Book, What time is it there, on the other side? America and Islam on the threshold of[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. On a planetary scale, what circulates – or doesn’t – between cultures? We have this experience through globalization: we live in the immediate flow of events around the world, broadcast by news agencies; however, paradoxically, our old ways of feeling persist. Despite not constituting something new, the progressive collapse of stagnant universes gained prodigious acceleration, in particular, on the threshold of the Modern Age. This observation is illustrated in this book through the confrontation between two almost contemporary texts: a chronicle of the New World written in Istanbul, in 1580; and Repertório dos Tempos, a work written in Mexico City, in 1606, which covers the Turkish empire in great detail. Why and how were the Turks in a position to know such a large number of aspects relating to America? Why did readers in the Mexican capital wonder about the Ottomans? Using the art of cinematic editing, Serge Gruzinski enters into a dialogue between these texts to highlight the singularities of two visions – that of Islam and that of America – already attentive to each other, without ceasing to be irreducibly different. And, as a background, this question: what did it mean to “think the world” at the end of the Renaissance?