Jennifer Leetsch: Travelling and Translating between Worlds: Early Modern Mobility in Leo Africanus' The Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526) (Forum) | 31 Oct 2024

Thursday, 31 October 2024, 6-8 PM

Casino Cas 1.802

This lecture is part of the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

This talk explores the multifaceted exchanges and mediations at work in The Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526), an account written by the diplomat and scholar al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-Wazzān al-Zayyātī (today more commonly known as Leo Africanus). Born in Granada and educated in Morocco, al-Wazzān lived at the crossroads of Islamic and Christian worlds. On one of his extensive trips through North and West Africa, he was captured by pirates and taken to Pope Leo X’s court in Rome, where he converted (or was forced to convert) to Christianity. His Cosmography, which he wrote during this time, can be understood as a key source of knowledge about Africa for early modern Europe—it stands as a text that moves across multiple spheres: geographically, linguistically and intellectually.

Al-Wazzān’s unique positioning between Africa and Europe allowed him to mediate knowledge about Africa for European audiences while subtly challenging European preconceptions about the continent. As the first detailed account of Africa written by a modern African to reach print in Europe, the Cosmography represents more than just a geographical treatise—it is a dynamic site of early modern cross-cultural exchange and knowledge production. Al-Wazzān’s life and work reflect the fluidity of identities and the intricacies of translation as both literal linguistic acts and as metaphorical negotiations between conflicting worldviews. By centring this early modern traveller and a text that journeyed across time, space and multiple translations, this talk hopes to shed light on complex and complicated early-modern encounters between Africa and Europe, positioning both al-Wazzān and the Cosmography as mobile, fluid agents traversing different worlds.

Jennifer Leetsch is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn’s excellence cluster, the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, where she is currently working on a project that aims to connect Black life writing to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ecologies. She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Würzburg and has recently held fellowships and guest lectureships at the University of Melbourne, the University of Glasgow and Jawaharlal Nehru University Delhi. Her first book on contemporary African Diasporic women’s writing appeared with Palgrave in 2021, and she is co-editor of Configurations of Migration: Knowledges – Imaginaries – Media (De Gruyter 2023) and editor of a double special issue on Ecological Solidarities across Post/Colonial Worlds (2024).