Narratives Of Conquest Research Articles

The Uncanny Wonder of Being Edible to Ticks

In this paper I argue that an encounter with a tick can produce both fear and wonder. I make a distinction between the legitimate danger of tick borne-diseases and the non-danger of our entanglement with the nature revealed by the tick’s bite in order to highlight the goodness of the tick and the possibilities for post-human existences beyond narratives of conquest and control. Ultimately, I argue that wonder is a helpful mechanism for thinking through the goodness of the tick by allowing an ungrounding of our assumptions about climate change, hospitality, and the danger of non-human agencies.

Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa M. Harris

Reviewed by: Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa M. Harris Amanda Joan Wetmore carissa m. harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii, 285. isbn: 1–5017–3040–1. $42.95. Harris analyzes a selection of Middle English and Scots texts in a compelling and relevant monograph. Sexual obscenity’s didactic power to agitate and provoke thought connects her readings of literary sexual encounters. Obscenity reinforces medieval patriarchy by deigning women corporeal, sexually gluttonous objects. Many of Harris’ female speakers, however, adopt the language of their debasers and turn it around on them in a feminine heteroglossia. Harris’ first two chapters explore how men perpetuate rape culture and misogyny in same-sex environments, even as they petition for and against sex with women. In Chapter One, ‘Felawe Masculinity,’ manhood is established through narratives of sexual conquest among the ‘mercantile-artisan’ Canterbury pilgrims. Focusing primarily on the Reeve’s Tale, in which two clerks rape a mother and daughter based on the projected reaction of their peers, obscene talk among men mutually authorizes and encourages sexual aggression toward women. Harris brings in evidence from the North Wales Ched Evans rape trail (2016), showing similar discourses among modern same-sex peers in their justification of rape. Chapter Two, ‘With a Cunt,’ introduces poetry battles of the sixteenth-century Scottish court. In the context of Mary Stuart’s rumored adultery and young James V’s series of illegitimate children, these texts present a misogynist disgust with female bodies as inherently destabilizing for the male body politic. Instead, libidinal energies are turned inward as poetic prowess substitutes for the sexual act. Harris relates this rhetoric to modern freestyling, in which a rapper insults his opponent by degrading the women close to him. The final three chapters focus on women’s fictive voices and examine their ability to teach men about their pain and pleasure, and other women about navigating the sexual world: negotiating desire, obtaining pleasure, and avoiding rape and its effects. Chapter Three’s ‘Pastourelle Encounters’ presents idyllic debate poems between men and women over a typically forced sex act. Although the narrator is usually male and first and last to speak, women voice their non-consent, fear, and pain. Some resist through verbal sparring, some eventually succumb but protest systemic inequality, others are brutally raped and decry their injuries. Chapter Four, ‘Pedagogies of Pleasure,’ focuses on understudied English women’s songs from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, helpfully placed in the Appendix. After the Black Death, young single women’s rise to the urban working class left them [End Page 72] especially vulnerable. Women’s objectification in the workplace was often expressed in the language of capital, which women seized upon as a model for negotiation. Harris then compares the same-sex education these sexually explicit lyrics offered to modern abstinence-only education, which, by limiting knowledge, limits the possibility of female agency. Finally, Chapter Five, ‘Songs of Wantonness,’ offers a selection of lyrics from two early Tudor anthologies, MS Ashmole 176 and the Ritson Manuscript. Polite and obscene lyrics about consensual and forced sex acts register meaningfully together as they are juxtaposed, exposing courtly ideology’s violent distortions—especially in the fiction of women’s power and men’s pain. Fictive women’s voices offer narratives that evoke ‘educational empathy’ for sexual victims, portraying the emotional, physical, social, and psychological repercussions of rape. Harris is a delicate close-reader, employing etymology and colloquial usage to bolster her vivid readings of obscene metaphors in mostly understudied texts. She also argues from codicological evidence to consider textual transmission and reader response. Harris ties all of her material to the present day, providing readings of contemporary texts in parallel with her analysis of a ‘usable’ medieval past. She concludes with a reading of Trump’s infamous ‘Grab ‘em by the pussy’ recording, revealing many of the same long-standing misogynist paradigms. Obscenity authorizes misogynist stereotypes, but it can also be used to challenge systemic violence and inequality. Amanda Joan Wetmore University of Toronto Copyright © 2020 Arthuriana

