Legacies of Al Andalus: Islam, Judaism, & the West

View/download the poster for this event
View/download the Event Schedule (PDF, printer-friendly)

For this fourth Humanities Festival in Madison, the Center for the Humanities will invite leading writers, scholars, and artists to Madison to lead a public discussion of the legacies in the modern world of "Al-Andalus," the Muslim kingdom on the Spanish Peninsula from 800- 1492, with its three communities of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. The festival will explore the effects of the Diaspora of expelled Jews and Muslims on the three communities, and will explore the influence this has had on the cultures and the kinds of interactions between these groups today.

As in the case of the Jane Austen and W.E.B. Dubois festivals, this year's Humanities Festival is planned in conjunction with a scholarly conference which will stand at its center. This festival is being planned as a complement to the scholarly conference "Al-Andalus: Cultural Diffusion and Hybridity in Iberia (1000-1600)," October 18-20, 2007, organized by Professor Ivy Corfis, UW-Madison Medieval Studies Program.
spanport.lss.wisc.edu/al-andalus

With Generous Support from The Anonymous Fund and The Evjue Foundation. Partners and co-sponsors include: Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions (LISAR), Middle East Studies Program, Medieval Studies Program, and Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

• The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism
• Regina Schwartz
• Professor of English, Northwestern University
• Regina Schwartz teaches seventeenth-century literature, especially Milton; Hebrew Bible; philosophy and literature, law and literature, and religion and literature. Her publications include Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost (1988), which won the James Holly Hanford prize for the best book on Milton; The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory (1990); Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature (1994); and The Postmodern Bible (1995). Her most recent book, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, a study of monotheism, national identity, and violence in the Hebrew Bible, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
• October 16, 2007 @ 7:30 pm
• Pyle Center

• Roundtable discussion
• This roundtable discussion will include presentations by:
  
  Keith Busby, Professor of French, University of Wisconsin-Madison, "Rencesvals: The Saracen View"
  
  Deborah Jenson, Professor of French, University of Wisconsin-Madison, "The Romantic View of the Moorish Expulsion: Chateaubriand’s “Le Dernier Abencerage"
  
  Névine El Nossery, Professor of French, University of Wisconsin-Madison, "The Quest for Belonging in Amin Maalouf’s Léon l’africain: The Fall of Grenada and the Arab Diaspora"
• October 17, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
• Room 126, Memorial Library

• From Baghdad to Montreal: Crossing Cultures
• Naim Kattan
• Novelist, essayist, short story writer and critic, Naïm Kattan (an inhabitant of Quebec of Iraqi origins and Jewish-Arabic heritage) is the author of forty works, translated in several languages. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal. He has received honorary doctorates from Middlebury College in Vermont and the University of Novi Sad in Serbia, and several major prizes, including the Lauréat Athanase David and the French Légion d'honneur.
  
  His books trace his journey from Baghdad to Montreal, a trajectory of identity in evolution, nourished by memories, promises and movement. Condemning the fixity of secure places, rigid borders, and immutable identities, Naïm Kattan has continued to celebrate -for more than a half-century- cultural diversity, multiple affiliations and nomadic identity, making him a universal migrant writer.
• October 17, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
• Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160

• Music from Renaissance Spain and its Colonies in the New World
• The King's Noyse
• Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Ensemble Musicians
• The King's Noyse, one of the leading North American Renaissance-style violin ensembles will perform at the opening of the Al Andalus Conference at the University of Wisconsin Madison. The program will feature music from Renaissance Spain and its colonies in the New World. These pieces will be chosen from collections of music to be played and sung at celebratory religious festivals and to highlight the joys of secular Spain with dances and songs. King's Noyse performs on replicas of string instruments of the period and is famous for recreated the enthusiastic freedom inherent in the music with free improvisations on dance rhythms. Well known to Madison audiences from its appearances at the Madison Early Music Festival, the group performs at festivals and concert venues throughout the United States, Canada and Europe and has many critically acclaimed recordings to its credit. This performance will give the audience a taste of the flavor of Spain both in its churches and in the streets.
  
