Paper short abstract:

Literary production on the territory that came to be the Islamic Republic of Mauritania will be here main object of analysis. I will focus on how narratives produced over time and carrying distinct paradigms contributed to the construction of a "Moorish" identity in pre-colonial and colonial contexts

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I propose to analyze, from an outsider's perspective, how the discourses about otherness and the "other" were produced, and how the African continent and its inhabitants were represented by the West, and its Eurocentric and privileged viewpoint.

I will focus on the narratives of "discovery" and "conquest" produced between the XV and XVIII centuries and on the different paradigms and forms of looking at the "other" and at its territory that those narratives offer.

Starting with the analysis of the narratives of conquest produced by European navigators in the fifteenth century, (an era also defined by the "maritime paradigm", Pratt, 1992), we will begin a journey through the representations present in the discourses concerning the "other" that were produced over the territory which later came to be the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

These narratives of "discovery", characteristic of the fifteenth century, were followed by a whole new wave of literary production imbued with various premises: illuminist, sentimental, heroic and anti-heroic. Those same texts were, in most cases, later used towards as instruments of the colonial powers that ruled over of the actual territory of Mauritania, who reproduced the language used to characterize the territory and its inhabitants, the "infamous" "Moors".

We will seek therefore to reflect on these various periods of narrative production about Mauritania, and how they had contributed to the solidification of a discourse that constructs the exoticism and radicalizes otherness, ultimately essentializing "Moorish" population.