Catey Boyle is a historian who writes on slavery, race, and empire at the crossroads of the African continent and the Middle East. They are currently a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Axinn Center for the Humanities at Middlebury College and an incoming assistant professor of history at the University of Calgary. Their writing has been featured in Feminist Formations  and The Journal of Modern African Studies, and is forthcoming in Ìrìnkèrindò: A Journal ofAfrican Migration  and The Review of the Tunisian Academy Beït al-Hikma. Their work has been supported by Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies in Tunis, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Mellon Foundation, and Dar Ben Gacem. They are at work on a book project tentatively entitled Sites of Servitude: Slavery, Race Formation, and Empire in 18th and 19th-century Ottoman Tunis.

Abstract:

Boyle contends that enslaved women forcibly conveyed from western Africa to labor in northern Africa theorized rich therapeutic knowledge practices in the face of mass mortality and violent displacement. Merging worldviews from Hausaland, Kanem-Borno Empire (present-day northern Nigeria and Chad), and Tunisia, this knowledge-practice became known as Bori-Stambeli. It was not merely alternative or marginal but was rather equally, if not more popular, among inhabitants of western and northern Africa than the practices of orthodox medical and religious elites. Boyle argues that historical accounts of Bori-Stambeli demonstrate how enslaved women were formidable knowledge producers. They threatened the ideological and economic presumptions upon which patriarchal and racialized social orders were crystallizing in western Africa, northern Africa, and western Europe by the early-mid nineteenth century. This talk begins with close critical readings of writings penned by western African Islamic reformers, followed by analysis of the medical diary of the French physician to Tunisian governors. These readings center the ways in which Bori-Stambeli practitioners called, and still call, for redress for the violent legacies of trans-Saharan human trafficking.