The Racial Politics of Adaptation in Laila Lalami’s <i>The Moor’s Account</i>

Laila Lalami’s novel The Moor’s Account reclaims the erased historical voice of the Moorish slave Estebanico, one of the first Arab Africans on the American continent in the 1500s. While Lalami explicitly positions her novel as a postcolonial revision of Cabeza de Vaca’s colonial report on the fate of Estebanico, this essay argues that a significant part of the novel’s literary resistance to Arab American racial vulnerability unfolds on the formal level. Lalami uses a series of unstated adaptations of foundational literary genres that have historically contributed to US nation building and race-making: Barbary captivity narratives, orientalist editions of The Arabian Nights, and African American slave narratives. Based on a mapping of the web of references underlying The Moor’s Account, I analyse how these multiple adaptations of foundational-national US narratives engage with and thus expose the past production of hegemonic racializing terms at the same time. In my reading, Lalami applies here a form of ‘adaptive agency’ that while ambivalent and not without complicities, repositions racial vulnerabilities embedded in dominant narratives as a source for historical revision and world making. The results suggest that the racial politics of literary adaptations can also become a modality of narrative resistance in vulnerability for multi-ethnic authors caught in between self-essentializing stereotypes and historical reproductions of silences around racialization in the Americas.