Month: January 2018

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My Year in Books: 2017 (Part 2)

Normally I don’t include my academic reading in my year-end roundup, but I wanted to keep track of what I accomplished on my sabbatical so I have a running list already prepared. I didn’t end up reading exactly what I expected. I thought that I would sit and read a lot of Arabic text since I had time to work without interruption. However, I found that just coming off of finishing the book that has had me tied to my desk chair since 2011-12, I didn’t just didn’t want to sit at my desk. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to work or to read, but I wanted to not be in a desk chair at a desk. I read out of doors and, since the weather was mostly disgusting in the summer and then, suddenly, freezing, with very little in between, on my couch in my living room. The little table-sitting that I did was devoted to working on a translation project that is ongoing. I didn’t have the wherewithal for another semester of all-day desk-sitting, so I translated in the morning and read, took notes, and wrote while sitting on the couch in the afternoons. Like translating, reading medieval Arabic text is a desk activity, and so it just didn’t happen that much; it was one or the other in terms of desk time and I wanted to make some progress on that project, which had stalled while I finished my book. Realistically, I was also just mentally exhausted from finishing the book and tenure, and reading text is a taxing activity; certainly far moreso than reading scholarship.  In a certain respect, keeping this list has gotten me to think about habits of reading and the physicality that governs them. I thought that the long stretch of time would be good for reading text, but it was actually better for reading scholarship precisely because of how I was prepared to sit or not sit after years of a very specific kind of sitting. I’m hoping that now that I’m back to teaching, where I’ll have blocks of time where I’m on my feet, blocks of time where I’m prepping classes (which I can do anywhere), and blocks of time in meetings — that is, I’ll have lots of different physical modes of being at work — that I’ll be able to put in an extra hour or two of desk time, both physically and mentally. (I’m also hoping this doesn’t sound completely bonkers.)

With that said, here’s the mostly-complete list of what I read this semester with an eye toward reading widely and starting to think about the intellectual setting and framework for my next book:

Altschul, Nadia and Kathleen Davis, ed. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Benor, Sarah Bunin. “Jewish English,” in A Handbook of Jewish Languages, ed. Lily Khan. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 130-7.

—. “Do American Jews Speak a ‘Jewish Language’?: A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness,” Jewish Quarterly Review 99:2 (2009): 230-69.

Bishop, Chris. Medievalist Comics and the American Century. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2016.

Calderwood, Eric. “Franco’s Hajj: Moroccan Pilgrims, Spanish Fascism, and the Unexpected Journey of Modern Arabic Literature,” PMLA 135:5 (2017): 1097-1116.

Coope, Jessica. The Most Noble of People. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2017.

Dangler, Jean. Edging Toward Iberia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Derrida, Jacques. “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Critical Inquiry 14:3 (1988): 590-652.

Dockray-Miller, Mary. Public Medievalism, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women’s Colleges. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Efron, John M. German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. Princeton: UP, 2016.

—. “Scientific Racism and the Mystique of Sephardic Racial Superiority,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 38:1 (1993): 75-96.

Guichard, Pierre. Los reinos de taifas: Fragmentación política y esplendor cultural. Málaga: Editorial Sarriá, 2005.

Hernández Cruz, Victor. In the Shadow of al-Andalus. Minneapolis: Coffee House Books, 2011.

Herman, David. “Narrative Worldmaking in Graphic Life Writing,” in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael Chaney. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. 231-43.

Hever, Hanan. Suddenly, the Sight of War. Stanford: UP, YEAR.

Horn, Dara. “The Future of Yiddish in English,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96 (2006): 471-80.

Judt, Tony. A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe. New York: UP, 2011.

León, María Teresa. Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar: Gran señora de todos los deberes. Madrid: Castalia, 2004 reprint.

—. La Historia tiene la palabra: Noticia sobre el salvamiento del Tesoro artístico de España. Madrid: Endymion, 2009.

Marx, Karl. “On the Jewish Question,” in The Early Writings. New York: Penguin.

Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. New York: Verso Books, 2013.

Muñoz Molina, Antonio. Córdoba de los omeyas. Madrid: Seix Barral, 1991.

Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism.

Ozick, Cynthia. “America: Toward Yavneh,” in What is Jewish Literature?, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994. 20-35.

