She Who Knows: Resistance to Gendered Racialization in Early-19th-Century Ottoman Tunis and Present-day Reverberations

This lecture turns to the Ottoman province of Tunis, a terminus for trans-Saharan human trafficking in the late 18th and early 19th century, to center the lives of enslaved women forcibly conveyed to the province. It examines how the violence of slavery intersected with French economic intervention in the region as well as with emerging racial ideologies held by Tunisian and western African elites. This lecture critiques disembodied historical perspectives conventionally preserved in state archives, like those of the chief doctor to the Ottoman governor of Tunis. Instead, we read primary sources like medical memoirs to amplify rich and challenging narratives from enslaved people of presumed sub-Saharan African descent whom the physician frequently treated. These episodes of disease, while heavily mediated, offer narratives of refusal and dissemblance, negotiation and resistance. We examine these accounts alongside visiting Fulani Islamic reformer A?mad Ibn Al-Qa?i al-Timbuktawi’s 1808 polemic against Stambeli, widely popular therapeutic practices led by enslaved and freed people living in Tunis. Ultimately, this lecture contends that these residents were popularly considered healing practitioners as much as individuals like the elite physician.