Domestic Slavery, Skin Colour, and Image Dialectic in Thirteenth-Century Arabic Manuscripts

This essay is the first scholarly exploration of slavery's visual representation in medieval Islam. Close examination of thirteenth-century paintings from Arabic manuscripts, considered alongside textual sources, reveals how images may contribute to the study of slavery in the premodern Middle East. In particular, these paintings confirm the link between domestic service and the trade in black African slaves. They also suggest that if skin colour did not determine enslavement, it might have shaped the perception of slaves and the division of labour among them. This essay further attends to the semantic operations of slavery within the picture. One of its suggestions is that images of slaves functioned as signs of pure labour, as well as liminal figures, framing, highlighting, and creating a contrast with light-skinned Arab characters, mostly seen engaged in acts of discourse and leisurely activities. A visual dialectic seems to be at work, creating a series of asymmetrical relationships, between light-skinned and dark-skinned, freedom and slavery, speech and labour, high culture and servitude. Such a dialectic may ultimately be read as a comment on the mechanisms and limits of archival power.