Hispanism and Sephardic studies

Abstract

After reviewing inherited discourses that have shaped what we come to think of as Sephardic studies, I address from my perspective within Hispanic studies the ways in which contemporary work in Sephardic studies intersects with work being done in the wider academy (such as translation studies, diaspora studies, and African studies), and speculate on how it might develop in the coming decades. One projected path is a focus on the complexity that has characterized Sephardi experience for at least the last 1300 years, not just in the southern Mediterranean but also in northern Europe, the Americas, and parts of Africa and Asia, and that necessarily challenges the presentist bias of much contemporary postcolonial theory, which insists on the novelty/modernity of the postcolonial‐postnational character of today’s world.