Alex Dika Seggerman:
Expressing Faith, Claiming History: Portraits of Enslaved American Muslims

From the first arrival of twenty enslaved Africans on the shores of Virginia in 1619 to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, approximately 400,000 people from Africa were forcibly migrated to the North American colonies and the subsequent independent nation, the United States of America. These people came largely from West Africa, where Islam has been practiced since at least the eleventh century. The brutal inhumanity of the Atlantic slave trade meant that precise records were not kept, but scholars estimate that many thousands Muslims were amongst them. Nevertheless, the relative paucity of material records of Black African Muslims resulted in a major gap in historical record. Placing an art historical lens to this archive helps fill the lacuna, thereby establishing a more robust history of Islam in America. 

The visual archives of three enslaved Muslim Africans – Ayuba Sulieman Diallo (1701-1773), Yarrow Mamout (1736-1823), and Omar Ibn Said (1770-1864) – exhibit the long presence of Islam in the United States and the central role of Black Americans to that story. An art historical examination of these rare records reveals how each man expressed his Muslim faith through connecting to West African Islamic cultural histories. These connections include sartorial histories, fiber arts, talismans, calligraphy, holiday celebrations, manuscript illumination, and recitation practices. 

This history is significant for a contemporary American society with a Muslim minority (approximately 4 million in 2024) as well as a corrective to a mainstream culture that often frames Islam as a foreign. While it has always been small, Islam has been in North America for hundreds of years and is today represented by millions of people. This history deserves to be told and expanded.

Alex Dika Seggerman  is Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University-Newark. She received her PhD from Yale University and held postdoctoral fellowships at Smith College, Hampshire College, and Yale University. Her scholarship investigates the intersection of Islam and modernism in art history. She is author of  Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary  (2019) and co-editor of  Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean  (2022). In 2023-2024, she was the Patricia and Phillip Frost Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of Asian Art. She is currently Visiting Scholar at the Photothek and will stay at the KHI until 31 December 2024.