Ambra, Matyla, and Marie: Gendered Racialization, Anti-Blackness, and Legacies of Slavery in Tunisia, Early Nineteenth Century—Present

Abstract: This article unfolds from 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 both early-nineteenth-century European colonial observers as well as African Muslim elites. I subsequently examine how these ideologies are being rearticulated in present-day Tunisia. To move between these temporal frames, I conceptualize an ethics of relationality—a concept informed by scholars of Black and Transnational Feminist Studies centering connective encounters in 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 an early-nineteenth-century archival trace. I maintain that an ethics of relationality is essential for confronting 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 the present.