Eisige Helden: Kälte, Emotionen, und Geschlecht in Literatur und Kunst vom 19. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart by Inge Stephan

Reviewed by: Eisige Helden: Kälte, Emotionen, und Geschlecht in Literatur und Kunst vom 19. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart by Inge Stephan Elisabeth Krimmer Inge Stephan. Eisige Helden: Kälte, Emotionen, und Geschlecht in Literatur und Kunst vom 19. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart. transcript, 2019. 367 pp. Paper, € 39.99. Inge Stephan’s Eisige Helden is a tour de force and a towering achievement. The book explores discourses and metaphors of cold, ice, and snow as they relate to gender, emotional dispositions, and sociopolitical developments, ranging from the Cold War to cryogenics and the climate crisis. The scope of the project is truly impressive. Stephan analyzes a large corpus of texts from the nineteenth century to the present, including different genres and media such as novels, poems, radio plays, comics, film, visual art, and [End Page 132] music. She is interested in both canonical texts and popular entertainment, offering perceptive readings of Adorno’s and Oskar Negt’s notions of “soziale Kälte” (social cold) as well as of Reinhold Messner’s memoirs and Katarina Witt’s Carmen on Ice (1989). Stephan opens with an insightful analysis of Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Eismeer (1823–24; The sea of ice), which influenced artists such as Gerhard Richter and Klaus Staeck. The painting ties the polar region to discourses of the sublime and captures the fragility of human existence amid a nature that threatens to engulf us— even as we work to destroy it. Stephan then traces how metaphors of cold and snow are used to depict existential crises, exile, alienation, or political stagnation in a variety of texts, ranging from Schubert’s Winterreise (1827; Winter journey) to Büchner’s Lenz (1839) and Heine’s Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (1844; Germany, A Winter’s Tale, 1906). Throughout, Stephan is particularly interested in the links between cold metaphors and gender discourses that characterize narratives of polar conquest and even tales such as Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1846). In addition, she devotes a chapter to arctic travelers who were forgotten or left behind, such as Matthew Henson, the author of A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (1912) and subject of Simon Schwartz’s graphic novel Packeis (2012; Pack ice), and the Inuit Minik, who was brought to New York by Robert Edwin Peary in 1897. Unsurprisingly, a large number of texts that deal with the polar regions offer either a celebration or deconstruction of famous arctic explorers. Stefan Zweig, for example, depicts Scott as a tragic hero in his Der Kampf um den Südpol (1927; Fight for the South Pole, 1940), which forms part of his Sternstunden der Menschheit (Decisive Moments in History). Sten Nadolny’s Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit (1983; The Discovery of Slowness, 1987) centers on John Franklin while Jo Lendle’s Alles Land (2011; All the Land, 2018) offers a portrait of the geophysicist and polar explorer Alfred Wegener, who originated the theory of continental drift . Critiques of polar explorations include Lion Feuchtwanger’s Polfahrt (1928; Polar Expedition, 1935), which highlights the egomania of Umberto Nobile, who attempted to reach the North Pole in his airship, and Christoph Ransmayr’s Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984; The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, 1991), which includes citations from historical documents relating to the Tegetthoffexpedition. Although the overwhelming majority of polar explorers were male, Stephan highlights the contributions of women. Josephine Peary, for [End Page 133] example, was a member of her husband’s expedition and documented her experiences in My Arctic Journal (1893). Similarly, Christiane Ritter, a talented painter and illustrator, who spent time in Spitzbergen, criticizes heroic arctic discourses in her Eine Frau erlebt die Polarnacht (1938; A Woman in the Polar Night, 1954). Leni Riefenstahl wrote about the experience of filming S.O.S. Eisberg (1933; S.O.S. Iceberg, 1933) and Die weiße Hölle von Piz Palü (1929; White Hell of Pitz Palu, 1930) in Kampf in Schnee und Eis (1933; Struggle in snow and ice). A subset of texts that link metaphors of cold to the political realm associate coldness with fascism. In Marcel Beyer’s Kaltenburg (2008; Kaltenburg, 2012), a Nazi zoologist embodies the...

