Towards Modes of Shared Emotion: Revisiting the Iberian Diasporas' Trauma through the "Captive's Tale" (Don Quixote I, 37-41)

In his work on the modern system of meaning and its displacement of alterity, Michel de Certeau (1988) discusses how Freud elaborated upon a new approach towards history as a “return of repressed alterity.” This is a starting point for de Certeau’s reflection on the therapeutic role of history and memory.

Taking off from this theoretical standpoint of the restorative function of remembering and reinterpreting the past, the following pages will address the conversion and diaspora’s histories of the conversos and moriscos as a way of reconsidering and reenacting in the present a dynamics of emotion and reconciliation. In other words, I ask to consider the possibility of a present-day working-through of the memory of a past trauma – in this case that of the forced conversions and exiles of the conversos and moriscos – through the reading of literary texts. In my view, this could constitute a path towards the realization of a shared emotion, leading to a feeling of belonging and even reconciliation within the complexity of current Israeli/Arab or Jewish/Muslim tensions.