أسفار الألعبان : مسلم من القرن السادس عشر بين عالمين

Abstract EN

This text is the preface to Natalie Zemon Davis' Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim between Worlds, published in numerous editions, some subtitled In Search of Leo Africanus.

Stephen Greenblatt, the dean of "New Historicism," considered this book a masterpiece of the historian's craft.

Here Davis introduces her book's topic of the life and works of Hassan al-Wazzan or Leo the African, and especially his Description of Africa.

She observes that much silence and mystery surrounds him, whether in Europe where he was imprisoned or in North Africa to which he returned after a long absence, and details everything said about al-Wazzan in biography, literature, geography and historical inquiry and chronicle.

In this preface Davis not only situates her book in the context of her other works and the changes that have taken place in her methodology and historical vision, but also considers changes that have occurred in methodologies in general, right up to the moment of this latest endeavor: from an interest in people of diminished status in her previous books to concerns relating to the confrontation between Europe and Africa, and from polarized ways of looking at the relationship of colonizer with colonized to the idea of hybridization and middle ground - while not relinquishing the two key ideas of control and resistance (as per Homi Baba, for example), and without ignoring governments' antagonism towards foreigners and economic and sexual exploitation of migrants - she instead focuses on avenues of cultural exchange and emigrant coping strategies.