Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research
Lectures

Muslim Slave Rebellions in the Americas – Margarita Rosa | 16th MAS-ICNA Convention

April 6, 2018
Margarita Rosa
1 min read

In this Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference presentation at the 16th MAS-ICNA Convention, guest author Margarita Rosa discusses the history of Muslim resistance to slavery in North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and our connection to a spiritual ancestry of resistance to oppression. She shares du’as written by enslaved Muslims as well as aspects of her experience as an Afro-Dominican Muslim woman in a world where slavery has not yet been abolished.

Read “Du’as of the Enslaved: The Malê Slave Rebellion in Bahía, Brazil” to learn more.

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Margarita Rosa

Margarita Rosa is a Ph. D candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and a scholar of women and slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Her dissertation, titled “The Enslaved Womb: Enslaved Women, Roman Law, and Reproduction in Brazil,” traces the history of legislation concerning enslaved women’s biological reproduction, beginning with Roman legislation and ending with the 1871 Free-Womb Law in Brazil. Rosa’s work examines how nineteenth-century scholars in Brazil used or disposed of Roman legislation in arguments for or against hereditary slavery. Rosa traces the naturalization of the claim that “the child of an enslaved woman is also born a slave,” and provides theoretical tools for studying the inheritance of slavery through long durée accounts of the western archive.

Her interests include enslaved women and reproduction, slave rebellions, enslaved women in prisons, and black women writers in the western literary tradition. Margarita Rosa’s historical training is in Latin American History and African American History.

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