The present chapter studies two contemporary Algerian narratives retelling the medieval rebellion of the Zendj, Black Africans brought as slaves to the marshes of Lower Iraq, who revolted against the power of the Abbasid Caliphate. Considered as the greatest servile insurrection of the medieval Arab-Muslim world, Jamel Eddine Benchecikh’s novel Rose noire sans parfum (1998) and Tareq Teguia’s film Révolution Zenj (2013) revisit this evocative episode in the global history of slavery, merging racial and economic exploitation with religious conflict and the struggle for liberation in an age of empire. The chapter focuses on Benchecikh and Teguia’s creative responses to the silence to which the Zendj have been condemned by the Arabic sources of the time, pointing out the different stylistic paths they take to trace analogies between the Zendj Rebellion and the contemporary forms of oppression, racism, and sectarian strife they witness across Algeria, Iraq, Palestine, and Europe. Expressing the rage of the oppressed, their narratives denounce the inequalities and injustices of the postcolonial and globalized world, investigating their causes while inviting audiences within and outside the Arab World to join in the Zendj’s unconcluded struggle for liberation across the centuries.

From the Georgia Sea Islands to Jamaica to Brazil, enslaved African Muslims precariously re-established textual traditions and networks by writing letters in Arabic and transcribing sacred texts from memory. Bearing witness to their rich and cosmopolitan educational backgrounds, African Muslims in the New World used Arabic literacy to subjectively and objectively overthrow the chains of slavery. They narrated as well as propelled their itinerant diasporic histories through literary and epistolary models, from Scheherazade to al-Hariri, studied in the markets and madrasas of Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in the West Indies but resident for the majority of his life in Liberia, engaged deeply with the Islamic culture of the Sahel. He provided extensive documentation about Islam in West Africa, attuned to the ways it was woven together with the Islamic world of the Ottoman Empire and Indian Ocean world. His research and travels frame how future researchers, scholars, and activists would perceive the cosmopolitanism of African Muslims such as Job ben Solomon, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, and Nicholas Said among many others, and how they sought to re-member their narrative, familial, and sacred ties to Arabic and Islam.

In this chapter, Hesford examines the humanitarian imperatives of contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking campaigns and their calculated appropriations and parasitic logics. She considers in what contexts, under what conditions of visibility and legibility, and in support of what political investments are humanitarian tropes deployed? To better understand the contemporary anti-slavery movement’s perpetuation and parasitic appropriation of humanitarian tropes, Hesford turns to the rhetorical mediation of human trafficking subjects and their stories. Understanding these mediations, she argues, is important because how trafficking subjects and their stories are framed sets the parameters for public recognition and political action.

This chapter focuses on recent scholarly discussion of how the visual arts may be considered capable of “visual exegesis” (a term first coined by the art historian Paolo Berdini and now widely used). It argues that, when we read the Bible in the company of visual art, we are asked to countenance our implication in each other, in a single world full of many meanings, in the shared conditions that sustain human communication across difference and in the encompassing existential questions that the biblical texts pose.

Acknowledging the experimental beginnings of opera and expressing high hopes for its future, Marco da Gagliano (1582–1643) thus reviews the origins of ‘such spectacles’ in the 1608 preface of his own first effort in the new genre, La Dafne, itself a reworking and expansion of the earliest completely sung music drama a decade earlier. He goes on to explain how, after a great deal of discussion concerning the way the ancients had represented their tragedies and about what role music had played in them, the court poet Ottavio Rinuccini (1562–1621) began to write the story (favola) of Dafne, and the learned amateur Jacopo Corsi (1561–1602) composed some airs on part of it. Determined to see what effect a (completely sung) work would have on the stage, they approached the skilled composer and singer Jacopo Peri, who finished the work and probably premièred the role of Apollo ‘on the occasion of an evening entertainment’ during the carnival of 1597/8 and on subsequent occasions. In the invited audience at the first performance were Don Giovanni de’ Medici and ‘some of the principal gentlemen’ of Florence.2

The essay discusses the development of literary criticism and its various approaches, such as narrative criticism, reader-response criticism, and ideological criticism. Concepts such the implied author, text, and implied reader are also introduced, providing greater clarity of the principles employed by literary critics engaged in the narrative exegesis of the text.

