Race Empire: North Africa

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This seminar examines the entangled histories of race and imperial power in North Africa since the nineteenth century. Topics it covers include the role of racialization and racism in the governance of imperial subjects, changing social and scholarly conceptions of race in the contexts of Ottoman, Egyptian, Moroccan, and European rule, enslavement and attempts at its abolition, the racial dimensions of decolonization and of the domestic and international politics of anti-colonial liberation, and the effects of the imperial era on the racial politics of North African societies today. Using both historical scholarship and literature from the region, the course explores the manifold histories of race and power that have shaped modern societies from Egypt and Sudan in the east to Morocco and Mauritania in the west.