Ruptures in the Western Empire

First encounters between the east and the west in the Mediterranean are important instances in history. They are the source of constructing a myth and history that has depended much on literary and cultural productions. This book investigates this history by dwelling on issues of white female captives in Moorish Thralldom and their representation in western cinema to realize the way the stories of those Christian female captives have been used and abused by their nations to achieve imperialist ambitions. This book dwells on the ambivalent attitudes of those female captives towards their empires and problematizes the “strength” and “unity” of the colonial discourse.Cinema of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflects the paradigm that western directors and producers followed. It is the construction of visual narratives they inherited from orientalism, as well as the creation of visual tropes that are often created through polarities of good and bad, and through the process of intertexuality. Western cinema encapsulates the “other” in the stereotypical framework of cinematic production. It fixes the “other” with its misrepresentation and, with the repetition of those stereotypes, it contributes to widening the gap between the two entities – the west as opposed to the east.This book analyzes all those visual texts: movies as a battleground for opposing ideologies; as a space where we are pushed far away from the precinct of literature into the arena of politics and ideology; an arena where political, ideological and cultural struggles are enmeshed to vanquish the weak “other”. Omar Moumni reads all those western cinematic productions as colonial texts. He reads them from the perspective and the position of the Moorish “other” whose voice has been drawn to represent a history. By rereading this visual culture, he deconstructs the stereotypes, the tropes and the constructed reality about the “other”, and gives the “other” his due and his voice, uttered in the other’s disruptive resistance.