Activating Emancipation: Race, Slavery, and Islamic Respectability Among the Hratin in Colonial Mauritania

Activating Emancipation boldly interrogates our knowledge of the history of slavery, emancipation, race, and Islam in Mauritania, where slavery was abolished only in 1981 and criminalized in 2007. It centers on the voices and stories of Ḥrāṭīn peoples, a complex and ambiguous social category encompassing people with mixed free and servile ancestral backgrounds. The stigma of enslavement, along with their racialized status as Black, has placed them at the bottom of a social hierarchy dominat...