  Program notes and translations of the lyrics for the concert were provided by Drew Edward Davies, Assistant Professor of Musicology at Northwestern University and Mexico City Regional Coordinator for the National Seminar on Music in New Spain and Independent Mexico at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Mr. Davies specializes in sixteenth through eighteenth-century Spanish and Novohispanic musics.
• October 17, 2007 @ 7:30 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium

• The Arts of Co-Existence
• Jerrilynn Dodds
• Distinguished Professor of Art History and Theory, School of Architecture, City College of New York
• On the Iberian peninsula, the relations between divergent religious groups have ranged from a creative and tolerant coexistence to savage persecution and cultural genocide. This lecture will examine some of these moments in Iberian society from the point of view of the arts, with the goal of understanding the variety of responses societies can make to religious difference.
  
  Jerrilynn Dodds is Distinguished Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture of the City College of the City University of New York, and lecturer and consultant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has centered on issues of artistic interaction, and how groups form identities through art and architecture. She is the author of Architecture and Ideology of Early Medieval Spain (London and University Park, 1990); New York Masjid. The Mosques of New York (2002); Al Andalus: The Arts of Islamic Spain (ed., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992); Convivencia. The Arts of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Medieval Iberia (ed., with Glick and Mann, 1992); "A Short History of Bosnia through Architecture," and "Hearts and Stones: The Destruction of the Bridge at Mostar." among many other publications. Prof. Dodds has also curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions on the subject of cultural interchange as seen through art and architecture (Al Andalus, The Metropolitan Museum, 1992; Convivencia, The Jewish Museum, 1992; The Mosques of New York, Storefront for Art and Architecture, 1996; Crowning Glory: The Virgin in the Arts of Portugal, The Newark Museum, 1997). As a prize-winning filmmaker, Professor Dodds writes and directs films in conjunction with museum exhibitions (Journey to St. James; An Imaginary East; NY Masjid) and for public television audiences (Hearts and Stones: The Bridge at Mostar). Professor Dodds lectures internationally and has served as a consultant for a broad selection of contemporary organizations bridging the Muslim global community and the United States, including the historic preservation of monuments. Among the other institutions at which Professor Dodds has taught are Harvard University, MIT and Columbia University. Her latest book The Betrayal of Intimacy: The Formation of Castilian Culture, co-authored with Prof. Maria Menocal and Abigail Krasner, will appear in 2008 with Yale University Press.
  
  
• October 19, 2007 @ 11:15 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium

• Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices: Between Al Andalus, the Middle East, and the Americas
• Ella Shohat
• Professor of Art & Public Policy and Middle Eastern Studies, New York University
• No longer merely a name fixed in a certain time-place, Al-Andalus has become a complex trope invoked to highlight changing perspectives on contemporary national conflicts and cultural clashes. “Al-Andalus” evokes an exilic nostalgia for return as well as for a kind of multiculturalism avant la lettre, as much as it evokes its traumatic end-- inquisition, expulsion and wandering. How has the imaginary of “al-andalus” and “1492” traveled from one zone to another? How can we understand the staging of historical memory through contemporary commemorations of the two 1492s, that of the reconquista and of the conquista? In what ways does Al-Andalus, allegorize contemporary belonging within dislocation, for example in the context of Israel/Palestine? In what ways do the utopian/distopian evoked by Al-Andalus and its aftermath remain relevant to the Middle East and the Americas?
  
  Professor Ella Habiba Shohat teaches cultural studies and Middle Eastern studies at New York University. She has lectured and published extensively on issues having to do with race, gender, Eurocentrism, Orientalism, post/colonialism, transnationalism and diaspora, often transcending disciplinary and geographical boundaries. A substantial part of her work has examined these issues in relation to the question of Arab-Jews. Her books include: winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award Unthinking Eurocentrism (co-authored with Robert Stam, Routledge, 1994), Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Duke University Press, 2006), Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (University of Texas Press, 1989), Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (MIT 1998), as well as the co-edited volumes, Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and the Postcolonial Perspectives (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (Rutgers University Press, 2003), and The Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas to be published by the University of Michigan Press. Her writing has been translated into diverse languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, and Turkish. A recipient of Cornell University's The Society for the Humanities fellowship and of Rockefeller Bellagio fellowship, she was awarded this year a senior fellowship at the International Center for Advance Studies at New York University.
• October 19, 2007 @ 5:00 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium

• The Moors: Who Were They and Why Is It a Problem?
• Ross Brann
• Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies, Cornell University
• In this talk Ross Brann interrogates the figure of "the Moor" in its medieval and modern incarnations. He will discuss the figure's historical evolution and instability and comment on its particular social agency in medieval Iberia. Brann’s books include The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (1991), recipient of the 1992 National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Studies; and Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain (2002).
• October 20, 2007 @ 12:30 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium