspora studies to archival theory. Frank Guridy’s Forging Diaspora is central to the theoretical formation of a “live dialogue,” as well as Achille Mbembe’s conception of the archive as debris. This work combines such literature to assess how identity formation can act as an attempt to rupture colonial legacies through the intersections of performative cultural mediums and internationalism(s), and thereby imagine a black alterity.
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Bam Willoughby
This paper uses that which might be called ‘blackness’ rather than ‘blackness’ as a concession that the exploring of this politic, rooted certainly in a proximity to some imagined darkness, must come before its naming. An examination of that which might be called ‘blackness’ in the Middle East is incomplete without a diligent engagement of the question of gender. This paper interrogates this question via an exploration of the figure of the Arap Baci/Kizi, or Arab Nurse/Arab House Girl. Though a faceless Arab Baci/Kizi can be located within Ottoman Turkish folkloric tradition, Arap Baci/Kizi takes physical shape within contemporary Turkish television—both film and commercial—as a fat man often wearing black body paint and always clad in a willowy wig and headscarf playing the part of the domestic servant. That Arap Baci/Kizi [loosely] translates to Arab Nurse/Arab House Girl but is consistently played by an oft black body painted, wig-wearing fat man necessarily signifies an inextricable relationship between gender, desirability, labor and that which might be called ‘blackness’ present within the Turkish imagination. This paper offers a close reading of the Arap Baci/Kizi of a 2015 Turkish television show known as Zeyrek ?le Çeyrek along with the Arap Baci/Kizi of a contemporary Turkish cleaning supply commercial to bring presence to the nuanced orientations to gender and that which might be called ‘blackness’ present within the Turkish imagination. Through its analysis of these visual texts, it argues that the deployment of Arap Baci/Kizi within Turkish popular culture parallels the greater framework of power through which Turkish subjects are produced. Ultimately this paper illuminates a Turkish cartography wherein corporeal proximity to an imagined darkness renders subjects legible only as grotesque caricatures. This project, by closely examining the distinct contemporary resonances of the figure of the Arap Baci/Kizi within Turkish popular culture sheds new light on the confluence of color, gender, and the corporeal within Ottoman studies.
