{"title":"Making Islam (Coherent): Academic Discourse and the Politics of Language","authors":"R. Rafii","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472331","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Despite the Islamophobic insistence on “Islam” as an alien and hermetically sealed phenomenon in popular and political Anglophone cultures, the field of Islamic and Near Eastern studies—historically subsumed under Oriental studies—has long been studied alongside a multiplicity of pre-Islamic Southwest Asian cultures. Yet the European Orientalist tradition still needed to create a “coherence” out of Islamic history in order to place it within a hierarchy of so-called civilizations. This essay discusses the issues regarding the Orientalist legacy of the terms Middle Ages and medieval in academic Islamic discourse, and how such usage, made to “familiarize” non-European cultures to Anglophone, non-Muslim audiences, served to reinforce Orientalist notions of lack of progress and backwardness in Muslim-majority societies.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44634757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Bridge Too Far? Ludovico Marracci's Translation of the Qurʾan and the Persistence of Medieval Biblicism","authors":"C. Livanos, M. Salama","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472387","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The medieval tendency to view Islam as a Christian heresy continues to influence Qurʾanic studies in the Western academy due to the academy's origins as a religious institution and the absence of systematic reckoning by contemporary scholars. Ludovico Marracci's 1698 Qurʾan commentary was both the culmination of the medieval polemic tradition and the blueprint for subsequent Western engagement with the Qurʾan. Though few Qurʾanic scholars have the proficiency in Latin necessary to read Marracci's work, Western Qurʾanic studies continues to overemphasize biblical “sources” for the Qurʾan because the field originated in a methodology that was fundamentally polemical rather than exegetical. This essay proposes models from within the Christian and Muslim traditions that can pave the way toward a break from Biblicist tropes toward an interfaith understanding based on the rich tradition of Muslim exegesis.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42289895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10799221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10799221","url":null,"abstract":"Other| August 01 2023 Contributors boundary 2 (2023) 50 (3): 247–248. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10799221 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. boundary 2 1 August 2023; 50 (3): 247–248. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10799221 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsboundary 2 Search Advanced Search Shoshana Adler is assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University, specializing in medieval English literature, cultural histories of race, and queer theory. Her work is forthcoming in Exemplaria and The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer.Anne Le holds a PhD in French and Francophone Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is the Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame's Medieval Institute. She specializes in romances and chansons de geste from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Her research interests include representations of interfaith contact across the medieval Mediterranean, conversion narratives, and genealogy.Christopher Livanos is professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has published on medieval Latin literature and theology and relations between Eastern and Western Christianity in the medieval and early modern periods. His work also examines the intersections of classical and Middle Eastern influences on medieval Latin and Greek... You do not currently have access to this content.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136222862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Race, Medieval Studies, and Disciplinary Boundaries","authors":"Adam Miyashiro","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472401","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Debates in medieval studies about race and the global Middle Ages parallel past debates in comparative literature. Both comparative literature and medieval studies struggle with their Eurocentric origins while simultaneously trying to negotiate a non-Eurocentric approach to their respective disciplinary boundaries. While trying to globalize medieval studies, medievalists have remained in disciplinary silos, especially in regard to a transnational and transtemporal understanding of race. This article's author argues that a comparative approach to periodization, rather than holding onto a concept of the “medieval,” is a more productive way to understand premodern race.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43811773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Is “Postmedieval”? Embedded Reflections","authors":"Julie Orlemanski","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472345","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores the issue's topic, “The ‘Medieval’ Undone: Imagining a New Global Past,” by asking what it has meant, and what it could yet mean, to be postmedieval. It does so by telling a specific institutional history, that of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, which launched in 2010 and continues to the present. The article adopts a decidedly embedded perspective, from the point of view of a current coeditor of postmedieval, previously an author and book reviews editor. Ultimately, the article argues that postmedieval's attachment to the “medieval” works to keep its readers in conflicted contact with the Eurocentrism, global flows of capital, dominance of English, and politics of time that cannot be escaped merely through critique or shifts in representation.