Browse Exhibits (5 total)

    This project deals with the exhibit “Kilwa to Doha: Journey of an enslaved person” at the Bin Jelmood House, Msheireb Museums in Doha, Qatar. This exhibit follows the story of a woman captured and sold into slavery in the Indian Ocean, and her story is supplemented by drawings that capture the emotional experience. As a group, we were particularly struck by the creative way in which this exhibit deals with the complex themes of enslavement in the Indian Ocean. One of Gwen Campbell’s interview sections deals with the enslavement of women and children after killing men, and the way in which this plays into notions of power and being able to enslave the perceived “weaker” populations was an interesting aspect to our exhibit, as the woman in a pink dress is the protagonist and she is separated from her husband. Our group decided to design a website highlighting the themes we took out of this beautiful exhibit, delivering our analyses in various forms of art and reflection. 

(Interview: Gwen Campbell, “Women and Children”.)

In the Bin Jelmood House (BJH) there is an exhibition called “Slavery from the Indian Ocean to Qatar”, which shifts focus from slavery in the broader Indian Ocean world context to the Qatari national context. This narrowing includes a discussion of slavery and abolition from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, a robust examination of so-called “modern slavery” in both national and global contexts, and a brief exploration of contemporary efforts to combat modern slavery, in Qatar and beyond. The exhibit does present slavery in its various historical incarnations as abusive, but through its emphasis on slavery as a global institution and its diminishment of Qatar’s own participation the BJH shields and minimizes Qatar’s own complicity in the slave trade while portraying Qatari slavery as particularly benign.

This presentation will bring you through the exhibit in chronological order, commenting on aspects that seem particularly compelling, unconvincing, or problematic. In so doing it will make use of the work of other scholars like Karen Exell and Ahmad Sakainga who have engaged with slavery in the Gulf region, or directly with the BJH. The section on “Modern Slavery” will discuss the strategies the BJH employs to distance Qatar and its exploitative labor practices from the international slave trade and from slavery as it has existed in the region historically.

The section devoted to “Combating ‘Human Trafficking’” will analyze several discursive moves made in this portion of the exhibit, and converse briefly with other scholars who have commented on the ubiquity and nature of contemporary forms of slavery. This discussion will locate important contradictions and ironies in this final portion of the exhibit, the problematics of which lie not in what is said, but rather what is left silent.

This presentation will conclude by investigating how Qatari national identity is privileged at the expense of slaves’ agency. By exploring the racialized narratives privileged in Bin Jelmood House one also sheds light on how Qatar’s curators portrayed slavery as benign in relation to the Atlantic context. Additionally, the last section of this presentation will include a link to an essay, which explores the ideas above in more detail. By bringing questions surrounding identity, race, agency and historiography to light, this paper and presentation seek to provide viewers with a more nuanced lens in which to interface with the exhibit. 

In our approach to this project, sensitivity to the subject matter was essential. More than that, it was important to us to balance a critique of the museum with affirmations that its stated goal is worthwhile, necessary, and meaningful. A critique of the Bin Jelmood House's motives does not detract from the importance of its mission and the necessity of acknowledging and teaching about a country's history with slavery. With this in mind, our project both explains the museum's goals in examining legacies of slavery in Qatar, and poses questions of our own for future museum exhibits.

With regards to methodology, we began by reading and discussing the exhibit upon which we based this website. We talked about our major takeaways, and we discerned the main idea and purpose of the exhibit. We decided upon a website as a format for this project because, the more we examined the exhibit, the more we noticed that it was broken into distinct sections, which lends itself to a website. We each selected sections of the website to work on. Each section offers factual information about the Bin Jelmood House's exhibit, as well as our own analysis in different sections so as to distinguish opinion from fact for the reader.

(For your ease, the breakdowns are as follows:

Morgan wrote the sections titled "Slavery" and "Integration"

Molly wrote the section titled "Manumission" and this "About this project" section

Rameen wrote the section titled "Qatari Identity").

https://sites.google.com/view/legacies-of-slavery-in-qatar/home