Around the globe, concerns about interfaith relations have led to efforts to find earlier models in Muslim Iberia (al-Andalus). The first study to undertake a wide-ranging comparison of invocations of al-Andalus across the Arab and Hispanic worlds, 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.
Christina E. Civantos is Associate Professor of Spanish and Arabic at the University of Miami. She researches and teaches modern Hispanic and Arabic literary and cultural studies, with a focus on postcolonial studies, nationalisms, the Arab diaspora in the Americas, and the ethno-racial and gender politics of literacy. Her publications include numerous essays on these topics as well as the book Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity (SUNY, 2006). She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship.