Opera, ‘as every school boy knows’, started life in the 1590s; and we might well suppose that such a novel phenomenon would cry out for entirely new techniques of staging. But in this we would be wrong. Most of the elements which fused to create opera as a form were already present in other musical and dramatic modes in the later sixteenth century, and that was the case, too, when it came to putting the form on stage.

Christian theological interpretation of Scripture is a practice that brings together both trained biblical scholars as well as theologians of various types. In recent years this has enabled the importance of some foundational theological questions about scriptural interpretation to come to the forefront. This chapter both highlights the importance of addressing these questions and how the practice of theological interpretation might move forward in the future.

Traditionally underexplored by historians of modern Iran, over the past few years slavery in Iran has become a recognizable subject of historiographic inquiry. Taking as an example the transmediation of a Persian legend (Dāsh Ākul) into literary fiction, and then film, this chapter explores the limits and contradictions of slavery’s historical recovery. In the cinematic version of Dāsh Ākul, the narrative foe Kākā Rustam wears blackface, reactivating a historical detail lost in Sadeq Hedayat’s famous short story of the same name published forty years prior. In Masūd Kīmīā’ī’s 1971 film, Kākā Rustam’s blackface recalls the fact that he was the child of African slaves, witness to his parents’ brutal murder at the hands of their master. This chapter argues that the various transformations and distortions that occur through the medial transmission of Dāsh Ākul illustrate how distortion is constitutive of, rather than merely contingent to slavery’s archive.

The invention of opera not only introduced musical, dramatic, and aesthetic innovations, but it also prompted unexpected changes in gender roles and social relationships, in particular the appearance of the first women to sing on the operatic stage as professionals and the rise of the castrato. The stricter gender roles of early modern society meant that a professional female singer appearing in public was perceived to be committing a significant transgression. The public sphere was primarily a male space where men could act professionally and still maintain their honour and prestige, whereas the reputation of a woman who performed on stage was considerably more precarious: her career was likely to be viewed as indistinguishable from prostitution. The embodiment of an object of desire, the female singer was viewed as both threatening and appealing. Crossing the border between public and private spheres was therefore a bold move for a woman and exposed those who did it to all kinds of attacks. In everyday life, chastity, moderation, silence, and invisibility were the major virtues associated with an honest woman. Female opera singers became visible and professionally active by exhibiting themselves onstage; they also transgressed the border between silence and voice.1

Mapping one of the “global afterlives of slavery,” this chapter thinks about how the racist technologies of control in the United States, from slavery to Jim Crow Segregation, formed templates for other racist configurations of control across the colonial world. Charting the transatlantic reach of white supremacy transmitted through ecosystems of transcolonial influence, the chapter explores what it means to think about the legacies, or “afterlives,” of the policies and ideological structures that emanated from the histories of slavery in the southern United States, and how these traveled as markers of both precedent and caution to other nations, and especially in the case of South Africa. As a transnational afterlife to the histories of slavery in the United States, apartheid can be seen to grapple with the legacies of racial control such as segregation, employing the racialized landscapes of the post-slavery American south as metrics and templates for the articulation of segregationist platform that would lead to formal apartheid by the mid-twentieth century. The chapter argues that while slavery did not create apartheid, the transcolonial circulation of technologies of racial control did mutually inform and structure the national and cultural landscapes of spaces such as the American south and South Africa.

The chapter on Jewish interpretation focuses on the role that biblical interpretation has played and still plays in the development of Jewish tradition, and how it has shaped Jewish practices, theology and ethics from antiquity to our own time. It provides a survey of important phases in the history of biblical interpretation from antiquity to the present.

The beginnings of German-language opera can only be sketched loosely based on available sources. Our knowledge of its early history depends on ‘dates without visual aids’1 and ‘words without songs’, that is, mentions of performances and dates in more-or-less reliable archives, chronicles, and bibliographies,2 as well as mute libretti, which ultimately only hint at how the first opera-like works in German sounded and were performed onstage. The musical losses must be considerable. According to cautious estimates, in the twenty-four known sites of operatic performance in Protestant-Lutheran regions in northern, central, and southern Germany, about 230 works were performed in the seventeenth century alone.3