Carnegie Mellon University

CAS

April 11, 2024

CMU's Center for Arts & Society invites you to the launch of the Center for Black European Studies and the Atlantic

Keynote address by Noémie Ndiaye, followed by a reception

Wednesday, April 24, 4:00-6:00 pm
Posner Grand Room (340 Posner Hall)

In this talk, Noémie Ndiaye explores the representations, or rather the strategie misrepresentations of Afro-Muslim relations in early modern European drama. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans could not but acknowledge the economic and military superiority of contemporary Islamic cultures, so that, when faced with Black Muslims, Ndiaye argues, they found that superiority impossible to reconcile with their ongoing project of racializing Blackness to render it enslavable. Indeed, if, in European minds, being a Muslim meant always already being a potential enslaver of Christians in the Mediterranean world, and if being Black meant always already being enslavable by Christians in the Atlantic world, then a Black Muslim was an oxymoron or an impossibility during the significant overlap period between the era of Mediterranean slavery and the era of transatlantic slavery. To become unambiguously enslavable then, Black Muslims had to be un-muslimed, to be untethered from what Christians perceived as the Islamic power to enslave. Ndiaye shows how this process of untethering plays out in the fictions of early modern European drama, while remaining alert to the resonances of those early racial machinations for our own cultural moment. 
This conference is supported at CMU by the Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics, the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Center for the Arts in Society, the Humanities Scholar Program. It is also funded by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.