Keynote Lecture: 

Noémie Ndiaye, University of Chicago
"How to Enslave an Unenslavable Person: Afro-Muslim Splittings in Early Modern Drama"

In this talk, Noémie Ndiaye explores the representations, or rather the strategic 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.

Gloria Wekker, University of Utrecht

Bintou Dembele, Compagnie Rualité

Facilitator: Uju Anya, Carnegie Mellon University