Paper short abstract:

Just like Pan-Africanism, Andalusia is a unionist imagination marveling for a lost ‘pure’ land which can say a lot for Afrofuturism without falling into the trap of ‘romantic gloriana and romantic primitivism’ à la Ali Mazrui.

Paper long abstract:

Andalusia was the gate to Europe opened by Africa. This ‘unsullied’ ‘pure’ history was poetically invented. Rundi’s The Fall of Seville, Muhammed Iqbal’s The Great Mosque of Cordoba, Mahmood Darwish’s Eleven Stars, Imtiaz Dharker’s Remember Andalusia, and Shadab Zeest Hasmi’s The Baker of Tarifa produced a collective memory for Andalusia. It became the lost paradise. 1492 ended Andalusia to commence modern nation-state by expelling Jews and Muslims while Christians, Muslims, and Jews were living peacefully before thanks to color-blind Islamic epistemology. Accordingly, Jewish people were sent from one Muslim State (Andalusia) to another (Ottomans). Andalusia faces ‘invasion’ again. Now, its gate is crowded with immigrants. It unifies Arabs and Africans again who become Subalternized migrants this time instead of ‘conquerors’. Following Darwish’s The Last Sky, this paper goes beyond the horizons for an Arab, African, Christian, and Jewish co-existence. This decolonized option resists the colonial modernist discourses like ‘colonialism in reverse’. The same epistemology portrays Andalusia as an Arabic colonization of Spain after the colonization of Northern Africa. Andalusia, nevertheless, moves beyond Arabness or Africanness. Just like Pan-Africanism, it is a unionist imagination marveling for a lost ‘pure’ land which can say a lot for Afrofuturism without falling into the trap of ‘romantic gloriana and romantic primitivism’ à la Ali Mazrui. Tariq Ali failed to imagine a non-Western land because of his colonial language. It portrays Andalusia as a secular state. This paper decolonizes secularism in his fiction to uncover how dualization in Andulisian madrasa was another epistemology.