The Afterlife of al-Andalus


Book Description

Around the globe, concerns about interfaith relations have led to efforts to find earlier models in Muslim Iberia (al-Andalus). This book examines how Muslim Iberia operates as an icon or symbol of identity in twentieth and twenty-first century narrative, drama, television, and film from the Arab world, Spain, and Argentina. Christina Civantos demonstrates how cultural agents in the present ascribe importance to the past and how dominant accounts of this importance are contested. Civantos's analysis reveals that, alongside established narratives that use al-Andalus to create exclusionary, imperial identities, there are alternate discourses about the legacy of al-Andalus that rewrite the traditional narratives. In the process, these discourses critique their imperial and gendered dimensions and pursue intercultural translation.




The Afterlife of al-Andalus


Book Description

The first study to undertake a wide-ranging comparison of invocations of al-Andalus across the Arab and Hispanic worlds. Around the globe, concerns about interfaith relations have led to efforts to find earlier models in Muslim Iberia (al-Andalus). This book examines how Muslim Iberia operates as an icon or symbol of identity in twentieth and twenty-first century narrative, drama, television, and film from the Arab world, Spain, and Argentina. Christina Civantos demonstrates how cultural agents in the present ascribe importance to the past and how dominant accounts of this importance are contested. Civantos’s analysis reveals that, alongside established narratives that use al-Andalus to create exclusionary, imperial identities, there are alternate discourses about the legacy of al-Andalus that rewrite the traditional narratives. In the process, these discourses critique their imperial and gendered dimensions and pursue intercultural translation.




Colonial al-Andalus


Book Description

Through state-backed Catholicism, monolingualism, militarism, and dictatorship, Spain’s fascists earned their reputation for intolerance. It may therefore come as a surprise that 80,000 Moroccans fought at General Franco’s side in the 1930s. What brought these strange bedfellows together, Eric Calderwood argues, was a highly effective propaganda weapon: the legacy of medieval Muslim Iberia, known as al-Andalus. This legacy served to justify Spain’s colonization of Morocco and also to define the Moroccan national culture that supplanted colonial rule. Writers of many political stripes have celebrated convivencia, the fabled “coexistence” of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Iberia. According to this widely-held view, modern Spain and Morocco are joined through their shared Andalusi past. Colonial al-Andalus traces this supposedly timeless narrative to the mid-1800s, when Spanish politicians and intellectuals first used it to press for Morocco’s colonization. Franco later harnessed convivencia to the benefit of Spain’s colonial program in Morocco. This shift precipitated an eloquent historical irony. As Moroccans embraced the Spanish insistence on Morocco’s Andalusi heritage, a Spanish idea about Morocco gradually became a Moroccan idea about Morocco. Drawing on a rich archive of Spanish, Arabic, French, and Catalan sources—including literature, historiography, journalism, political speeches, schoolbooks, tourist brochures, and visual arts—Calderwood reconstructs the varied political career of convivencia and al-Andalus, showing how shared pasts become raw material for divergent contemporary ideologies, including Spanish fascism and Moroccan nationalism. Colonial al-Andalus exposes the limits of simplistic oppositions between European and Arab, Christian and Muslim, that shape current debates about European colonialism.




On Earth Or in Poems


Book Description

The idea of al-Andalus—medieval Muslim Iberia—has many uses, inspiring artists and activists who imagine a place and time of peaceful coexistence among Europeans, North Africans, and Middle Easterners; Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Eric Calderwood explores the consolidation of this reputation and its impact on artistic and political aspiration.




Between Argentines and Arabs


Book Description

Examines the presence of Arabs and the Arab world in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Argentine literature by juxtaposing works by Argentines of European descent and those written by Arab immigrants in Argentina. Between Argentines and Arabs is a groundbreaking contribution to two growing fields: the study of immigrants and minorities in Latin America and the study of the Arab diaspora. As a literary and cultural study, this book examines the textual dialogue between Argentines of European descent and Arab immigrants to Argentina from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Using methods drawn from literary analysis and cultural studies, Christina Civantos shows that the Arab presence is twofold: “the Arab” and “the Orient” are an imagined figure and space within the texts produced by Euro-Argentine intellectuals; and immigrants from the Arab world are an actual community, producing their own texts within the multiethnic Argentine nation. This book is both a literary history—of Argentine Orientalist literature and Arab-Argentine immigrant literature—and a critical analysis of how the formation of identities in these two bodies of work is interconnected. Christina Civantos is Assistant Professor of Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami.




