Professor El Hamel discusses the emergence and evolution of ideas of race and color in the Middle East and North Africa. This lecture is mainly interested in racial constructs built around notions of color and lineage. It traces distinct genealogies of race and racism to the beginning of the Islamic empire.
Chouki El Hamel is director of the Center for Maghrib Studies and a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, specializing in West and Northwest Africa. His training and doctoral studies were at the University of Sorbonne (Paris I & VII, France). He was a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. In the year 2017, he was awarded a Fulbright grant for research in Morocco. He is an Africanist scholar who is particularly interested in the subaltern relationship of servile and marginalized communities to Islamic ruling institutions. His research into these relationships revolves around issues of slavery, race/ethnicity/color, gender, power/class, and restorative justice. He published two books and many scholarly articles in academic journals and popular magazines. His interviews, commentaries and essays have appeared in international venues such as the French newspaper Le Monde, the German magazine Bilatéral, the Moroccan magazines Zamane and TelQuel, and Jadaliyya (produced by the Arab Studies Institute in the US). His most recent book is Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013). This book was translated into French in 2019. He is now working on a new book project entitled “The Hidden Story of Maroons in Morocco.”
