Order ID 53563633773 Type Essay Writer Level Masters Style APA Sources/References 4 Perfect Number of Pages to Order 5-10 Pages Description/Paper Instructions
Week8_ConcubinageGeoPoliticalEconomy_Value_Kano.docx
This week, we start to examine how “race” is invented as an instrument of “sex.” That is, how ‘race’ was created to further subordinate the generative/relational value of the maternal to the violences of private property and the ‘father.’ This intensification is nowhere more evident than in the institution of concubinage as it moved away from the African continent to the white-settled slave-owning Americas. If you do not know what a concubine is, please look that up, first.
Week 8 Concubinage and ‘race’: royal concubinage in nineteenth century Kano, Nigeria versus the heightening of maternal subordination within the context of transatlantic slavery
This week we begin with one of two case studies of concubinage tied directly to slavery (not all concubines across time and place were slaves, though this was commonly the case). It has to do with the fifty or so royal concubines who worked and lived in the exceptionally large Islamic palace built circa 1500 in the old merchant city of Kano, Nigeria. In African contexts, slave women generally fetched a higher market price than slave men—their greater value coming from their “sex,” that is, the expectation that they would bear children for their owner. In the context of royalty, moreover, concubines were often favored over wives. Marriage was largely about politics, whereas men could choose whom they wanted as concubines.
By contrast, at the same time, slave owners used slave women in transatlantic contexts for ‘sexual’ purposes. Here, slave women held lower market value than slave men. This is because planters considered the childbirth and child rearing activities of slave women to be net accountancy losses. Accordingly, they preferred that African women stay in Africa so they that and the continent bore all reproductive costs.
Before you start the reading, though, you’ll need to develop some conceptual tools for thinking about ‘race’ in relation to ‘sex.’ We do this by exploring the geopolitical economic contexts in which ‘race’ is assigned very particular kinds of work to do. Geopolitical economy refers, here, to how power (the political) is shaped by where people are located in relation to one another (geopolitics), and the economic and geographical means through which power organizes itself. So, for instance, Paleolithic peoples that lived along the littoral margins of the Mediterranean Sea and ate fish every day lived very different material-geographical lives than those hunters and gatherers living in the mountains who hunted (and ate) wooly mammoths and wild boar. These are not individual differences having to do with, ‘individual’ ‘choice,’ but with how life is structured or ‘called to order’ by structural, natural, and social conditions.
For our purposes, think about differences in geopolitical economy in terms of the categories of: hunting and gathering; pastoralism; nonmechanized farming; mercantilism; industrial capitalism; and finance capitalism. Below, I describe the first of these geopolitical economies, one that wholly depended on the dyadic maternal, that is, not on private property. This latter had to do with a ‘father’ that created itself by compelling women (only) to be monogamous; a ‘mother’ created through the ‘father’; and by the monitoring and related making of ‘sex.’
· Hunters and gatherers ‘hunt and gather’ (their economy) to sustain themselves. As nomads, the entirety of their material and economic existence is fleeting. They stay in one place only momentarily, to forage and eat. And then they move on to the next place. Because they have to, they develop an intensely intimate relationship with the natural world around them, making hunting and gathering a kind of natural economy. Given the peripatetic nature and precariousness of nomadic life, women conserve their maternal energies by birth-spacing their children by 4 to 5 years. For this reason, total fertility rates (or TFRs–the total number of children born to a woman in her lifetime) of all hunting and gathering groups are low, perhaps 3 or 4.
We consequently know that anywhere we go in the world where hunting and gathering life predominates, we can expect: little to no private property; no slavery; low fertility rates; a dyadic/relational (‘maternal’) celebration of life; and intense relational intimacy with the material world.
Thinking along geopolitical economic lines, then, allows us to ask: in what precise contexts did/does ‘race’ become possible–just as for hunters and gatherers it was/is impossible. It is in light of this question that we begin this first study of concubinage in Kano, the geopolitical economic context of which was agrarian and mercantilist. Because iron smelting relied on images of the maternal, agriculture in Africa did not develop through ontologies of private. Instead, agriculture became central
By contrast, in the Americas, ‘race’ was used to increase the intensity and scale of maternal exploitation/degradation. This it did by providing the justification by which slave traders and owners took the child from the mother for purposes of sale.
Figure 1. Look at the trans Saharan slave-trading map, below, to familiarize yourself with where Kano was located in relation to Fez and Cairo. Note how the Saharan desert effectively separates North Africa from the rest of the continent. The film Yeelen is set within this transSaharan region (remember when he’s walking in a desert and nearly dies of thirst?)
Exercise C:
· Read pages 36-45 (only) of the following article, the PDF of which can be found by searching for the title in Google Scholar:
· The impact of British imperialism on the landscape of female slavery in the Kano palace, northern Nigeria
· Write a paragraph detailing the various grain-related tasks that concubines carried out and to which tasks or ‘jobs’ the grain-related concubine and slave titles referred.
· What does this association of grains and concubines suggest about how the Hausa people understood the maternal? (Hint: think about the smelting context and how the maternal can also extend into nonhuman domains.)
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