Eric Calderwood. On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus

On Earth or in Poems appears at an interesting moment in time, as geopolitical tensions between the Islamic world and "the West" approach an intensity not seen since the Bush-era "War on Terror," when a "clash of civilizations" narrative took hold across Europe and was adopted in Spain by José María Aznar to explain his government's response to the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid. It is refreshing to read Eric Calderwood's presentation of the many ways in which the cultural narrative of al-Andalus is used to perform a diverse array of identities and worldviews throughout the world, as a counter to the xenophobic embrace by Spain's far-right Vox party of a Reconquista cultural narrative that relies upon a reductive flattening of the Muslim Other. Calderwood's challenge to conventional academic treatments of al-Andalus is to change focus, away from history and historiography and towards present-day human beings that engage with some version of an al-Andalus narrative to confront, negotiate, and overcome the challenges faced in their communities.Because On Earth or in Poems is such an original take on a problem that has long been studied, it is challenging for me to classify or categorize it in conventional terms. It showed me the possibilities of a Neomedievalism that was less Eurocentric, or of a diachronic mode of comparative literature nimble enough to engage in the analysis of a contemporary cultural narrative while also being firmly grounded in that narrative's historiographical roots. It is important to note, however, that the author acknowledges from the outset that these roots are often irrelevant to the artists, intellectuals, and activists engaging al-Andalus today. Calderwood's selection of case studies demonstrates how contemporary uses of al-Andalus can widely vary in their consonance with the narrative projected by the western academy. As a reader whose understanding of al-Andalus had been almost exclusively formed through that academic lens, I now understand that this diversity is not merely a function of the concept's representation as a remote moment of history, but indeed that the many ways of imagining al-Andalus "perform meaningful cultural and political work, even when they only have a tenuous relationship to events in medieval Muslim Iberia" (9). To the disappointment of readers seeking something like a definitive history of Muslim Spain, Calderwood's point of departure is instead that "rather than asking what al-Andalus is, I ask what it does" (9, original emphasis).Wisely, Calderwood's introductory chapter demonstrates a thorough knowledge of current and classic scholarship on the topic, which allows him to identify those of its tropes to be woven into his own analysis (e.g., Christina Civantos's notions of Toledo and Cordoba "paradigms" for interpreting Andalusi history through the respective lenses of translation or religious tolerance), while also identifying how his purpose (that of a Comparatist) departs from that earlier work. While he acknowledges the growing body of scholarship on the cultural afterlife of al-Andalus, Calderwood opts to put aside the geographical, disciplinary, and chronological barriers limiting much of this contemporary scholarship in order to treat a set of key versions of the Andalusi cultural narrative that have been obscured by those dividing lines, which are the interdisciplinary fault lines where comparative literature thrives. These thematic or tropic versions of al-Andalus in fact become the thematic bases for his organization of the book's chapters: "The Arab al-Andalus," "The Berber al-Andalus," "The Feminist al-Andalus," "The Palestinian al-Andalus," and "The Harmonious al-Andalus." His treatment of these themes is an especially useful service to Hispanists hitherto unaware of the scholarship completed outside of their own field in Arabic and Middle East studies.Chapters 1 and 2 explore the usage of al-Andalus as a marker of cultural identity. "The Arab al-Andalus" addresses how among Arabic cultures like Saudi Arabia and Syria, al-Andalus is appropriated as a purely Arabic entity—a simplified reduction of a far more complicated history involving the rise and fall of many different cultures in the Muslim world. The "pan-Arab consciousness" (19) that began to develop in the nineteenth century now thrives in today's globalized digital media environment, thus facilitating this Arab appropriation through cultural production widely circulated from Lebanon to Kuwait. In Calderwood's estimation, "'Arab al-Andalus' is a discourse that has empowered Arabs of different faiths and animated celebrations of pan-Arab identity, while also ignoring, or even openly rejecting, the contributions that North Africans and Andalusis of North African descent made to al-Andalus" (17). The exclusion of these African communities from the history they share with the Arab world, a practice Calderwood exposes in his analysis of early twentieth-century historical fiction and twenty-first-century television dramas, effectively "whitens" al-Andalus while also (mis)informing historians from Europe as far back as the nineteenth century. Chapter 2, "The Berber al-Andalus," turns our attention to those excluded North African communities that continually contributed to (and occasionally ruled over) al-Andalus. In this case, emphasis is placed on recent and contemporary cultural programming, including combined efforts of the Spanish and Moroccan governments and media industries to center al-Andalus in Berber/Amazigh Granada. Like the "Arabization" described in the previous chapter, the appropriation here can be traced back to a century ago; in this case, however, the discourse of Berberness is part of a broader effort to revive indigenous north African cultural legacies across the Mediterranean region. This project entails highlighting the medieval Almoravid and Almohad dynasties of indigenous North African origin as what we might call the "golden age" of al-Andalus. These invocations of Andalusi identity are motivated by contemporary political expediency: in this case, the rise of a Moroccan Nationalist movement in the 1930s that would become pivotal to the process of Moroccan decolonization and independence, which was ultimately realized in 1956. In both chapters, al-Andalus is embedded in cultural identity deliberately and programmatically by intellectuals, historians, and artists for the benefit of their communities.Chapter 3 ("The Feminist al-Andalus") shifts the focus to gender identities and the utility of the Andalusi narrative for emerging and established autochthonous feminist movements in the Islamic world. Calderwood thinks of feminism expansively here to accommodate "a diverse range of ideological, cultural, and geographical positions" via "a broad and flexible definition of feminism" (110). As Western feminism developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Muslim feminists sought more indigenous articulations of their cause better equipped to address the concrete problems of their lived experiences within the Islamic patriarchy—a political emancipation not unlike the emergence of Black Feminism in the United States during the 1970s. What ties the diverse examples of Muslim feminism to one another in the book is the development of a common narrative of Al-Andalus that centered on the intellectual and artistic empowerment of women like Wallada, an Umayyad princess born more than a thousand years ago whose passion for literature led her to found a legendary tertulia. Wallada's rarefication would eventually inspire, among other things, the founding of a girls' school in northern Africa and a mode of feminism in the Muslim diaspora far better suited to address the needs of women in those communities than its second- and third-wave Western corollaries. As with the entire monograph, Calderwood's rich selection of cultural products (in this case, including public murals, poetry, women's histories, popular fiction, and film) evinces "a cultural lineage that includes al-Andalus and that links the experiences and exploits of Andalusi women to the cultural and political ambitions of women in the present" (114). The legends of illustrious Andalusi women come to serve as exemplary "cultural matriarchs" (114) for modern-day feminists throughout the Muslim world. Calderwood's close reading of Saliha Ghabish's poetry is particularly salient: the Emirati poet builds her work dialogically around samples from the legendary Andalusi poet Buthayna to develop first a dialogic connection, which ultimately dissolves into a shared identity."The Palestinian al-Andalus" explores a recurring theme among writers, poets, and journalists dating back to at least the 1920s, in which al-Andalus had assumed a place in the Palestinian imaginary "for understanding and debating the plight of Palestine in the face of the dual threats of colonial rule and Zionist encroachment" (157). The cultural narrative of a lost, culturally glorious civilization in this case serves as a cautionary tale, lest Palestine's precarious sovereignty (and eventually, the loss of that sovereign autonomy in the latter half of the twentieth century) make it a "second al-Andalus." As the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continued through several generations, the cautionary tale would become more complex: "The Palestinian al-Andalus would become, at once, retrospective and prospective, elegiac and visionary" (159). In other words, the deployment of al-Andalus has evolved from an analogy of loss to one of hope for a future in which Palestinian culture might one day flourish again.This optimistic trajectory prepares the reader for the book's final chapter, "Harmonious al-Andalus," in which the monograph's most diverse slate of cultural products reveals the ubiquity of the narrative. "Harmonious" here is a multifaceted term, referring both to the musical medium on which Calderwood focuses and to the common message of convivencia that these products share. (We do well to recall that one's personal adherence to or disdain for a narrative of Iberian convivencia has little to do with whether or not the products under Calderwood's scrutiny embrace that narrative.) The heart of the chapter's argument is developed from a musical project in the early 1980s, Macama jonda, in which Spanish Flamenco artists led by José Heredia Maya collaborated with Moroccan Maghribi musicians known for what is now called "Andalusi" music in northern Africa. The two high-profile artists crafted a show of what Calderwood calls "Flamenco-Andalusi fusion," in which prevailing themes of connection and brotherhood are developed on a number of literal and figurative levels. Macama jonda, itself a code-switching term, would roughly translate in English as "deep encounter," and it would serve as a kind of template for many subsequent "fusion" projects uniting musicians from Spain and northern Africa. During this analysis, we learn how complicated and fraught this discursive fusion can be, as when the common trope of brotherhood or fraternity in Macama jonda is shown to be a repurposing of the discursive manipulation by the Franco regime to maintain Spanish colonial rule over Morocco. Spain and Morocco, the regime argued, share a common point of origin in al-Andalus that made for something of a "special relationship" between colonizer and colonized to justify Spanish occupation and control of its neighbor.The chapter proceeds to fan out well beyond the Macama jonda to incorporate widely disparate musical genres and positionalities, ranging from the Palestinian diaspora via American musical theater to Spanish rap with code-switching from Arabic to French to English. The effect of this variety leaves the impression that, having viewed al-Andalus in each of the preceding chapters as if through a differently colored lens, we are now looking into a full-spectrum global kaleidoscope of musical genres, geographic spaces, and political contexts. The approach proves especially fruitful as the monograph draws to a close, as Calderwood treats music as both an object of study and as a way of understanding his subject—or, as he puts it, ". . . musical transmission and performance are themselves metaphors for how the memory of al-Andalus operates in contemporary culture" (208). Beyond the memory of cultural nostalgia, the real power of al-Andalus lies in its capacity for facilitating the negotiation and articulation of identities and positionalities, whether individual or collective.Calderwood concludes with a reflection on the ubiquity of the al-Andalus cultural narrative that brings him back to his own location, the Central Illinois Mosque and Islamic Center, which was designed to echo the famous striped arches of the Mosque of Cordoba. The Andalusian community of Cordoba continues to grapple with its own relationship with al-Andalus, a contest embedded in the history of the monument itself, a mosque converted to a cathedral after the Reconquista. Prompted by local conservatives, the Catholic Church surreptitiously privatized the building 2006, a move that was not made public until several years later. Calderwood is of course right to point to this controversy as evidence of al-Andalus's continued importance in the negotiation of tensions between the traditionally Christian and Muslim worlds. In just the few months since the book's publication, however, those tensions have taken a critical turn for the worse in their Israeli/Palestinian epicenter, with spillover worldwide that includes the home campuses of many who might be reading this review. While we cannot know to what extent Palestinians have al-Andalus in mind as Israel wages war against Hamas in the Gaza strip, a key point of contention involves the current Israeli government's regard for the innocent Palestinian civilians trapped in the conflict. The importance of seeing the humanity of these people—an inconvenience to the war planning on either side of the conflict—seems clearer than ever, and indeed is likely the only path to finding a sustainable resolution to the conflict. In this context, the publication of a text such as On Earth and in Poems constitutes a more timely intervention than its author could have envisaged at the time of writing.