Rashid, Hussein, “Truth, Justice, and the Spiritual Way: Imam Ali as Superhero,” in Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation, ed. A. David Lewis and Martin Lund. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Ravitzky, Aviezer. The Roots of Kahanism: Consciousness and Political Reality. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986.

REDACTED, Prof. Dr. REDACTED. REDACTED: A book I reviewed in manuscript, confidentially, for a press. REDACTED: REDACTED Press. Forthcoming, inshallah, 2018.

Rein, Raanan. “Echoes of the Spanish Civil War in Palestine: Zionists, Communists, and the Contemporary Press,” Journal of Contemporary History 43:1 (2008) 9-23.

Rennger, N.J. “The neo-medieval global polity,” in International Relations: Theory and the Politics of European Integration, ed. Morten Kelstrup and Michael Williams. New York: Routledge, 2000. 57-71.

Rodríguez, Ana A. “Mapping Islam in the Philippines: Moro Anxieties of the Spanish Empire in the Pacific,” in The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe, eds. Keller, Marcus and Javiero Irigoyen García. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 85-100.

Rosser-Owen. Maryam. Islamic Arts from Spain. London: V&A Publishing. YEAR?

Roth, Laurence. “Innovation and Orthodox Comic Books: The Case of Mahrwood Press,” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 37:2 (2012): 131-56.

Salgado, Minoli. “The Politics of Palimpsest in The Moor’s Last Sigh,” in The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah. Cambridge: UP, 2007. 153-68.

Schirmann, Jefim. “Samuel Hanagid: The Man, the Soldier, the Politician,” Jewish Social Studies 13:2 (1951): 99-126.

—. “The Wars of Samuel Ha-Nagid,” Zion

Schorsch, Ismar. “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 34:1 (1989): 47-66.

Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. “Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries Since 1492,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman, et al. Oxford: UP: 2002. ##.

Tabachnick, Steven E, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel. Cambridge: UP, 2017.

—. The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2014.

El-Tayyib, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Unamuno, Miguel de. Gramática y glosario del Poema del Cid. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1977.

Viguera Molins, María Jesús. “El Cid en las fuentes árabes,” in Actas del Congreso Internacional El Cid, Poema e Historia, ed. César Hernández Alonso. Burgos: Ayuntamineto de Burgos, 2000.

Wilson, G. Willow. “Machina ex Deus: Perennialism in Comics,” in Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels, ed. A. David Lewis. New York: Continuum Publishing, 2010. 249-56.

Zihri, Oumelbanine. “A Capitve Library Between Spain and Morocco,” in The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe, eds. Keller, Marcus and Javiero Irigoyen García. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 17-31

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Jumping Off the Shoulders of Giants

I have been getting some comments on my previous post to the effect of: How dare you repeat claims of racism without proving them yourself, de novo? The answer to that question is that having read the blog posts so accused and having read the arguments that bear out those claims, I find them convincing. I’ve read the claims, I’ve read the evidence presented for those claims, and I’ve accepted it. It is worth mentioning that racism or no racism isn’t the central point of that post, but rather the question of how scholars grapple with the work of those so credibly accused; but I did have to repeat those claims in order to be able to illustrate the example. I did not think that I needed to re-prove the claims, however, when they have been proven elsewhere.

I bring this up not because I’m particularly interested in carrying on that conversation per se but because it gets to a larger question that is present, in varying degrees, in how we think about writing and sourcing both for the public at large and for academic audiences. The question is this: How do we decide when to accept work that has been done before us and when to reject and redo it?

For me, the most recent manifestation of this question came when I was invited by the editor of a magazine aimed at a general audience with an interest in the Middle Ages to write a shorter version of the chapter I’m currently working on for my second book project. One of the works that I am analyzing in the chapter is a graphic novel loosely based on the life of Samuel ibn Naghrīla that leverages his biography in the service of modern political commitments that are laid particularly clear when one learns that its author was devotee of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane.

The editor wasn’t comfortable with my citing a peer-reviewed journal article that gave a biographical sketch of the author and delineated his political leanings and instead wanted me to do original biographical research on the author before assuming a political affiliation that even his obituaries acknowledge. But in order to be able to move the state of knowledge forward, there are certain things that we read, assess, accept, and build upon. Time runs short and the work is unending. If I first have to rewrite a history of the JDL when the work has already been done in a satisfactory way, I’m not going to move forward and write the history of how JDL members and aficionados refashioned the Middle Ages in their own image.

