Fuchs, Barbara ~ Virtual Spaniards Barbara Fuchs remains to me one of the clearest voices articulating the inexorable Moorishness of the Spanish past and present. This kind of cultural entanglement is of course largely due to the history of Iberian Islam: the Mediterranean “chronotope” from which Spain inherits its cultural and historical background, “whose horizons… Read More

An important argument is that the aesthetic world of the Andalusi tradition “suffuses and conjoins the past and the present,” and that this becomes especially acute through an exploration of the sensorial aspects of this tradition. This means: music, affect, and the “fondo sonoro”   Andalucismo as a challenge to European ontology Andalucistas are concerned… Read More

In this book, Jennifer Morgan seeks to reckon with slavery—its historicity, its afterlives, and notably, its archival silences—from the standpoint of the captive, specifically, from the lived experiences of enslaved women. From the first African who the Portuguese took as captive in 1441 from Senegambian Rio de Oro, who was a woman, to Dorothy, a… Read More

Whereas, as many postcolonialists have argued, encounters between the English and Africans/natives in the 18th and 19th century expressed a total (ontological?) othering of difference as codified by physical traits, customs, societal practices, language, etc., Hall’s analysis of the early narratives of these encounters shows that the central site of difference is gender. These 16th/17th… Read More

Much of Hall’s analytical work is rooted in the exploration of the material consequences of the black/white binarism that permeates the language, thought, and aesthetic constructions of Early Modern England. She maintains that the moralization of this chiaroscuro theme, and its use in the creation of gendered and class difference, remain key processes in the… Read More

Introduction Takes Arendt’s writings on modernity as point of departure–locating the submerged “dark currents” of western civilization, the “subterranean stream of western history” on the “road to making sense of the morally insensible.”  As Foucault and Bourdieu explored the evolution of bureaucratic institutions and “art of government” (Foucault) in the 17th century, when dynastic power… Read More