Trickster Travels

Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds by Natalie Zemon Davis Review by: Edmund Burke III Journal of World History, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Sep., 2007), pp. 372-374 Published by: University of Hawai'i Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20079439 . Accessed: 20/01/2012 23:49 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of World History. http://www.jstor.org 372 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SEPTEMBER 2OO7 from the fact of the commodity chain's existence, failing to interro gate the historical process of commodification itself. Every commodity addressed in the volume retained local values and significance apart from the global capitalist marketplace. Yet, here the commodity chain methodology defines "benefit" exclusively through global capital's own criteria of measurement. These scholars offer an alternative model to that of the dependency theorists who applied a Marxist analysis to the structural inequities built into the distribution of surplus capital derived from the exploitation of Latin America's resources. Some one hundred years earlier, Marx wrote about the dangers of the commodity fetish. In attempting to challenge tendencies toward economic determinism, the contributors seem to naturalize, rather than provide a framework for questioning, the economic system that transformed the earth and human labor into sellable objects to begin with. SUZANNA REISS University of Hawaii at M?noa Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds. By Natalie ZEMON davis. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. 448 pp. $17.00 (paper). Hasan al-Wazzan was born in Granada around i486. Like most other things about him, neither his name nor his date of birth can be known with exactitude. Indeed, as Natalie Davis suggests in her marvelous Trickster Travels, the silences and inconsistencies are characteristic of the man. Known to the West as Leo Africanus, Hasan al-Wazzan was the author of a Description of Africa as well as numerous other books on a variety of subjects. A refugee from Nasirid Granada after its fall in 1492, raised and educated in Fez, widely traveled in Africa and the Mediterranean, he lived most of his life in the Rome of the Medicis. His claim on our attention as world historians derives from his liminal status as a voyager between worlds. Whereas Ibn Batutta's travels provide a vantage point to explore the fourteenth century world through which he traveled, al-Wazzan's peregrinations occurred at a time when the shadow of the West was beginning to fall over the western Mediterranean. An expellee of Islamic Spain, his life invites us to consider the ethnic cleansings that made modern Spain possible. Like many other Granadans, both Jewish and Muslim, he ended up in Fez (where an entire quarter, that of the Andalusians, marks Moroccan historical memory). Captured by Chris Book Reviews 373 tian pirates while on his way back to Morocco from a diplomatic mis sion to Cairo, he was sold into slavery in Italy in 1518, and his life (and Davis's book) began anew. His owner was Pope Leo X. Trickster Travels is a work of enormous energy and erudition that combines aspects of a historical detective story, an innovative reimag ining of Medici Rome (viewed as a point of multicultural, multilingual crossings), and a comparative history of the Renaissance Italy and late Marinid Fez. Only Davis could have written this book. No other his torian possesses the range, historical imagination, and knowledge of multiple languages and literatures. It is quite simply a tour de force. Just following al-Wazzan's life in Rome is a major feat of research in itself, given the thicket of names by which he was known at various times. Upon baptism, he took the name of Joannes Leo. But he was also known by his pen name Leo Africanus, as Giovanni Leone, and, toward the end of his stay, Yuhanna al- Asad. He may have used other names as well. In some respects Leo's life recalls the kidnapped and enslaved British people we encounter in Linda Colley 's Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (2004). However, as a converted Muslim and schol arly servant/slave, Leo enjoys better material conditions than the Brit ons enslaved in Morocco, of whom Thomas Pellow is emblematic. (See his captivity narrative, The History of the Long Captivity and Adventures of Thomas Pellow [1973].) Yet Leo's livelihood always depended upon his ability to provide useful information to his owner and subsequently his patrons in the Roman curia. Davis makes the composite cultural world of Renaissance Italy come alive. Jews, Muslims, and Christians of several sorts intermin gled and interacted, not always as equals, in a high-stakes scramble for knowledge and power. The first several chapters trace al-Wazzan's North African years and his life in captivity. The heart of the book is a complex, many-layered exploration of his writings. These chap ters explore his scholarly Italian milieu and his liminal status between Africa and Europe as well as between Islam and Christianity. Davis has painstakingly documented Yuhanna al-Asad's previously unknown role in a bilingual translation of the Qur'an, as well as in Jacob Mantino's Arabic-Hebrew-Latin-Spanish dictionary, among others. In subse quent chapters Davis provides a masterful reading of how Islamic liter ary and historical conventions as well as those of the Italian Renais sance informed the Description and its more important twin, The Book of the Cosmography and Geography of Africa. The intellectual portrait of Juhanna Leo that emerges from these pages is of a scholar imbued with a truly Mediterranean intellect who strove to confront the racist 374 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SEPTEMBER 2OO7 and sometimes lubricious prejudices of European readers about North African realities. At a moment when our world, like that of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, is powerfully shaped by civilizational certainties, sense less wars, and forced migrations, it is refreshing to encounter a book that reminds us of the persistence of humanistic relations. The story of Leo Africanus provides a window into the little known cross-cultural intellectual collaborations that flourished in Medici Rome, alongside of its epic corruption, power-hunger, and racial profiling. This is by no means the least of Davis's achievements in this remarkable book. EDMUND BURKE III University of California, Santa Cruz Rivalry and Conflict: European Traders and Asian Trading Networks in the 16th and lyth Centuries. Edited by ernst van veen and Leonard BLUSS?. Studies in Overseas History, Vol. 7. Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2005. 382 pp. 35. The Rivalry and Conflict conference took place in Leiden, Neth erlands, in June 2003. Twelve papers of this conference, by as many authors, comprise the content of the volume under review. The confer ence was the capstone of a series of conferences in which mainly Dutch and Portuguese academics examined the relationship between their two countries in Asia and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu ries. It is well known (by students of world history) that for the entire sixteenth century Portugal dominated the sea trade with Asia from its bases in Goa, Malacca, and Macao, and that the Dutch Republic at the very end of that century ( 1595 ) encroached upon that trading preserve, and in the next century came to dominate it completely from its bases in Batavia and the Cape of Good Hope. The papers in this book are for the most part greatly enhanced by the extensive use of archival sources found in the Portuguese archive of the Estado da India and the Dutch archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). As a result, much new material on the general topic is presented in many of these papers, which will make them of great interest to scholars teaching or involved in research in the period. Ernst van Veen's paper "The European-Asian Relations during the 16th and 17th Centuries in Global Perspective" provides an overall view of European expansion by sea into Asia. Jacques Paviot examines "Trade between Portugal and the Southern Netherlands in the 16th Article Contents p. 372 p. 373 p. 374 Issue Table of Contents Journal of World History, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Sep., 2007), pp. i-iv, 251-382 Front Matter The Concept of "Decisive Battles" in World History [pp. 251-266] Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal, Twenty Thousand Cannibals, and an Ottoman Plot to Rule the World [pp. 267-296] Socialist Paths in a Capitalist Conundrum: Reconsidering the German Catastrophe of 1933 [pp. 297-323] Reconstructing World History in the People's Republic of China since the 1980s [pp. 325-350] Forum: Debate on Sati in Universal Context Reconsidering "Sati in Universal Context" [pp. 353-360] Sati and the Task of the Historian [pp. 361-368] Book Reviews Review: untitled [pp. 369-372] Review: untitled [pp. 372-374] Review: untitled [pp. 374-377] Review: untitled [pp. 377-379] Review: untitled [pp. 379-381] Back Matter