Why is it that a significant number of Arabic epics (siyar sha‘biyya) first attested in the 12th century contain protagonists who are raced as Black and assigned unique origin stories unlike their heroic peers? What can attention to this genre of literature teach us about the role of race in narrative and social-historical modes of Muslim belonging?

This talk will introduce Rachel Schine's research examining representations of Black heroes in medieval Arab-Islamic popular epics that existed between oral and written traditions and across vast regional and temporal contexts. Schine read the Black heroes of Arabic epics as enacting “aspirational histories” in which even populations viewed as geo-culturally remote are always already assimilated into Islam. By comparing the aspirational histories featured in epics with related works of adab, geographies, legal texts, and medical texts, she illustrates the particular racial logic of this popular literary form and situates its role in the premodern Arabic corpus as a whole.

Speaker
Rachel Schine, Humanities Research Fellow, NYUAD

Moderated by
Erin Pettigrew, Assistant Professor of History & Arab Crossroads Studies, NYUAD