The Violence of the Biblical God: Canonical Narrative and Christian Faith by L. Daniel Hawk

Reviewed by: The Violence of the Biblical God: Canonical Narrative and Christian Faith by L. Daniel Hawk Eric A. Seibert l. daniel hawk, The Violence of the Biblical God: Canonical Narrative and Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019). Pp. xviii + 222. Paper $35. In his newest book, Dan Hawk addresses one of the most challenging theological issues in the Hebrew Bible: divine violence. H. is well positioned to write on this subject given his extensive scholarship on the Book of Joshua throughout his career. The Violence of the Biblical God consists of nine chapters, a bibliography, and indexes (author, subject, and Scripture). In chap. 1, H. acknowledges the difficulties many readers have with the violence of God in the OT. He then reviews a number of approaches (e.g., allegorical, historical-critical) that have been taken to remove, or resolve, the problems these texts ostensibly create. H. finds these approaches unsatisfactory and proposes an alternate way forward. He believes we should read the Bible “with a focus on how it narrates [End Page 482] God’s experience of and work in a violent world” (p. 17; emphasis mine). Therefore, H. focuses exclusively on the world of the text. With this approach, the majority of the book, chaps. 2–7, is devoted to a close reading of selected OT narratives. H. attempts to explain Yhwh’s relationship to the violence narrated in the text, and he offers various explanations for why God gets entangled in warfare and killing. H. sees God learning, growing, changing, and adapting to events and people along the way. In chap. 2, H. explores Genesis 1–11, emphasizing that human violence was not God’s original intention for the world but rather results from “humanity’s determination to make the world in its own image and likeness” (p. 23). H. challenges the notion that God responds angrily to Adam and Eve’s disobedience, Cain’s murder, the violent antediluvian population, or the tower builders. Rather than seeing God’s actions as primarily punitive, H. believes God reacts to the world and engages it for the purpose of restoration. In chap. 3, H. describes the way Yhwh binds himself to Abraham in a move that will necessarily embroil Yhwh in further acts of violence. Yhwh will be faithful to Abraham even if that means behaving violently toward those, like Pharaoh, who inadvertently “wrong” Abraham (see Gen 12:10–20). H. also regards the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, like the flood, as “an acceleration of a process of ruination” rather than an act of divine judgment (p. 60). In chap. 4, H. discusses how Yhwh must deliver the Hebrew people from Egyptian oppression in order to honor the divine promise made to the patriarchs. Yet sending plagues, hardening Pharaoh’s heart, and decimating Egypt’s army do more than liberate Hebrew slaves; they demonstrate Yhwh’s absolute supremacy. The destruction of chaotic human powers and structures makes way for Yhwh to reorder the world and to make space for a new creation in and through the people of Israel. Chapter 5 deals with the second part of Exodus, briefly noting the covenant made between Yhwh and Israel and mostly concentrating on the golden calf debacle, which represents the covenant being broken. H. emphasizes how this represents the first time divine anger is connected to divine violence (p. 104). In chap. 6, H. explores Yhwh’s deepening involvement in violence through Yhwh’s allowance of a king in Israel. Because of this decision, H. believes “Yahweh is drawn into the contests of power and violence that define the ends and means of monarchies” (p. 117). In chap. 7, H. turns his attention to the conquest narrative in the Book of Joshua. He disputes the commonly held assumption that the slaughter of the Canaanites was an act of divine judgment. Instead, he argues it is a necessary step Yhwh must take to clear the land so that an alternative kind of community can be formed. Yet, for all this effort and the massive amount of violence it required, H. says, “Yahweh’s grand plan, to heal the world by identifying with a people, ends in disaster” (p. 169). In light...

