Jonathan Shannon - Review of On Earth or in Poems for IJMES (original) (raw)

Gender and Poetry in Muslim Spain: Mapping the Sexual-Textual Politics of Al-Andalus

This article revisits the role of women in the Andalusian literature and culture of the period between the 8 th through the 15 th centuries C.E. Drawing on some Western sexual-textual political models of analysis, the article reexamines the literary methods and devices employed by selected Andalusian women poets to demonstrate their intellectual equality with men. Moreover, by providing a sexual-textual political reading of some of the women's poems and/or the anecdotes (akhbār) about them, the article demonstrates how these women exerted their social and political agency in a male-dominated society. The article seeks to bolster an argument that the frequent mention of the preponderance of women poets—their names and the anecdotes about them— suggests the existence of a female literary sub-culture in al-Andalus that was more vibrant than has been documented in the male-authored classical Arabic texts.

Muwashshah and Kharja: Gems from al-Andalus

Hispanic Horizon, Journal of the Centre of Spanish Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. new Delhi. Year 2001, No. 20., 2001

Socio-linguistic reality of Hispania under Muslim rule is imperative for understanding the literary environment of the Islamic Spain where remarkable poetic forms came into being leaving indelible marks on the Peninsular literature. This article focuses on the culture synthesis that took place in Andalusia where the Hispano-Romans, the Jews and the Arabs interacted freely with one another.

Exile, Encounter, and the Articulation of Andalusi Identity in the Maghrib

Medieval Encounters, 2014

This article explores how Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s historiographical perspective informed an Andalusī vision of the history of the western Mediterranean and how it articulated an Andalusī identity vis-à-vis the Maghrib, where it became deeply rooted. Through an examination of Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s historiographical and geographical work, and consider- ing his own experience of exile and encounter in the Maghrib, I argue that Ibn al-Khaṭīb was both illustrative of a larger trend whereby Andalusīs argued for their cultural value as a displaced community in the Maghrib and a crucial actor in articulating and inform- ing the long-term historiographical perspective on the history of the Islamic West and al-Andalus’s place in it.