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History, Racism and Futurism in Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account
Abstract
I propose to examine how a historical fictionalization of slavery, Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, can potentially be a source of a radical reimagining of colonialism, race, and gender. Written in English, the novel presents itself as a fictionalized Spanish-language memoir of sixteenth-century Arabic-speaking Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, an enslaved Black Moroccan Muslim man about whom almost nothing is known beyond scattered mentions of his presence in an expedition part of the Spanish invasion of the “Land of the Indians” (2014, 5). The Moor’s Account speculates both the past and future of its Muslim characters and prompts us to consider what a story, written in the present but based in historical realities between the Arab world, the African content, and North America, can tell us about the future. It does this by retelling stories of the Spanish invasion and colonization, forced conversions to Christianity, genocide of Indigenous Peoples, and the kidnapping and enslavement of African Peoples. I suggest that this narrative told by a Muslim protagonist offers a vision of differences between real and speculative histories and argue that such alternative narratives allow us to evaluate how anti-Muslim racism works within North American conceptualizations of race and racism and how it produces a nuanced understanding of Blackness, gender, and colonialism as crucial aspects of Islamophobia. I propose that the novel inverts hegemonic narratives of transatlantic slavery whereby the enslaved rather than the enslaver and colonizer is the authoritative figure about the invasion of the “New World.” It is the inversion of, speculations on, and alternatives to western colonial narratives of such phenomena that create space to explore Muslim futurities. Such narrations build worlds where racialized and gendered people are dynamic forces in their own stories, reimagining resistance to anti-Muslim racism, challenging and changing narratives of Muslim being. Lalami, Laila. The Moor's Account: A Novel. Vintage Books, 2014.
Discipline
History
Literature
Other
Geographic Area
Morocco
North America
Spain
Sub Area
None