Reclaiming a unified American narrative

Abstract As part of an on-going project to apply metaphor analysis to understanding the cultural polarization that has recently obstructed discourse about political and cultural issues in both the United States and Europe, this essay examines the lexical, grammatical, and story metaphors in a recent editorial column, by conservative columnist Ross Douthat, that also focuses on this topic. In a key section of the essay, Douthat uses a blend of complex grammatical and lexical metaphors to highlight the contrast between the traditional American identity narrative of settlement and conquest and a recently emerged liberal counter-narrative, which Douthat epitomizes by quoting former President Obama’s repeated insistence that “That’s not who we are.” Douthat’s argument is contextualized by the reproduction of an image with the title “Engraving of a massacre of Indian women and children in Idaho by 19th century white settlers,” which strengthens the contrasts and implied ironies embedded in his complex combination of grammatical and lexical metaphors. These relationships are brought into sharp focus through the metaphor-led analysis of the text and its interaction with the image, demonstrating the value of this approach to discourse analysis.

Confusion and Consent: Land Tax (Kharāj) and the Construction of Judicial Authority in the Early Islamic Empire (ca. 12–183 A.H./634–800 C.E.)

This essay examines the Islamic land tax (kharāj) during the first wave of the Arab conquests (ca. 12–24/633–50) and the following century and a half. Highlighting the confused state of land tax and landholding, it argues that Sunni jurists incorporated land tax into Islamic law despite the lack of Qurʾānic injunctions and prophetic tradition. In doing so, they drew upon Qurʾānic concepts such as fay’ and ghanīma while reinterpreting a vast body of conquest narratives and traditions that helped present land tax as a bona fide Islamic practice. A major outcome of this juristic discourse of public finance was the recognition of the ruler’s right to discretionary taxation. Just as the jurists emphasized justice and equitable application of tax laws, they also enabled the government to enjoy a wide latitude in its fiscal management without legal backlash. It further allowed the jurists to speak for God and His Prophet.

British Creoles: Nationhood, Identity, and Romantic Geopolitics in Robert Southey’s History of Brazil

Abstract This essay considers the nationalist preoccupations underpinning Robert Southey’s three-volume History of Brazil (1810–1819), maintaining that there are important links between his historiographical practices and his rethinking of British imperialism in relation to the challenges raised by the Peninsular War and Napoleonic France. It argues that Southey’s rejection of many of the discourses associated with European encodings of the imperial frontier—such as climatic determinism, sentimental and stirring descriptions, and conquest narratives—forms part of the emergence of a new legitimatory style of British national historiography. While Southey deflates sublime or heroic tales of discovery and conquest, he nonetheless naturalizes the European experience in Brazil via a latent Anglocentric subtext, simultaneously co-opting the hegemonic tendencies of Spanish/Portuguese imperialism, and representing Britain as a benign colonial power divorced from the violence and cruelty associated with those regimes. As Southey’s Brazilians progress towards independence from Portugal, they are invested with more refined moral sensibilities and peculiarly ‘British’ national qualities, making their drift towards emancipation a vindication of a superior British colonial culture. Southey thus uses Brazil as a complex geopolitical space with which to examine a number of his most pressing national concerns, including his fears regarding French imperialism, his residual support for anti-slavery and emancipatory movements, his faith in British expansionism and missionary interventionism, his understanding of the British national character, and his endorsement of new models of ethnic and civic nationalism pioneered in South America.

Scott Savran. Arabs and Iranians in the Islamic Conquest Narrative. Memory and Identity Construction in Islamic Historiography, 750-1050.

Scott Savran. Arabs and Iranians in the Islamic Conquest Narrative. Memory and Identity Construction in Islamic Historiography, 750-1050.

