I nostri saracini, Writing the history of the Arabs of Sicily (original) (raw)
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“Arabesques”: The Making and Breaking of a Concept in Renaissance Italy
The Art Bulletin, 2023
“Arabesques” (arabeschi) took shape as a term and concept in sixteenth-century Italy to describe motifs deriving from Islamic art. The formation of the concept reflects a complex interplay between art making and art theory, which played out differently across different media. In metalwork, the arabesque was conceptualized in tandem with conscious projects of imperialist appropriation, whereas in needlework, it furnished a theoretical basis for a highly conflicted affirmation of female artists. In the long term, these countervailing developments laid the groundwork for increasingly racialized identifications between the arabesque and the grotesque.
The present research paper aims to introduce and discuss the special issue dedicated to The Sicilian Questions. Thanks to the increase in studies and research there seems to be an urgent need today, more than ever, to bring together all the fragments of an uniterrupted historical dialogue between Sicily, understood in its widest geo-political meaning, and the Arabo-Islamic world. The study of the Arabic elements in this history of Sicily has been presented with well-defined chronological and cultural limits (ninth to thirteenth centuries), set out in the work of Michele Amari. Nonetheless, as the present work demonstrates, a diachronic and transdisciplinary perspective allows new and unexpected viewpoints to open up. The need emerges to broaden chronological limits to the entire Middle Ages and beyond, whilst fully aware of other disciplines and areas of knowledge, which have until now been overlooked, isolated or simply considered secondary or subordinate.
Mediterranean Imaginaries: Europe, Empire, and Islam in the Nineteenth Century
Mediterranean Europe(s): Rethinking Europe from its Southern Shores, 2023
This chapter examines the role that the Mediterranean played in constructions of imperial sovereignty and European national identity. In particular, it treats the ways in which Europe’s encounter with the Muslim Mediterranean engendered multiple forms of identity that often cut across imperial formations. France at once promoted ideas of itself as a “Latin” race and a “Muslim power.” Spanish colonialists and Africanistas agonized over their country’s European credentials and yet promoted a vision of a shared Iberian-Arab racial identity as Spain expanded into Morocco. Italian publicists and nationalists looked back to the glories of Rome and turned their eyes to Libya and the dreams of a colonial African empire. These and other examples reveal that the Mediterranean was an imperial space, but a space in which concepts of European sovereignty and identity were reformulated to fit the contours of imperial nationhood. Framed otherwise, the Mediterranean became a laboratory in which ideas of Europeanness were subject to refashioning and re-invention. ,