Lecture | Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series
Yemen’s history of slavery and its lasting impact on social and racial hierarchies
- Magdalena Moorthy-Kloss (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient)
- Date
- Monday 21 October 2024
- Time
- Serie
- Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series
- Address
- Online via Zoom (register below)
For centuries, enslaved individuals were trafficked to Yemen – mostly from the Horn of Africa across the Red Sea – and forced to support local societies through their labor. As Ḥusayn al-ʿAmrī's pioneering scholarship and my recent studies have highlighted, their contributions in medieval Yemen ranged from manual and domestic work to military and protective services and the occupation of high positions in various local polities. Enslaved women and girls also performed sexual work for their owners and bore them legitimate children, thereby playing key roles in the perpetuation of elite lineages. Yemen’s more recent history of slavery remains largely uncharted, apart from marginal mentions in ethnographies, historical works and literature on the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea region more broadly.
As I will argue in this lecture, slavery was not simply a significant but forgotten aspect of Yemen’s complex history. It also offers important interpretive clues for understanding social and racial hierarchies in the country today, and thus deserves closer attention. Focusing on two social groups known as Muhammashīn and ʿAbīd, I will show that contributions from historical slavery studies can deepen our understanding of their persistent discrimination.
The study of marginalized communities racialized as Black was spearheaded by anthropologists Delores Walters and Huda Seif, and has recently been expanded by a new generation of scholars, including our discussant Gokh Amin Alshaif. I will show how the association of blackness with slavery was already firmly established in the medieval period, largely due to a popular myth and the fact that most enslaved persons in medieval Yemen were of African origin. A love poem about a Black woman of slave ancestry will be analysed in detail, as it reveals how racialized rhetoric was used to demarcate the borders of group identity, and how these borders nevertheless remained porous and contested. This lecture aims to spark scholarly interest in Yemen’s history of slavery and stress that its repercussions will continue to shape social and racial hierarchies in the country for a long time to come.
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About the speaker
Magdalena Moorthy-Kloss is an FWF Erwin Schrödinger Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and an associate researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. (Anthropology) from the University of Vienna and a M.Sc. (Anthropology & Development) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research examines slavery, dependency and social hierarchies in Yemen through an interdisciplinary and transregional lens. Her first monograph is entitled Unfree Lives - Slaves at the Najahid and Rasuld Courts of Yemen (Brill, 2024). She has also published articles in the journals History and Anthropology and Der Islam, and a chapter in the Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery (2023). Besides academia, she has worked for international organisations in Yemen, Egypt and Austria.
About the discussant
Gokh Amin Alshaif is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on gender, race, and racialization in the modern Middle East. Her dissertation, "Native Outsiders," is a social history of marginalized communities in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Yemen. Gokh is the founder and curator of The Global Yemen Project, an online digital humanities project that narrates the global histories of an "Oceanic Yemen" through the social lives of those historically on the margins of Yemeni society. She has written on the lives of Yemeni women, Black Muhamasheen, and Yemeni-Americans. She holds an MA in Global & International Studies, and her work has been generously supported by the Mellon/ACLS Foundation, Council of American Overseas Research Centers Multi-Country Fellowship, and the American Institute for Yemeni Studies.
The Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series is supported by the Horizon-2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project EMStaD YEMEN.
An overview of all events in this series can be found on the series page.