Canaanite Genocide and Palestinian Nakba in Conversation: A Postcolonial Exercise in Bi-directional Hermeneutics

David Ben-Gurion's attempt to forge a collective Israeli identity rooted in the biblical conquest myth adopted a bi-directional hermeneutic: biblical text and modern reality were mutually illuminating. While Ben-Gurion read Scripture ‘from above’, with the eyes of the IDF, Edward Said called for readings ‘from below’, with the eyes of the Canaanites. Following Said, this paper reads the Conquest narrative and the Nakba bi-directionally, tracing four themes: (1) Depopulation and dispossession, (2) Traitors and Tricksters, (3) Spoils of War, (4) Incomplete expulsion. The exercise cautions those who see both narratives as zero-sum games only one side of which merits moral consideration.

Savran, Scott, Arabs and Iranians in the Islamic Conquest Narrative. Memory and Identity Construction in Islamic Historiography, 750-1050, London/New York: “Routledge”, 2018—258 pp.

Savran, Scott, Arabs and Iranians in the Islamic Conquest Narrative. Memory and Identity Construction in Islamic Historiography, 750-1050, London/New York: “Routledge”, 2018—258 pp.

History & Geography

History & Geography Christopher T. Begg, John M. Halligan, and Victor H. Matthews 1058. Rainer Albertz, "The Exilic Period as an Urgent Case for a Historical Reconstruction Without the Biblical Text: The Neo-Babylonian Royal Inscriptions as a 'Primary Source,'" 'Even God Cannot Change the Past,' 93-110 [see #1582]. After discussing the difficulty of a historical reconstruction of the exilic period, A. focuses on the Babylonian royal inscriptions, the "foundation myth" of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in particular, which affirms that Assyria was overthrown as punishment for Sennacherib's destruction of the Esagila temple in Babylon and the removal of the cult statue of Marduk. Regarding the Babylonian Basalt Stela concerning Nabonidus's reign, A. concludes with the methodological evaluation that the theological aim of this inscription does not make the events described therein unhistorical. Furthermore, the myth in question is not just an interpretation of history—it also served to shape history.—V.H.M. 1059. [2 Kings 25, etc.] Sonja Ammann, "Oszillationen eines Traumas. Biblische Erzählungen der Eroberung Jerusalems," TZ 74 (2018) 319-37. The Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in the early 6th cent. b.c.e. occupies a central place in the remembered past of ancient Israel. Building on the concept of "cultural trauma," A.'s article examines the various biblical narratives concerning the conquest found in 2 Kings 25; 2 Chronicles 36; Jeremiah 37–40 and Jeremiah 52, with particular attention to the question of how these texts function to establish the Babylonian conquest in ancient Israel's cultural memory. A. adduces examples drawn from 2 Kgs 25:4-7//Jer 39:3-7 and 2 Chronicles 36 in support of her thesis that (1) in the course of time, a simplified conquest narrative emerged from the above versions of the event, one that focused increasingly on the individual protagonists and their typification; and (2) this process of focusing and typification can be observed at both the micro-level of textual history and the macro-level of literary history. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 1060. Bob Becking, "Why Start with the Text? The Fall of Samaria Revisited," 'Even God Cannot Change the Past,' 3-19 [see #1582]. B. argues that biblical texts should be construed as interpretations of what might have happened: the text does not equal the event. Thus, e.g., for the Assyrian conquest of Samaria, it should be kept in mind that neither the biblical accounts nor the Assyrian inscriptions can be equated with the event itself. Both inform the reader about the view of their authors concerning a past happening. Texts are historical sources in the same way that artifacts are. But a historian has to deconstruct a given source in search of trustworthy particles contained in the account. Furthermore, the narrator of the text is in a power position, and historians should be aware that the information on the past is filtered through a specific point of view.—V.H.M. 1061. Jonathan Ben-Dov, "Nebuchadnezzar: Seeing Twice Double in Babylonia and the Levant," HeBAI 7 (2018) 3-16. This article works on both the temporal and spatial axes. In spatial terms, it seeks to show that Nebuchadnezzar created a slightly different image for himself in the Levant from the one propagated in Babylonia itself, with the latter being reflected in the royal monuments and the former in biblical prophetic literature. On the temporal axis, B.-D. [End Page 347] notes that Nebuchadnezzar's image enjoyed renewed attention in the Hellenistic period, both in Babylonia and in the Levant. His article traces these twice-double reflections of Nebuchadnezzar, especially as represented on a pair of monuments from Brisa that B.-D. uses to explain certain details of Daniel 4 and the Qumranic Book of the Giants. See also ##1070, 1096, 1097, 1110, 1127. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 1062. Ehud Ben Zvi, "Clio Today and Ancient Israelite History: Some Thoughts and Observations at the Closing Session of the European Seminar for Historical Methodology," 'Even God Cannot Change the Past,' 20-49 [see #1582]. In a wide-ranging critique of the work of the above...