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45350259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spoiled History: Leprosy and the Lessons of Queer Medieval Historiography","authors":"S. Adler","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472443","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 White supremacists fetishize the crusading knight; queer theorists claim an identification with the generative secret of the premodern sodomite. This essay attends to the epistemological circuits of transhistorical identification, examining the claims of recursive history and the theories of attachment betrayed by identification with the medieval past. Turning away from the solicitations of the crusader and the sodomite, the essay excavates histories of emotional attachment to the leper, a medieval figure whose status as abject incarnation of historical distance helps reconfigure transhistoric emotional identification. In medieval texts, the leper's ruined face scripts styles of recognition. In the medical writings of nineteenth-century imperial physicians, the medieval leper is used in negotiating fears of disease outbreaks in various colonies. The leper therefore comes to assume the status of reassuring historical distance as a result of imperial ideological needs. Attention to the circuits of desire that animate claims to the past on the basis of identification and personal attachment can account for the attraction the Middle Ages exerts on both medievalists and white supremacists.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41724678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fighting for the Middle: Medieval Studies Programs and Degrees within Higher Education","authors":"Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472373","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores the politics of disciplinarity in medieval studies by revisiting the author's own graduate medieval studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with another graduate student, the author advocated for a more flexible and inclusive conceptualization of the discipline. These efforts were perceived as threatening—and so were the advocates. This essay offers an account of their “diversity work,” which the author theorizes through Sara Ahmed's critical frameworks, in order to share the greatest lesson they learned: aside from the established governing body of the degree program, the fiercest defenders of a conventional, Eurocentric conception of medieval studies were those newest to the discipline—the graduate students.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46571400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Medieval of the Long Now","authors":"M. Warren","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472359","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 As decades turn to centuries to millennia, the contemporary relationship with the past is increasingly medieval. This article takes the perspective of extreme long-term thinking to reexamine how medieval studies can interact with more contemporary fields. How might scholars share the “now” with each other and with their predecessors from other millennia? And how might this perspective transform racial epistemologies? Inspired by the millennial thinker, Henry of Huntingdon (d. 1157), the article connects the Long Now Foundation, the 10,000-Year Clock, the poet T. S. Eliot, and the near future called the “digital Dark Ages.” Henry from the twelfth century provides a recent antecedent for imagining the “long now” wrought by settler colonialism. Undoing periodization directly challenges the colonizing deployment of time itself.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46072539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Belle da Costa Greene and the Undoing of “Medieval” Studies","authors":"Sierra Lomuto","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472317","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay outlines the current challenges facing medieval studies by focusing on the deployment of “medieval” as a category for knowledge production. It argues that as the field confronts white supremacist medievalism and pushes for a global turn, it exposes the unsustainability of the epistemologies, methodologies, and discourses that have buttressed the formation of the “medieval.” Through an analysis of the “global medieval” archive that Belle da Costa Greene curated at the Morgan Library, this essay also demonstrates how Orientalism still lurks within the global Middle Ages. The essay concludes with an introduction of the ten essays included in this special journal issue, all of which show the ways our push for epistemological progress ultimately undoes medieval studies and other disciplinary formations that have held—or been held by—it.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44608730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Different and Familiar: Les enfances Renier and the Question of Medieval Orientalism","authors":"Annie Le","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472429","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Some medievalists use “medieval Orientalism” to address critiques of Edward Said's engagement with the Middle Ages in Orientalism. However, the author of this article argues that “medieval Orientalism” entrenches a divide between the Middle Ages and other time periods, which sequesters medieval objects of study from contributing to the ongoing theorization of critical frameworks. The article analyzes a thirteenth-century Old French text, Les enfances Renier, to demonstrate how a medieval text depicts ambivalence in the face of alterity, a hallmark of recent post-Saidian engagement with Orientalism. The author argues that the nuances and complexities of medieval representations of interfaith encounter contribute to theories of Orientalism.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44662412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}