Paper short abstract:

Deploying an ethics of relationality, I call for a project of archival reading that interrogates ideologies of gendered racialization and enslavement produced by early-nineteenth-century African and European elites in northern Africa, as well as their post-colonial rearticulations in the present.

Paper long abstract:

This article centers on the inscription of an enslaved Black woman in early-nineteenth-century Ottoman Tunis preserved in the French colonial archives. I call for a project of archival reading that interrogates ideologies of gendered racialization and enslavement produced by early-nineteenth-century Islamicate elites and European colonial observers, as well as their post-colonial rearticulations in the present by politicians and translators. Deploying an ethics of relationality that productively holds common difference across privilege, time, space, race, class, gender, status, and ability, I contend that this praxis is essential for engaging with the multiple forms of anti-Blackness that have conditioned the production and legacies of this archival trace. Furthermore, this praxis amplifies the rich and complex histories of Black Tunisians. To confront the violence of anti-Black racism and xenophobia linking the northern regions of the African continent to empires of the Global North in the past and present, this project of archival reading is grounded in coalition-building among activists, organizers, and researchers in Tunisia and the broader Global South and North.