M'hamed Oualdi

This project deals with the abolition of slavery in 19th-century North Africa through narratives written or conceived by slaves and servants originating from Western Europe, Anatolia, Caucasus, Western and Eastern Africa and their offspring. It seeks first to contribute to a connected and global history of slavery by studying groups of slaves in relation with each other and by linking North Africa to other parts of Africa, Europe, Asia and America. By analyzing slave narratives in a North African context and the various slaves’ abilities to speak for themselves in various languages, this project aims as well at revealing how slaves considered the demise of slavery, how they saw and experienced this legal and social phenomenon. At a methodological and a theoretical level, the final goal of this research project is to understand how and why subalterns were able, forced or even sometimes forbidden to write about their own lives; in other words, to understand how the primary sources that we are using as historians are the outcomes of social interactions including social domination and social conflicts.