Abstract
At the close of a millennium marked by the homogenizing forces of global capitalism and the particularizing tendencies of essentialist dogma and sectarian violence, the francophone Lebanese journalist, novelist, and expatriate Amin Maalouf claims a heterogeneous polyglot subjectivity as an antidote to lethally reductive identity politics. Maalouf’s concern in his memoir with the complex imbrication of identity and politics is anticipated by his first novel, Léon l’Africain, which constructs an “imaginary autobiography” for the sixteenth-century poet, diplomat, and exile al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wezzan, also known in the Western European tradition as Leo Africanus.2 The historical Leo Africanus— a name Oumelbanine Zhiri stresses “qu’il ne s’est jamais donné luimême” (that he never gave himself)—was born in the Islamic kingdom of Granada and exiled as a child to North Africa with the overthrow of this kingdom by the Catholic coalition that would later become the Spanish Hapsburg Empire.3 His youth was spent in diplomatic travel concentrating on North Africa, but also venturing to the distant capitals of Timbuktu, Mecca, and Constantinople. Traversing the Mediterranean during one of his voyages, he was captured by Venetian pirates and presented as a slave to Pope Leo X, who lent him his Christian name. While in Rome, he was baptized and became a scribe in the papal service.
Moitié français, donc, et moitié libanais? Pas du tout! L’identité ne se compartimente pas, elle ne se répartit ni par moitiés, ni par tiers, ni par plages cloisonnées. Je n’ai pas plusieurs identités, j’en ai une seule, faite de tous les éléments qui l’ont façonnée, selon un “dosage” particulier qui n’est jamais le même d’une personne à l’autre.
(Half French, then, and half Lebanese? Not at all! Identity cannot be compartmentalized; it can be divided neither by halves, nor by thirds, nor by parts. I do not have several identities, I have one alone, made of all the elements which have fashioned it according to a particular “dosage” which is never the same from one person to another.)
Amin Maalouf, Les identités meurtrières (Deadly Identities)1
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Notes
Amin Maalouf, Les identités meurtrières (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1998), 10. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French are my own. Maalouf’s memoir has recently been translated as In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Arcade, 2000).
Oumelbanine Zhiri, L’Afrique au miroir de l’Europe: Fortunes de Jean Léon l’Africain à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 49.
An influential touchstone for my argument has been Walter Cohen, “The Discourse of Empire in the Renaissance,” in Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, ed. Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 260–83. My conceptualization of the Western European discourse of empire has also been informed by
Anthony Pagden’s Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Importantly, while cautioning against eliding colonial dynamics prior to the modern era, Robert Bartlett in his influential The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) clarifies the distinction between “Medieval and Modern Colonialism” (306–14) in qualitative terms that signal a paradigm shift for early modern discourses of empire.
Most notably, Louis Massignon, Le Maroc dans les premières années du XVIe siècle: Tableau géographique d’après Léon l’Africain (Alger: Adolphe Jourdan, 1906), 34.
Edward Said, Orientalism (NewYork:Vintage, 1979), 71. Cf. Aijaz Ahmad’s reference to Saidian “cultural amphibian” in “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 210.
Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 244.
Bernadette Andrea, “Assimilation or Dissimulation?: Leo Africanus’s ‘Geographical Historie of Africa’ and the Parable of Amphibia,” Ariel, 32.3 (2001): 1–23. Jonathan Burton provides a parallel reading of this passage in “‘A most wily bird’: Leo Africanus, Othello and the Trafficking in Difference,” in
Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 43–63.
Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained Written by Al-Hassan Ibn-Mohammed Al-Wezaz Al-Fasi, a Moor, Baptised as Giovanni Leone, but Better Known as Leo Africanus. Done into English in the Year 1600, by John Pory, 3 vols., ed. Robert Brown (NewYork: Burt Franklin, 1896), 1: 189, 190. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent references to Leo Africanus’s Description are from this edition.
Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), ix, x. For a survey of Chicana feminist treatments of Mahntzin/Malinche, see
Norma Alarcón, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object,” in This Bridge Called My Back, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 182–91, and her essay “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism,” Cultural Critique, 13 (1989): 57–87.
In citing “dominant, residual, and emergent” social formations, I draw on Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–7.
For the construction of the British as belated imperialists, see Richard Hakluyt, “The Epistle Dedicatorie in the First Edition, 1589,” of The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, vol. 1 (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904), xvii–xxii. On the “tardiness” thesis concerning English overseas imperialism, see
Nicolas Canny, “The Origins of Empire: An Introduction,” in The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Nicolas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–33. Barbara Fuchs examines the tendentious representation of early modern British imperialism as “belated” in her essay for this volume.
For a useful biography, see William S. Powell, John Pory, 1572–1636: The Life and Letters of a Man of Many Parts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977).
See the analysis of Pory’s additions and alternations in Zhiri, L’Afrique, 82–3. Also see Emily Bartels, “Imperialist Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and the Construction of Africa,” Criticism, 34 (1992): 517–38.
On the Moroccan ambassador to England, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, see Bernard Harris, “A Portrait of a Moor,” Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958): 89–97. For an exemplary anticolonial analysis of Othello, see
Martin Orkin, Shakespeare Against Apartheid (Johannesburg: A. D. Donker, 1987). Anthony Barthelemy provides a useful survey of previous critical trends in his Introduction to Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Othello (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), 1–50. For a related reading of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, see
John Michael Archer, “Antiquity and Degeneration in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 145–64.
“The Queenes Masques. The first, Of Blacknesse: Personated at the Court, at White-Hall, on the Twelv’th night, 1605,” in Ben Jonson, eds. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, vol. 7 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 169–80. All subsequent references to this masque will be drawn from this volume and will be indicated through parenthetical references.
On (post)colonial ambivalence, see Homi Bhabha’s “Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92.
Anthony Gerard Barthelemy quotes this Oxford English Dictionary definition in Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Renaissance Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 7. Recent treatments of this politico-semantic shift include Ania Loomba, “‘Delicious Traffick’: Alterity and Exchange on the Early Modern Stage,” Shakespeare Survey, 52 (1999): 201–14 and
Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1999).
Powell, John Pory, 14. For “Queen Elizabeth’s response,” see Peter Fryer, Staying Power: Black People in Britain Since 1504 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984), 10–12. Also see
Arthur L. Little, Jr.’s astute analysis of these Elizabethan edicts in Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). For documents relating to English travel in North Africa during Elizabeth’s reign, see
Henri de Castries, Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc, vol. 1 (1540–89) (Paris: E. Leroux Luzac, 1918); vol. 2 (1590–1625) (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1925).
For the distinction between “author” and “scriptor,” see Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 142–8.
Bernadette Andrea, “Black Skin, The Queen’s Masques: Africanist Ambivalence and Feminine Author(ity) in the Masques of Blackness and Beauty,” English Literary Renaissance, 29 (1999): 246–81, at 247. Other recent treatments of gender and racial ambiguity in The Masque of Blackness include
Richmond Barbour, “Britain and the Great Beyond: The Masque of Blackness at Whitehall,” in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 129–53;
Leeds Barroll, “Inventing the Stuart Masque,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 121–43; Stephen Orgel, “Marginal Jonson,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, 144–75;
Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Temperature, Temperance, and Racial Difference in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness,” English Literary Renaissance, 28 (1998): 183–209;
Suzy Beemer, “Masks of Blackness, Masks of Whiteness: Coloring the (Sexual) Subject in Jonson, Cary, and Fletcher,” Thamyris, 4 (1997): 223–47.
For the English role in the transatlantic slave trade, see David Richardson, “The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660–1807,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. II: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 440–64.
For the racial import of Petrarchism, see Kim E Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 62–122.
For instance, Robert Brown, The Story of Africa and Its Explorers, 4 vols. (London: Cassell, 1911).
