Shaista Patel

Abstract

This article places Columbus’s travels to the New World within a much older history of eight centuries of Muslim/Moor presence on the Iberian Peninsula. It argues that the Orientalist logics underlining the creation of the ‘New World Indian’ have a long history interpellated through figures of the Moors and other Africans whom Europeans knew for centuries before they encountered the Indigenous peoples of the ‘New World.’ This article argues for the need to bring together seemingly discrepant figures, spatialities, and temporalities in order to re/examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of colonialism, capitalism, race, caste, gender, sexuality, and other social formations. Such a reading of the figure not only brings to fore unexamined relationalities but also demands that we think critically and concretely about questions of our complicity in upholding different systems of violence.

Keywords

1492, conquest, Columbus, Muslim/Moor, decolonial, indigeneity, anti-Blackness, Orientalism, Crusades, white settler colonialism, archives

From: Cultural studies 2019 33 (3)

Editor: Wang Yi