The Routledge Handbook of Muslim Iberia


Book Description

This handbook offers an overview of the main issues regarding the political, economic, social, religious, intellectual and artistic history of the Iberian Peninsula during the period of Muslim rule (eighth–fifteenth centuries). A comprehensive list of primary and secondary sources attests the vitality of the academic study of al-Andalus (= Muslim Iberia) and its place in present-day discussions about the past and the present. The contributors are all specialists with diverse backgrounds providing different perspectives and approaches. The volume includes chapters dealing with the destiny of the Muslim population after the Christian conquest and with the posterity of al-Andalus in art, literature and different historiographical traditions. The chapters are organised in the following sections: Political history, concentrating on rulers and armies Social, religious and economic groups Intellectual and cultural developments Legacy and memory of al-Andalus Offering a synthetic and updated academic treatment of the history and society of Muslim Iberia, this comprehensive and up-to-date collection provides an authoritative and interdisciplinary guide. It is a valuable resource for both specialists and the general public interested in the history of the Iberian Peninsula, Islamic and Medieval studies.




Iberian Jewish Literature


Book Description

This stimulating and graceful book explores Iberian Jewish attitudes toward cultural transition during the 12th and 13th centuries, when growing intolerance toward Jews in Islamic al-Andalus and the southward expansion of the Christian Reconquista led to the relocation of Jews from Islamic to Christian domains. By engaging literary topics such as imagery, structure, voice, landscape, and geography, Jonathan P. Decter traces attitudes toward transition that range from tenacious longing for the Islamic past to comfort in the Christian environment. Through comparison with Arabic and European vernacular literatures, Decter elucidates a medieval Hebrew poetics of estrangement and nostalgia, poetic responses to catastrophe, and the refraction of social issues in fictional narratives. Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.




The Visual Culture of al-Andalus in the Christian Kingdoms of Iberia


Book Description

This book addresses the reception of Islamic visual culture by the northern Iberian kingdoms, by systematically comparing works of art from both sides and fleshing out their historical context. This study includes figurative and iconographic motifs, architectural forms, and even the spolia from constructions and Arabic inscriptions that were embedded in Christian buildings. The Islamic visual culture of al-Andalus was often transformed as it was recreated by Christian hands, bringing to the fore various nuances in the relationship between the two religious communities. Artistic transfer was conditioned by social coexistence between Christians and Muslims—both in the caliphate al-Andalus and in the northern realms—and military conflict. To approach the different ways in which Andalusi visual culture was received in the northern kingdoms, while embracing the vast diversity of case studies available, this book is divided into three thematic sections: Reinterpretation, Appropriation, and Artistic Transfers. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, and medieval studies.




Art and Identity in Spain, 1833–1956


Book Description

Richly illustrated, this is the first study in English to explore the longevity of Orientalist art in Spain over a period of 120 years. It highlights how artists in Spain shaped perceptions of Al-Andalus (Iberia under Islam 711–1492) and northern Morocco, from Spain's liberal revolution of the 1830s to the end of the Protectorate of Morocco in 1956. Combining art history with a cultural studies approach, and using exemplary case studies, Hopkins foregrounds the diverse issues that underpin Orientalist expression: reflections on history and the nation, cultural nationalism, gender and sexuality, aesthetics and art commerce, colonialism and racial thinking. In the process, the book challenges over-familiar understandings of Western Orientalism. Beyond Fortuny and Sorolla, many unfamiliar artists and exhibitions are introduced, amongst them Villaamil, whose nostalgic landscapes evoked the loss of Andalusi culture; Bécquer, who celebrated Spanish-Moroccan peace-making through the lens of Velázquez; the Symbolist Rusiñol, whose images of the Alhambra are infused with melancholy; Morcillo, whose extraordinary camp images opened a new space for male subjectivity; Tapiró and Bertuchi, who dedicated their lives to Morocco, and the Moroccan Sarghini, who participated in the state-funded Painters of Africa exhibitions in Franco's Madrid – an annual exhibition that served the colonial concept of a Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood under the dictatorship. This book traces the shifting impulses and meanings of Orientalist expression in Spain. It makes an original intervention in the field of Spanish art studies and contributes new material to the ongoing debates about Western Orientalism.




Displacement, Belonging, and Migrant Agency in the Face of Power


Book Description

This book centres the voices and agency of migrants by refocusing attention on the diversity and complexity of human mobility when seen from the perspective of people on the move; in doing so, the volume disrupts the binary logics of migrant/refugee, push/pull, and places of origin/destination that have informed the bulk of migration research. Drawn from a range of disciplines and methodologies, this anthology links disparate theories, approaches, and geographical foci to better understand the spectrum of the migratory experience from the viewpoint of migrants themselves. The book explores the causes and consequences of human displacement at different scales (both individual and community-level) and across different time points (from antiquity to the present) and geographies (not just the Global North but also the Global South). Transnational scholars across a range of knowledge cultures advance a broader global discourse on mobility and migration that centres on the direct experiences and narratives of migrants themselves. Both interdisciplinary and accessible, this book will be useful for scholars and students in Migration Studies, Global Studies, Sociology, Geography, and Anthropology.