1st Edition

Charting Memory Recalling Medieval Spain

Edited By Stacy N. Beckwith Copyright 2000
    415 Pages
    by Routledge

    416 Pages
    by Routledge

    Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain elaborates an interdiscursive picture of how Medieval Spain has been remembered by various Arab, Jewish, and Hispanic peoples from well before 1492 to the present. The collection breaks with traditional foci on the legacies of separate Iberian communities and their descendants, and on limited, largely textual sets of their related cultural practices. In distinct ways, this collection takes a multi-ethnic and multi-modal approach, departing from sociologist Maurice Halbwachs' premise that collective memories form not within individuals alone, but through the inner and inter-workings of actual and conceptual social milieux. The volume hereby foregrounds the constitutive roles of communities created through prayer, literary resonances, architecture, musical performance, and name giving, in shaping memories of medieval Spanish contexts as well as complex identities in the Balkans, the Near and Middle East, North Africa, Latin American, and the United States. The ten original essays in this collection, by international specialists in anthropology, ethnomusicology, literary criticism, folklore, and onomastics, are not arranged according to Arab, Jewish, and Hispanic cultural memories of medieval Spain. Instead, the collection's unique comparative emphasis illuminates ways in which various peoples have re-articulated memories relating to medieval Spain in and across physical, temporal, and social locations, with different types and degrees of impact.

    Acknowledgments * Introduction * Al-Andalus/Iberia/Sepharad: Memory Among Modern Discourses, Stacy N. Beckwith * "We've always sung it that way": Re/Appropriation of Medieval Spanish Jewish Culture in a Galician Town, Judith R. Cohen * Crypto-Jewish Ballads and Prayers in the Portuguese Oral Tradition, Manuel da Costa Fontes * A Collusion of Gardens: Continuity of Memory in Medieval Sephardic Poetry, Libby Garshowitz and Stacy N. Beckwith * Al-Andalus and Memory: The Past and Being Present among Hispano-Moroccan Andalusians from Rabat, Beebe Bahrami * Voices from the Past: Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Nicknames Among the Israeli Sephardic Jews from Salonika, Shmuel Refael Translated by Stacy N. Beckwith * Spanish Balconies in Morocco: A Window on Cultural Influence and Historical Persistence in the Mallah (Jewish) Community, Hsan Ilahiane * Memory: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Sultana Wahn-n Translated by Stacy N. Beckwith * Musical 'Membrances of Medieval Muslim Spain, Dwight Reynolds * "Al-Andalus Arising from Damascus": Al-Andalus in Modern Arabic Poetry, Reuven Snir * American Sephardim, Memory, and the Representation of European Life, Jack Glazier * Afterword, Louise Mirrer

    Biography

    Stacy N. Beckwith

    "The Voyage of Saint Brendan is a book that will provide a very serviceable introduction." -- Catherine McKEnna, Queens College and the Graduate Center CUNY