Slavery Before Race: The Racialization of Slavery in Morrison’s A Mercy and Albeshr’s Hend and the Soldiers

Slavery existed in the Arabian Peninsula long before it emerged in the USA; it is depicted in both African-American and Middle-Eastern novels . The works of the African American novelist Toni Morrison and the Saudi writer Badriah Albeshr depict slavery and racism in both contexts. Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) pictures the origins of the slave trade in America in the seventeenth century, whereas Albeshr’s Hend and the Soldiers (2006), written in Arabic and translated into English by Sanna Dhahir in 2017, portrays the abolition of slavery in Saudi Arabia in 1962. The former shows that anyone can be in bondage irrespective of their race and circumstances, while the latter demonstrates that slavery is linked to race and results in numerous kinds of compulsion. A Mercy and Hend and the Soldiers show how “race and races are products of social thought and relations . . . [and that] races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient” (Delgado et al. 9). I argue that the comparison of these two narratives can reveal that race is a socially constructed category, shaped by economic, social, and ideological factors; it is not a fixed biological reality.

Department

English Academy

Publisher

University Press of Mississippi

Book title

Toni Morrison and the Arab World: Transnational Perspectives

Open Access

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14131/1995