Readings on Race and Slavery with Specific Relevance for Middle East Studies

July 07, 2020

Rosie Bsheer, Assistant Professor of History, and Cemal Kafadar, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, both core faculty members of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, recommend the following books on race and slavery that have special relevance for Middle East studies. For information on locating books at a library near you, visit www.worldcat.org.

Rosie Bsheer's Recommendations

	Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket Books, 2016)
	Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (University of California Press, 2009)
	Matthew S. Hopper, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2015)
	Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (University of North Carolina Press, 2014)
	Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press, 2017)
	Eve M. Troutt Powell, Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2012)
	Mahmud Traori, Maymouna (Dar al-mada li-l-tiba‘a w-al-nashr, 2007)
	Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Cornell University Press, 2017)

Cemal Kafadar's Recommendations

	Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800–1909 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1996)
	Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
	John O. Hunwick and Eve M. Troutt Powell, The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002)
	Ismael Musah Montana and Ehud R. Toledano, The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (University Press of Florida, 2013)
	Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, with a New Preface (Harvard University Press, 2018)
	Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (Yale University Press, 2007)
	Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean (American University in Cairo Press, 2010)
	Magdalena J. Zaborowska, James Baldwin's Turkish Decade (Duke University Press, 2009)

Additional Recommendations

Recommendations for more readings not necessarily specific to Middle East studies have been compiled by Harvard African and African American Studies faculty and are available on the Department of African and African American Studies website.