Introduction: Shakespeare's Mediterranean

Introduction: Shakespeare's Mediterranean

Cabeza de Vaca, Estebanico, and the Language of Diversity in Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account

Published in 1542, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La relación is a chronicle of the Pánfilo de Narváez’s 1527 expedition to the New World in which Cabeza de Vaca was one of the four survivors. His account has received considerable attention. It has been appreciated and critically examined as a narrative of conquest and colonization, a work of ethnographic interest, and a text of some literary value. Documenting and fictionalizing for the first time in European history the experience of travelling/trekking in the region which now constitutes the Southwest in the United States, Cabeza de Vaca’s story testifies to the sense of disorientation, as well as to the importance of psychological and cultural mechanisms of responsiveness and adaptability to a different environment. What allows the Moroccan-American contemporary writer Laila Lalami to follow that perspective in her book The Moor’s Account (2017) is an imaginative transfer of the burden and satisfaction of narrating the story of the journey to the black Moroccan slave whose presence in the narratives of conquest and exploration was marginal. In Lalami’s book, Estebanico becomes the central character and his role is ultimately identified with that of a writer celebrating the freedom of diversity, one who survives to use the transcultural experience of the past creatively in ways well suited to the needs of the current moment.

TRAJANIC TREES: THE DACIAN FOREST ON TRAJAN'S COLUMN

Trajan's Column stands in the centre of Rome as a proud monument to Trajan's triumph over Dacia in the early second century. On its 29 m tall shaft, a helical frieze depicts the events of the two wars which won the province for the Roman Empire. There are 224 trees to be found throughout this relief, 222 of which are native to Dacia. These trees have traditionally been treated as scene dividers and background material to the column's action. This article, which begins by exploring the identification of the trees in previous scholarship, argues that they are in fact crucial to the column's narrative of industry and conquest. The discussion of identification is followed by an examination of the numerous tree-felling scenes on the column as a metaphor for conquest. The article closes with a detailed analysis of contrasting representations of the two leaders on the column, Trajan and Decebalus, one an urban emperor, the other a forest king. By directing attention towards the arboreal population of the column, this article argues that trees cannot be dismissed as mere background detail, but play an active and significant role in the communication of ideas about triumph, imperialism and the conquest of nature.

