Tell This in My Memory

Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire

Eve M. Troutt Powell

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780804788649, 9780804782333
• eBook ISBN: 9780804783750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks across the Ottoman Empire and throughout Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Unlike the Atlantic trade, slavery in this region crossed and mixed racial and ethnic lines. Fair-skinned Circassian men and women were as vulnerable to enslavement in the Nile Valley as were teenagers from Sudan or Ethiopia.

Tell This in My Memory opens up a new window in the study of slavery in the modern Middle East, taking up personal narratives of slaves and slave owners to shed light on the anxieties and intimacies of personal experience. The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries later confronted—or not—the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these vocabularies of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: ‘Abid, A Word with a Long History
• 1. Public Workers, Private Properties: Slaves in ‘Ali Mubarak’s Historical Records
• 2. Babikr Bedri’s Long March with Authority
• 3. How Salim C. Wilson Wrote His Own Enslavement
• 4. Huda and Halide and the Slaves at Bedtime
• 5. Black Mothers and Fathers, Sanctified by Slavery
• 6. The Country of Saint Josephine Bakhita
• Epilogue: Laws of Return
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index