Short Abstract

This panel shifts focus from Atlantic slavery to compare Sahelian and Trans-Indian Ocean slaveries and seeks scholars who would analyze how the literary strategies and forms for remembering slavery's violence, addressing its afterlives and impacts on contemporary citizenship and identity.

Long Abstract

This panel proposes a critical intervention into the study of African slaveries by bringing two under-examined regions – the Sahel and the Trans-Indian Ocean world – into sustained comparative dialogue. Moving beyond the Atlantic-dominated paradigm that has long structured slavery studies, the panel examines how the memory of slavery is negotiated, contested, and embodied in African imaginaries across these two interconnected geographies. Centering the category of "Black bodies" as a site of violence and memory, the panel asks: How do African communities remember and narrate the violence of Sahelian and Indian Ocean slaveries? What aesthetic, oral, and performative forms does this memory take? How do works of Condé, Traoré, Habré, Christiansë, Ebnou and others shape or reinforce contemporary struggles over citizenship, belonging, postcolonial identity and human chattel reports (eg in Libya)? Critics/scholars in history, literary studies, anthropology, memory studies and more who examine the labyrinthine afterlives of slavery in Africa are welcome. Through case studies that may be drawn from Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Mauritius, and the wider Indian Ocean littoral and beyond, the panel seeks to argue that memory is not a passive repository of the past. It could also be an active, contested terrain where the legacies of slavery (currently happening) are negotiated in the present (or given heightened, aesthetic embroidery). The panel's contributions could also address the silences and erasures and lastly, the theoretical frameworks necessary for a comparative study of these two slave systems.

Keywords: Black Bodies; Violence, African Imaginaries; Sahelian slavery; Trans-Indian Ocean Slavery

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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