Representations of Indian Ocean slavery

 So little work on African slavery in the Indian Ocean world is grounded with descendant communities. It would be great if more of this scholarship tried to trace descendants and their families (ala the work of Joseph Harris) instead of reproducing the logics of erasure in the colonial archives or simply fabulating that past from folklore and rumor, as does some recent literary work.

Moreover, reproducing and narrating in pornographic detail the degradation the enslaved experienced in elite households or in royal courts (as does a recently translated work by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin) to expose "silences" might be necessary for certain projects, but I am often left uncertain certain how much such work contributes to the collective empowerment of African descendants about their present in light of their past. The translators of the novel claim they are stepping outside the colonial gaze, seemingly without doing much study of how these representations of Oriental and Muslim monstrosity were key ideological justifications for European colonial intervention in East Africa.

Most recent scholarship on the subject seems more about the extension of projects of critical race coming from the west than it does about recovering lineages and attitudes of the formerly enslaved. Those two projects need not be contradictory, but in practice, because of the organizational dominance of the western critical race framework, such projects of recovery tend to turn into cul-de-sacs of western representation of the 'Orient'.