In the minds of the conquering crusaders of the Reconquista, North Africa and the contiguous 'Middle East' occupied central roles in the earliest formulations of what was to become Western epistemology, and thus in the subsequent proliferation of meanings of blackness globally. At the dawn of modernity, North Africa and its peoples were represented as primary forms of an emergent notion of racial otherness, constituted in relational differentiation from proto-European, Christian whiteness - a formulation that has fluctuated and deepened, but remained axial until the present. The initial disruption of the societal norms of North African and wider African/Old World civilizations by the violent dispossessions of the Iberian Reconquista culminated in the late fifteenth century (Shohat, 1992; Wynter, 1995). Coupled  
with a newly emerging monocultural theocentric epistemology and the rise of modern biocentric racial categories and 'coordinates' in the world, these conceptualizations played a crucial role in the later rise of Europe both as an entity and a concept (Mignolo, 1995). Mediterranean and Afro-Asian societal concepts and practices were denied, suppressed, appropriated and incorporated into this new colonizing society, and extended, formalized, transformed and intensified into what rapidly became transatlantic and global concepts of modern racism, centred on plantation-based racial chattel slavery and other extractive capitalist relations (Galeano, 1973; Shohat, 1992). Shortly after the Reconquista and the rise of the Spanish and Portuguese global empires, northern Africa found itself to be one of many fast-proliferating zones of contact between the growing capitalist empires of Western Europe and the places they were 'discovering' and trying to plunder or colonize.