Locating Subaltern Resistance and Resilience in Laila Lalami’s <i>The Moor’s Account</i>

Abstract This article explores the thematic and aesthetic depictions of the colonized in Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account (2014) by extending the postcolonial theory of the subaltern. This Moroccan American novel reconstructs the colonial history of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest narrated in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition by giving voice to the slave Mustafa/Estebanico and other subaltern peoples, including female slaves and Native Americans. The protagonist Mustafa asserts his Muslim, Moroccan identity, which has been erased by Cabeza de Vaca’s chronicle. He also makes the reader attend to the colonized silenced by the colonizer’s hegemonic discourse. The Moor’s Account therefore opens new possibilities for rewriting the history of subaltern groups, their resilience, and their local forms of resistance to colonial powers, thus extending our understanding of subalternity.