Native Continuities in Colonial Mexico

Native Continuities in Colonial Mexico Mónica Díaz (bio) The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City barbara mundy Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015 256 pp. Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico osvaldo f. pardo Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015 248 pp. Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500−1800 peter villella Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016 368 pp. Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico amber brian Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press 2016 208 pp. The way in which scholars approach early modern Mexican culture and history has changed considerably over the years, due in part to the sources upon which they rely. The influence of theoretical methodologies that questioned master narratives of conquest and Eurocentric notions of literacy during the 1980s and '90s allowed for the study and discovery of previously unacknowledged sources mainly produced by indigenous peoples. The work of ethnohistorians, and particularly those working in the New Philology led by James Lockhart, has made a lasting impact on the way scholars in the humanities and social sciences approach and write about indigenous peoples' cultures and histories in the Americas.1 The four [End Page 539] books reviewed here attest to the fact that those trends are still current and are also good examples of the groundbreaking scholarship that is being produced about early modern Mexico. They have all been influenced in one way or another by the aforementioned changes in methodological research, which is evident by the central role that native knowledge plays in their intellectual inquiry. All four books are openly and consciously aiming at revising well-established historiographical paradigms and offering alternative and more nuanced readings of dominant historiographical narratives about Mexico and its people. Each author's work is clearly informed by his or her own academic discipline, but they all have an interdisciplinary take on the materials and the methods they use in their analysis. Barbara Mundy's book is openly grounded within the discipline of art history, yet she reads a variety of materials that range from native codices to maps, sculpture, and manuscripts in indigenous languages; and she analyzes them from the perspective of theories of space, producing a highly engaging book that crosses disciplinary boundaries. The same can be said about Amber Brian's and Osvaldo Pardo's work. While informed by their training as literary scholars, both Brian and Pardo use ethnohistorical methods and place archival research at the center of their analytical endeavors. They not only carry out close readings of primary materials but more importantly they place them within a sociohistorical context to provide a much more complex picture of the cultural dynamics of the time they study. Working from the discipline of history, Peter Villella also engages in cultural readings of archival materials, and he analyzes more traditional indigenous historiographical accounts, usually studied by literary critics, in tandem with documents of a bureaucratic nature. He attends to discourse analysis in the sources he studies, and pays special attention to uses of language and rhetoric. Through their interdisciplinarity, these authors draw connections between documents, colonial subjects, and European actors to make evident the network of intellectual relationships that existed and the implications that this had in the making of early modern Mexico. ________ Several parallels can be drawn between the four books under review; however, the most salient one is their argument for the continuity of a significant and active indigenous presence throughout the colonial period, in clear opposition to more traditional historiographical narratives that emphasize [End Page 540] rupture with the native past. This dominant line of historiography has emphasized the losses that many indigenous groups experienced after succumbing to European colonial power. Its focus has been to identify instances of resistance and to chart the survival of "authentic" aspects of native culture. In general, the dominant narrative has been to recognize a tenuous indigenous elite that faded away by the end of the seventeenth century, and the absorption and later interpretation of indigenous knowledge by a cadre of Creoles and mestizos. However, the books reviewed here offer a more nuanced narrative, one that allows for the prevalence of indigenous groups...

