Race in the Archives (Talk by Baki Tezcan)

Early Modern Ottoman Africana Literature at the Intersection of Gender and Race

Abstract
The Islamicate literature on the "virtues of Africans" has a long history that goes back to the ninth century. In the early seventeenth century, this literature was introduced into Turkish in a bilingual work that heavily drew on an unacknowledged Arabic source from the late sixteenth century. Within a few years, Mullah Ali, an Ottoman scholar who had entered Istanbul as an African slave, reworked the same Arabic source, expanding it in Turkish with the help of other Arabic sources that are devoted to eunuchs. While both of these works were written in the context of patronage relationships that involved the Chief Black Eunuch of the Ottoman imperial court, the next major contribution to Ottoman Africana literature in the first half of the eighteenth century was an openly racist critique of the political power of the contemporary Chief Black Eunuch. Finally, the last major example of this literature around the mid-eighteenth century was a biographical dictionary of Ottoman Chief Black Eunuchs. In this talk, these four works will be discussed comparatively and in the socio-political context of an Afro-Eurasian empire in which the only Africans with political power in the imperial capital were emasculated men.

Bio
Baki Tezcan teaches history at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World and about forty articles and books chapters on Islam, Ottoman history, and Ottoman and Turkish historiography, including “Dispelling the Darkness of the Halberdier’s Treatise: A Comparative Look at Black Africans in Ottoman Letters in the Early Modern Period,” in Disliking Others: Alterophobia in Pre-Modern Ottoman Lands, eds. Helga Anetshofer, Erdem Çıpa, and Hakan Karateke (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2018), 43-74.