And in fact, I ended up not publishing the piece in that magazine because I wanted to spend my sabbatical going forwards rather than redoing work that had already been done to acceptable standards. (There were a number of other editorial disagreements that led to the decision, but this is the one that’s relevant here.) Is the lay reading public interested in the Middle Ages served by backing me into a corner, so that I have to choose going backwards or going nowhere at all?

One of my senior colleagues has a beautiful way of phrasing this: We have to trust our craft. We have the tools to assess what is presented to us, both primary and secondary sources; and we can exercise our judgment about when those secondary sources present a questionable narrative that requires reevaluation and when we can use it as part of the foundations for our further work. It’s a bit of a facile example, but I don’t re-prove that medieval Hebrew poetry adapted its meters and rhyme schemes from Arabic poetry every time that I write about that body of poetry. I’ve read close to a millennium of scholarship (because medieval grammarians and historians wrote about this before their modern heirs did) on the topic and it’s good. I can run with it. I’ve been training to read text since I was 18 years old; by this point I trust my own judgment about what to rely on and what to revisit and the methodological tools that help me make those decisions.

And this all ultimately gets back to the subject of my last post, the question of not discarding earlier generations’ scholarship because we now reject their racism, sexism, etc. within scholarship rather than within writing for a general audience. While revisiting and interrogating the foundations of the field is an intellectually invigorating prospect, it’s not practical to reproduce 200 years worth of scholarship that was produced under conditions much more conducive to humanistic inquiry, much better funded, and (at least in the case of my field), before two centuries of modern warfare and political turmoil destroyed many of the manuscripts upon which our forebearers relied. And while digital technologies and increasing possibilities for academic collaboration means that recreating reference works might not take as long as it did in the 19th-century, those are still incredibly labor-intensive, time-intensive projects that require knowledge of the field cultivated over a long period of time. Furthermore, redoing everything already done forecloses the possibility of working on the materials that are still emerging. If I’m re-editing or re-translating the Nafḥ al-Ṭibb (which sorely needs it, to be quite honest), that means that I’m not working on, say, the manuscripts newly made available from the Timbuktu cache or the works of poetics that have been languishing, rediscovered but unpublished for 75 years. (I’m suddenly reminded of an admonition from one of my undergraduate professors of Arabic literature: Do your work carefully because it will be a minimum of 80 years before someone comes along and even thinks about redoing it.) Whether it is scholars or lay readers who would like us to reinvent the world anew every time we sit down to write, that is not the way that scholarship works.

While a field like Egyptology might change and update its understanding of certain symbols through both reflection upon its field’s foundations and as more texts are discovered,  it’s never going to go back and re-solve hieroglyphic writing from scratch. Nor can we separate the foundations of our own personal knowledge from those of our fields.  Those of us who learned languages from books of grammar written by Victorian Orientalists will never be able to go back and re-learn those languages in some other way even if we wanted to. While it might be an interesting intellectual exercise to think through whether we could teach or learn Arabic as the medieval Arab grammarians did, there are a number of insurmountable practical, methodological, and theoretical barriers to such a project. And so we are ourselves already implicated in the history of scholarship by virtue of having become scholars.

In a certain respect it’s kind of cool that the general public might imagine that scholars create everything for ourselves every time we sit down to do work (and it’s aspirational to think about it ourselves): in that image, the myth of the lone genius inheres in each of us. But it can also lead to devastating disappointment when they realize that part of what we do is assess earlier work and choose to build upon it and are never lone geniuses. Making clear our intellectual lineages and how me make those kinds of judgment calls must, then, be a part of how we present our work to the public (and to our students). If just linking to a peer-reviewed article isn’t enough to clarify to lay readers what the process of scholarship is and why that article is a sound foundation, then perhaps public writing could include a kind of scholarly “how I got the story” sidebar of the kind that newspapers sometimes write in order to explain their process to their readers; in scholarly writing, we spell out our methodologies and commitments. There’s not just one right possibility, not one right way of grappling with earlier scholarship, and not one right way of presenting it to the public; but what is clear is that there is still quite a lot of work to be done on all fronts. And that is pretty exciting.

May this be a year of thoughtful methodologies and much productivity for everyone!