Occupying Our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875–1942

Occupying Our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875–1942

Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest

The conquest of Mesoamerica has long been and continues to be an alluring subject of historical and interdisciplinary inquiry. Indeed, much work has emerged in the last few decades that has significantly enhanced—and at times radically transformed—our understanding of this fascinating and foundational episode in transatlantic history. This shift in conquest historiography—often referred to as the New Conquest History—is characterized by, among other things, the revisiting and rereading of long-familiar published primary sources, the recentering of native peoples and their perspectives and interpretations in our historical narratives, and a disregard for traditional disciplinary boundaries. Paul Scolieri's Dancing the New World accomplishes all these objectives and is an excellent addition both to conquest scholarship and to the cultural history of colonial Mexico.Scolieri's aim is to use dance as a “lens into the broader ‘encounter’ between Europeans and Indians in the New World,” specifically sixteenth-century central Mexico (p. 1). Through writings about dance, Scolieri sees an opportunity not only to enrich our understanding of Nahua performance but also to explore the “political unconscious” of sixteenth-century Iberia (p. 2). Scolieri demonstrates that texts about dance reflect important political, theological, and epistemological debates among Spaniards (whether native peoples are noble or savage, what the best methods of conversion were, and what happened in the past and how one knows it) in addition to elusive ethnographic information on pre-Hispanic and colonial-era dance in the Americas. This is a book that blurs the line between conventional definitions of history and performance and challenges us to answer one of Scolieri's central questions: “When does choreography (the writing of dance) become historiography (the writing of history), and vice versa?” (p. 151).The work is divided into five chapters, which proceed chronologically. Scolieri begins in the Caribbean with Europeans' first encounters with the peoples of Hispaniola and Europeans' descriptions of native dances. The “song-dances” of Hispaniola achieved some fame in sixteenth-century Europe through the writings of explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, who called them areítos. The explorers' writings about the areítos—which tended, in general, to create what Scolieri calls a “discourse of wonder” around native peoples—serve as a benchmark against which to measure later accounts of dance in central Mexico (p. 27).The book then moves the reader to central Mexico to examine writings on dance by two famed missionary ethnographers of the Nahuas, Motolinia (Fray Toribio de Benavente) and Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. Scolieri argues that Motolinia rejected the Caribbean discourse of wonder and instead used descriptions of Nahua dancers to portray them as penitent Christian native commoners, ready to be received into the Catholic Church and the Spanish empire. Sahagún and his Nahua collaborators, meanwhile, were understandably less concerned with either wonder or penitence and instead attempted an exhaustive description of the intricacies of Nahua dance in the context of the feasts of the pre-Hispanic solar calendar. Scolieri's treatment of Sahagún's work deserves special comment, as it is both masterful and enthralling. And this has to be one of the most enlightening and satisfying discussions of Nahua human sacrifice currently in print.The book then takes on—through the lens of dance—one of the more controversial episodes in the conquest narrative: the Toxcatl massacre. While Scolieri gets us no closer to the truth of what happened that night, he has nonetheless produced a very patient analysis of dance and dancers in the various and often contradictory sources for this episode to reveal “the range of competing and complementary meanings that conquistadors, chroniclers, missionaries, and natives brought to and drew from the massacre” (p. 122). The book concludes with a look at the colonial period. Drawing on the colonial-era writings of Diego Durán, José de Acosta, and Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Scolieri explores the degree to which native peoples retained control of their dancing in the context of forced Christianization.This is a clearly written work that will appeal to a variety of readers, from the sixteenth-century Mexicanist to the upper-level undergraduate student. A great strength of this book is Scolieri's primary source analysis. While he does not make much use of the kind of mundane archival material that many historians so esteem, he reevaluates the canon of published sources—by conquistadores and chroniclers, missionaries and missionized—to great effect. Happily, excerpts of many of these accounts are included in translation in a series of ten appendixes. Scolieri also draws on an abundance of pictorial sources produced by both Europeans and natives, and the University of Texas Press's characteristic care and attention to publishing copious and high-quality images of these sources is gratifying. Indeed, Scolieri's interdisciplinarity is another of the book's strengths; the fields of dance and performance studies, art history, ethnography, and history come together seamlessly in this very fine contribution to conquest historiography.

Narratives of the Islamic Conquest from Medieval Spain by Hazbun, Geraldine

Narratives of the Islamic Conquest from Medieval Spain by Hazbun, Geraldine

Indigenous Helpers and Renegade Invaders: Ambivalent Characters in Biblical and Cinematic Conquest Narratives

Indigenous Helpers and Renegade Invaders: Ambivalent Characters in Biblical and Cinematic Conquest Narratives

Reflections on Hoyland's In God's Path

Abstract Robert Hoyland's erudite new narrative of the so-called “Islamic conquests” uses a vast amount of primary and secondary sources to address key questions about how the early Muslims took control of Byzantine and Sasanian territory. By doing so, he broadens the scope of the earlier published “conquest narratives,” aptly contextualizes early history of Islam into the late antique landscape, and hence does not present a one-sided image of the events. However, the author claims that it was not religious zeal that motivated the fighters, but the doctrines of emigration (hijra) and fighting (jihād). This interpretation belies the monograph's title, which is a reference to and translation of the qurʾānic term fī sabīl Allāh that is usually used in connection with fighting (jihād) and represents an important Islamic theologumenon.