Public Lecture: Residual History, Blackness, and the Unsettled Histories of the Islamic West; Speaker: Temitope Fagunwa

Abstract

The historiography of Islam in medieval Spain remains among the most contested fields of medieval history. Debates over conquest, coexistence, identity and the legacy of Al-Andalus have long exposed the entanglement of historical interpretation with political power. This entanglement has often produced competing, binary historiographical narratives that privilege certain historical experiences while relegating others to the margins of scholarly investigation. Particularly conspicuous amid this historiographical contestation is the insufficient scholarly attention that has been devoted to the presence, contributions and historical agency of Black Africans in the making of the Islamic West. This marginalization is particularly striking given the wealth of residual traces of Black African presence embedded in contemporary European landscapes. These traces persist across diverse cultural practices and material forms, ranging from literary traditions, communal festivals, pharmaceutical knowledge and practices, music and dance to religious symbolism, military heraldry, architectural ornamentation and other expressions of contemporary European life. Drawing on residual history as an approach to fragmented and overlooked evidence, this lecture revisits these entanglements, taking the Western Sudan as an entry point to foreground neglected accounts of Black African mobility and historical agency within the historiography of Islamic Spain.

Temitope Fagunwa, PhD, is an African historian and African diaspora studies scholar whose research traces residual histories across the longue durée, from medieval Europe and Africa through transatlantic slavery and colonialism to postcoloniality. His work examines how the social power of accumulation, embedded in historical processes of mobility, exchange, enslavement, colonialism, and migration, produces enduring institutional, material, cultural, and social formations. He is particularly interested in how these historical processes leave different forms of residues that continue to shape power, inequality, mobility, identity, and the relationship between Africa and the wider world. Between 2018 and 2026, Fagunwa served as an academic staff member at Osun State University, Nigeria, where he taught and conducted research in History and International Studies. In 2025/2026, he held research fellowships at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society, at Leuphana University, Lüneburg and the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB), Wolfenbüttel. 

This lecture is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/68414276933?pwd=PIooDuJktLjPfAFcDj489QbeH3dL6a.1

Meeting-ID: 684 1427 6933
Code: aeUJ3PeAG