Work, Social Status, and Gender in Post-Slavery Mauritania

Work, Social Status, and Gender in Post-Slavery Mauritania PDF Author: Katherine A. Wiley
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253036232
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A portrait of women’s lives, struggles, and newfound freedoms in the last country in the world to abolish slavery. Although slavery was legally abolished in 1981 in Mauritania, its legacy lives on in the political, economic, and social discrimination against ex-slaves and their descendants. Katherine Ann Wiley examines the shifting roles of Muslim arain (ex-slaves and their descendants) women, who provide financial support for their families. Wiley uses economic activity as a lens to examine what makes suitable work for women, their trade practices, and how they understand and assert their social positions, social worth, and personal value in their everyday lives. She finds that while genealogy and social hierarchy contributed to status in the past, women today believe that attributes such as wealth, respect, and distance from slavery help to establish social capital. Wiley shows how the legacy of slavery continues to constrain some women even while many of them draw on neoliberal values to connect through kinship, friendship, and professional associations. This powerful ethnography challenges stereotypical views of Muslim women and demonstrates how they work together to navigate social inequality and bring about social change.

Work, Social Status, and Gender in Post-Slavery Mauritania

Work, Social Status, and Gender in Post-Slavery Mauritania PDF Author: Katherine A. Wiley
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253036232
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A portrait of women’s lives, struggles, and newfound freedoms in the last country in the world to abolish slavery. Although slavery was legally abolished in 1981 in Mauritania, its legacy lives on in the political, economic, and social discrimination against ex-slaves and their descendants. Katherine Ann Wiley examines the shifting roles of Muslim arain (ex-slaves and their descendants) women, who provide financial support for their families. Wiley uses economic activity as a lens to examine what makes suitable work for women, their trade practices, and how they understand and assert their social positions, social worth, and personal value in their everyday lives. She finds that while genealogy and social hierarchy contributed to status in the past, women today believe that attributes such as wealth, respect, and distance from slavery help to establish social capital. Wiley shows how the legacy of slavery continues to constrain some women even while many of them draw on neoliberal values to connect through kinship, friendship, and professional associations. This powerful ethnography challenges stereotypical views of Muslim women and demonstrates how they work together to navigate social inequality and bring about social change.

Still Far From Freedom: The Struggle of Mauritania’s Haratine Women

Still Far From Freedom: The Struggle of Mauritania’s Haratine Women PDF Author: Paige Wilhite Jennings
Publisher: Minority Rights Group
ISBN: 1907919600
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
Mauritania is consistently ranked as the worst place in the world for slavery, with tens of thousands still trapped in total servitude across the country. This practice, despite officially being criminalized, continues to be sustained by the systematic marginalization of Mauritania’s large Haratine population. The situation is especially precarious for Haratine women, who are discriminated against on account of both their gender and ethnicity. This report, Still Far From Freedom: The Struggle of Mauritania’s Haratine Women, draws on extensive research and first-hand testimony from Haratine women. Besides highlighting the everyday reality of abuse and oppression experienced by those in servitude – ranging from exploitative labour, intimidation and confinement to rape, violence and the enforced separation of families – it also explores how formerly enslaved Haratines and their descendants still face widespread stigmatization. The deep discrimination experienced by Haratine women, even among their own community, is driven by the reluctance of authorities to take meaningful action to curb abuses. Nevertheless, although these obstacles can be overwhelming, many Haratine women have demonstrated great courage and determination in their fight for equality and greater autonomy in their own lives. Despite the dangers and the deep resistance their activities attract, including from male members of their own community, Haratine women have played a leading role in advocating for their rights and legal redress for the abuses committed against them. Nevertheless, though the immediate abolition of slavery in Mauritania is a critical first step in reducing many of the worst rights abuses against Haratine women, a wider process of social and institutional reform will also be required before their rights and security can be ensured. These issues can only be addressed by a comprehensive and sustained process of social and institutional reform, with the involvement of the national government, Mauritanian civil society, law enforcement agencies and the international community.

Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman

Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman PDF Author: Matthew J. Perry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107040310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book explores the institution of manumission-the freeing of slaves-in ancient Rome from a gendered perspective. Rome was unique among ancient polities in that it bestowed freed slaves with full citizenship, granting them rights nearly equal to those of freeborn individuals. The sexual identities of a female slave and a female citizen were fundamentally incompatible, as the former was principally defined by her sexual availability and the latter by her sexual integrity. Accordingly, those evaluating the manumission process needed to reconcile a woman's experiences as a slave with the expectations and moral rigor required of the female citizen.

To ÕJoy My Freedom

To ÕJoy My Freedom PDF Author: Tera W. Hunter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674893085
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception--and at the heart--of the new south.

Black Morocco

Black Morocco PDF Author: Chouki El Hamel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139620045
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam chronicles the experiences, identity and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Chouki El Hamel argues that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explain social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world, for this viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions and social practices of slavery in Northwest Africa. El Hamel focuses on black Moroccans' collective experience beginning with their enslavement to serve as the loyal army of the Sultan Isma'il. By the time the Sultan died in 1727, they had become a political force, making and unmaking rulers well into the nineteenth century. The emphasis on the political history of the black army is augmented by a close examination of the continuity of black Moroccan identity through the musical and cultural practices of the Gnawa.

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture PDF Author: Sarah N. Roth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139992805
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In the decades leading to the Civil War, popular conceptions of African American men shifted dramatically. The savage slave featured in 1830s' novels and stories gave way by the 1850s to the less-threatening humble black martyr. This radical reshaping of black masculinity in American culture occurred at the same time that the reading and writing of popular narratives were emerging as largely feminine enterprises. In a society where women wielded little official power, white female authors exalted white femininity, using narrative forms such as autobiographies, novels, short stories, visual images, and plays, by stressing differences that made white women appear superior to male slaves. This book argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period, and consequently had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America through their powerful influence on popular culture.

The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 3, AD 1420-AD 1804

The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 3, AD 1420-AD 1804 PDF Author: David Eltis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521840686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 777

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Book Description
The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.

Reconfiguring Slavery

Reconfiguring Slavery PDF Author: Benedetta Rossi
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1846315646
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A fascinating collection that advances a renewed conceptual framework for understanding slavery in West Africa today: instead of retracing the end of West African slavery, this work highlights the preliminary contours of its recent reconfigurations.

Running from Bondage

Running from Bondage PDF Author: Karen Cook Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108831540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A compelling examination of the ways enslaved women fought for their freedom during and after the Revolutionary War.

(Re-)Claiming Bodies Through Fashion and Style

(Re-)Claiming Bodies Through Fashion and Style PDF Author: Viola Thimm
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030719413
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This book investigates ways of dressing, style and fashion as gendered and embodied, but equally as “religionized” phenomena, particularly focusing on one significant world religion: Islam. Through their clothing, Muslims negotiate concepts and interpretations of Islam and construct their intersectionally interwoven position in the world. Taking the interlinkages between ‘fashionized religion,’ ‘religionized fashion,’ commercialization and processes of feminization as a starting point, this book reshapes our understanding of gendered forms of religiosity and spirituality through the lens of gender and embodiment. Focusing mainly on the agency and creativity of women as they appropriate ways of performing and interpreting various modalities of Muslim clothing and body practices, the book investigates how these social actors deal with empowering conditions as well as restrictive situations. Foregrounding contemporary scholars’ diverse disciplinary, theoretical and methodological approaches, this book problematizes and complicates the discursive and lived interactions and intersections between gender, fashion, spirituality, religion, class, and ethnicity. It will be relevant to a broad audience of researchers across gender, sociology of religion, Islamic and fashion studies.