| This dissertation analyzes the representation of the Christian-Muslim relations in three 17th-century Spanish texts: Topographia e historia general de Argel, Cautiverio y trabajos de Diego Galan and Historia de Mindanao y Jolo. Topographia e historia general de Argel is the most significant non-fiction text about Algiers, and Christian captivity in this city, during the 16th and 17 th centuries. Cautiverio y trabajos de Diego Gala˘n details the circumstances that affected Christian captives in Istanbul, and also the interactions between Christians and Muslims along the Mediterranean shores. Finally, Historia de Mindanao y Jolo takes us to the Philippines, where the most unexpected reencounter with Islam took place during the Spanish colonial occupation of the islands. These three works also present the autobiographical experience of three individuals who, after leaving the realm of the familiar enter the Muslim world, experience contact with alterity, and go back to their points of departure, either literally or symbolically through their writings.;My analysis tries to uncover the writing mechanisms used to represent the complex contact with the Muslim Other, revealing the three-sided negotiation that takes place in the writing process: the readers' expectations, the knowledge acquired after living with the Other, and also the transformations that such experience has provoked. Showing the nuances of the narrated experiences, I attempt to reveal the interplay between approach and rejection that takes place in the relationship with human beings and situations that are sometimes hard to understand but that define the configuration of the self and of the collective consciousness, in molds not always compliant with the official ideology--an ideology which is sometimes revealed as too narrow to contain the process of understanding both the self and the Other. |
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