Abstract
Robinson-Dunn’s chapter comes from her conférence plénière, or plenary lecture, given at the international, interdisciplinary colloquium on the topic of slavery in Africa and the Middle East and its representation in French and English art and literature from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries held at the University of Lyon in February of 2014. In it she discusses the need for contemporary scholars to consider Orientalist images alongside and in dialogue with other more traditional types of archival evidence used by historians when studying slavery and abolition in that part of the world. For while European depictions of the female slave of the harem may have been unrealistic and often fantastic, these distortions are important and revealing in and of themselves. Just as previous generations of scholars have discussed and analyzed the myriad ways that the “angel in the house” functioned in Victorian society, especially in relation to the politics of race, class, gender and religion, new generations must do the same with regard to the “white slave” of the Orientalist’s harem. For this idea had real meaning and political purchase in a transnational, imperial cultural system that brought together “Easterners” and “Westerners” and Muslims and non-Muslims, even as difference was defined through it.
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Notes
- 1.
Here I differentiate between North Africa and the rest of the continent in part because of the ways in which this region can be considered an extension of the Arab and Islamic world and in part because of my own previous research through which it became clear that while slavery may have been male-dominated in the Sudan, once the traveler of the late nineteenth century moved northwards into Egypt and towards the Mediterranean, the trade and practice of slavery became harem-oriented and harem-driven, with the vast majority of slaves being women, children and eunuchs.
- 2.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London, Verso, 1983, 15.
- 3.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy, Monthly Review Press, 1971, and E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, Gollancz, 1963.
- 4.
Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1998, and Marie-Christine Rochmann, Esclavage et Abolitions, Karthala, Paris, 2000.
- 5.
Les Traites négrières, Paris, Gallimard, 2004.
- 6.
Dror Ze’evi, “My slave” and Toledano, “The concept of slavery” in Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa, Toru and Philips (dir), London, Kegan Paul, 2000.
- 7.
Le Sujet et le mamelouk, Paris, Mille et une Nuits, 2007.
- 8.
Esclavages et abolitions en terre d’Islam, Versailles, André, 2010.
- 9.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, London, Harvard UP 1993; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London, Routledge, 1994; and Myriam Cottias et al., Les Traites et les esclavages, Paris, Karthala, 2010.
- 10.
See not only Said’s seminal Orientalism, NY, Vintage Books, 1978, but also his later Culture and Imperialism, NY, Alfred Knopf, 1993, in which he speaks of modern imperialism as setting in motion a “globalized process” characterized by the “overlapping experience of Westerners and Orientals,” xx.
- 11.
William Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, Oxford UP, 2006, 19.
- 12.
Jurist and theologian Muhammad ‘Abduh became Egypt’s Grand Mufti in 1899. According to ‘Imad Hilal, the abolition of slavery in Egypt was only possible as a result of the eventual support of the Egyptian people thanks to religious leaders such as ‘Abduh who pronounced it in the true spirit of Islam. al-Raqiq fi Misr, Cairo, 1999, 386.
- 13.
Jean Gochet, La Traite des nègres, Paris, 1891, 171.
- 14.
Judith Scheele, “Travail et liberté,” in Botte et Stella (dir), Couleurs de l’eslavage, Paris, Karthala, 2012, 372–3.
- 15.
These roles were limited in the West as well. Leonore Davidoff, “Mastered for Life,” Journal of Social History, 1974, 406–23.
- 16.
“Travail,” 376–7.
- 17.
Diane Robinson-Dunn, The Harem, Slavery and British Imperial Culture, Manchester UP, 2006, 68. As Toledano has explained, slavery as practiced in this part of the world can best be understood as existing on a continuum rather than as a dichotomy of “slave” and “free,” Slave Elites, 159–175.
- 18.
Beth Baron, “The Making of the Egyptian Nation,” in Blom, Hagemann and Hall (eds), Gendered Nations, Oxford, Berg, 2000, 137–58, 148–9.
- 19.
Robinson-Dunn, 132–3.
- 20.
Robinson-Dunn, 127–8.
- 21.
Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution in Victorian Society, Cambridge UP, 1980 and City of Dreadful Delight, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
- 22.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather, NY, Routledge, 1995, especially chapters 2 and 3.
- 23.
McClintock, “Barrister and man of letters,” 76; “Dresden China woman,” 79; and Munby’s sketch, 105. McClintock has done extensive analysis on Munby’s sketches, photographs and diaries with regard to these issues.
- 24.
For example, A Widening Sphere, Martha Vicinus (ed.), Indiana UP, 1977, and Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, University of Chicago Press, 1987.
- 25.
A.J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, NY, Simon & Schuster, 50, II. Robinson-Dunn, 12, 13, 26, 27.
- 26.
Clarence-Smith, 3. Here Clarence-Smith is referring to domestic slavery in Islam in general, throughout the world and through the centuries.
- 27.
After all Orientalist ideas about the corrupting influence of white slaves and concubines of previous eras can be found in modern writings intended for Arabic speaking and predominantly Muslim audiences as well as Western ones. For example, ‘Abd al-Salam al-Tirmanini, al-Riqq Madihu wa Hadiruhu (Kuwait: al-Majlis al-Watani, 1979, 137–43.
- 28.
In Couleurs, 365.
- 29.
For example, after the abolition of slavery in the British and French colonies, sugar plantation owners in Trinidad and Guadeloupe continued to exploit nonwhite labor in the form of Indian and Asian indentured servants.
- 30.
Here Bhabha’s concept of less than half times two to describe hybridity in the imperialist context is helpful, Location of Culture. Said’s advances from Orientalism to Culture and Imperialism apply as well.
- 31.
Robinson-Dunn, chapters 3 and 4.
- 32.
Mary Roberts, The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Durham, Duke UP, 2007.
- 33.
Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, Cambridge, MA, Perseus, 1994 and Nawar Golley, Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2003.
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Robinson-Dunn, D. (2019). French and English Orientalisms and the Study of Slavery and Abolition in North Africa and the Middle East: What Are the Connections?. In: Fay, M. (eds) Slavery in the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59755-7_4
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