William Geddie and J. Liddell Geddie, eds., Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary: The Great of All Nations and All Times (New York: Macmillan, 1957), which is a reprint of the first edition of 1897. In his authorized biography of Yeats, R. E Foster describes Chambers’s as “first port of call for mediums and their researchers,” Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 465.
For nineteenth-century British imperialist investments in the Sudan, see Colin Newbury “Great Britain and the Partition of Africa, 1870–1914,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 624–50.
William Butler Yeats, “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’ ” ed. Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper, Yeats Annual, 1 (1982): 3–47, at 27. All subsequent citations from Yeats’s “Leo Africanus” will be drawn from this edition and will be indicated through parenthetical references. Adams prepared a scholarly edition of “W. B. Yeats’s Leo Africanus” as his master’s thesis (Florida State University, 1979), which should be consulted for its extensive textual and explanatory notes.
Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, xxviii, xxix. Cf. David Lloyd’s deconstruction of this binary opposition in “The Poetics of Politics:Yeats and the Founding of the State,” in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 59–87.
Conor Cruise O’Brien’s 1965 manifesto, “Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats,” is included in Yeats’s Political Identities, ed. Jonathan Allison (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 29–56. Also see
Bruce Stewart, “‘The Bitter Glass’: Postcolonial Theory and Anglo-Irish Culture—A Case Study,” Irish Review, 25 (1999/2000): 27–50, and
Edna Longley, “Postcolonial versus European (and Post-ukanian) Frameworks for Irish Literature,” Irish Review, 25 (2000): 75–94.
William Butler Yeats, “A General Introduction for My Work,” in Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 519.
Jahan Ramazani, “Is Yeats a Postcolonial Poet?” Raritan 17, (1998): 64–90, at 77. In addition to Said’s and Lloyd’s studies of postcoloniality and Ireland, which have been cited above, Ramazani references
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1995). I wish to thank Professor Ramazani for his generous reading of an earlier version of this essay.
Mary Catherine Flannery, Yeats and Magic: The Earlier Works (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 17. Related studies include
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948),
George Mills Harper, ed., Yeats and the Occult (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), and
Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), as well as Foster’s chapters on “Occult Politics, 1990–1901,” and “Ghosts, 1911–13,” in W. B. Yeats: A Life, 225–56, 453–91. Also see Peter Kuch’s explication of Yeats’s essay, “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places,” which Yeats wrote during the same period: “‘Laying the Ghosts’—W. B. Yeats’s Lecture on Ghosts and Dreams,” Yeats Annual, 5 (1987): 114–35.Yeats’s essay “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places” may be found in
Lady Augusta Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 317–36.
W. T. Stead, Letters from Julia, or Light from the Borderland (London: Grant Richards, 1899). In the preface to this volume, Stead explicates the method of “automatic writing” that influenced Yeats’s later works. Also see
Edith K. Harper, Stead: The Man (London: William Rider and Son, 1918).
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). Cf. Kiberd’s chapter on “Deanglicization,” in Inventing Ireland, 136–54.
As Thomas O. Beebee stresses in Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Bakhtinian dialogism characterizes the literary letter (101–2, 144–5).
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 294.
For an astute study that situates the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century vogue for spirituahsm within the imperialist context of Anglo-India, see Gauri Viswanathan, “The Ordinary Business of Occultism,” Critical Inquiry, 27 (2000): 1–20. Also see
Daniel T. O’Hara, “The Spirit Medium: Yeats, Quantum Visions, and Recent Lacanian Studies,” boundary 2, 29.2 (2002): 87–108.
For an explication of this poetical-political-mystical text, see Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Vision: Romantic Modernism and Antithetical Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). For a postcolonial interpretation, see Kiberd, “The Last Aisling—A Vision,” in Inventing Ireland, 316–26.
Cf. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3 (emphasis added).
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 3.
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Andrea, B. (2003). The Ghost of Leo Africanus from the English to the Irish Renaissance. In: Ingham, P.C., Warren, M.R. (eds) Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_10
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