This article is an expanded version of a final paper I wrote during my first year for Olimpia E. Rosenthal’s graduate course, “Race, Biopolitics & Colonialism,” at Indiana University in Fall 2022. While developing the piece, I presented it at the second annual Michael Gordon Memorial History Graduate Conference on April 28–29, 2023, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. After two years of refinement, it now carries the title “Beyond Borders and Beasts: Exploring an Ottoman Traveler’s Colonial Discourse and his Contribution to the Formation of Race in the Early Modern Period” and has been published in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies by the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In this article, I explore the extraordinary journey of Ilyas ibn Hanna al-Mawsuli (Reverend Ilyas/Elias), a late seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler, to the Spanish Americas. Spending eight years in the Spanish colonies with special permission from the Spanish court, Ilyas narrated remarkable experiences during his travels through the Caribbean, Venezuela, Peru, and New Spain. I primarily focus on this narrative as it relates to extraordinary encounters with fantastic beasts and creatures, and how these encounters contribute to emerging conceptions of race.

I thus address crucial issues:

First, the colonial discourse within the traveler’s narrative;

Second, the intercultural colonial imagination shaped by the Amerindians, Europeans, and Ottomans;

Third, the traveler’s subaltern identity in the Ottoman Empire, which is reimagined via global Catholicism, leading to his endeavor toward the “Ottomanization” of the Spanish Empire’s colonial domain.

I ultimately suggest in this research that the traveler’s colonial discourse contributed to the formation and codification of race in the early modern era.

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