Fall 2007 | Bios | Group Proposal

FALL 2007 - GROUP PROPOSAL

The Emergence of "the West": Shifting Hegemonies in the Medieval Mediterranean

Convener: Brian Catlos, History, UC Santa Cruz

Co-Organizer: Sharon Kinoshita, Literature, UC Santa Cruz

Project Overview
In The Making of Europe (1993) historian Robert Bartlett eschewed essentialist notions of European identity that have long implicitly or explicitly pervaded medieval historiography to redefine "Europe" as a culture—a constellation of institutions and practices originating in the Carolingian empire and diffused between c. 950 and 1350 through conquest, colonization, and acculturation. This recognition of the historical constructedness of "Europe" during the high and late Middle Ages opens the way for a reformulated understanding of areas like the Iberian peninsula, southern Italy, and the Byzantine empire— sites that, despite their great political, economic, and cultural importance, are frequently relegated to the margins of a "medieval Europe" strongly identified with the northerly cultures of France, Germany, and England. Our project seeks to complement and correct Bartlett’s genealogy of Europe with a genealogy of the medieval Mediterranean. In contrast to "Europe," defined first of all by its allegiance to a certain hegemonic version of Latin Christianity (as opposed to the heterodox practices of Christian Iberia or the "Celtic fringe"), the Mediterranean basin is characterized by a plurality of religions, within as well as between multilingual and/or multiconfessional polities like the Iberian kingdoms (both Christian and Islamic), Norman Sicily, and Fatimid/Ayyubid/Mamluk Egypt.

Drawing on a growing body of scholarly literature that takes the Mediterranean as its unit of analysis, our project’s interlocking goals include:

• complicating the position "medieval Europe" has been called upon to play in the history of "Western Civilization." This means understanding medieval phenomena—the "precocious" commercial development of centers like Venice or Genoa, the western "recovery" of Greek learning and Aristotelian method through the translation of Arabic texts—first of all in synchronic terms (the vitality of Latin Europe’s economic and cultural links to the Islamic world) rather than teleological ones (the rise of capitalism or "western" scientific method);

• challenging the "clash of civilizations" model featured so prominently in public discourse since 9/11/2001. Besides moving from an essentialist to a process-oriented understanding of "civilization," this entails emphasizing the wide variety of Christian-Muslim interactions in the medieval Mediterranean, with Crusades as one pole of a spectrum including co-existence, accommodation, and outright cooperation.

• complicating genealogies of modernity. By offering "thick descriptions" of medieval Mediterranean versions of phenomena such as identity construction, cultural and confessional interactions, modes of political organization, commercial exchange, colonialism, and perceptions of "the other," we hope to provide modernists and early modernists the means better to assess the specificity of these phenomena in the periods they study.

Historical Context
Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II –arguably the founding text of the field of "Mediterranean Studies" – was first published in 1949, during the same postwar period that in the U.S. saw the rise of Area Studies as a means of organizing knowledge about the non-U.S., non-European world in the context of Cold War geopolitics. In contrast to the Area Studies tendency of subordinating the deep understanding of the past to the strategic exigencies of the present, Braudel’s work—a key text in the development of the Annales school of French historiography—shifted focus from a history of events (l’histoire événementielle) to a history of the longue durée, to the ways in which geography and such features as climate and the technologies of transport conditioned the development a Mediterranean culture of shared forms, practices, and institutions (most famously, the cultivation of "the olive and the vine," but also in practices of transhumance, navigation, etc.). More recently, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell (The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, 2000) have undertaken an exhaustive reexamination of the question of the Mediterranean, theorizing its "unity" to reside in its commonality of locally diverse and interdependent microregions, again from the perspective of a longue durée that renders standard confessional and cultural borders in many contexts insignificant. In addition, the last ten to fifteen years have seen the publication of numerous volumes on Christian and Islamic "encounters" in the medieval Mediterranean, as well as specialized studies on topics such as naval history and technology (Pryor), the diffusion of merchant hostelries (Constable), and the circulation of commodities and artistic objects (Grabar, Hoffman, Jacoby) in the Greek, Arabic, and Latin Mediterranean.

Theoretical Context
From Belgian historian Henri Pirenne’s "thesis" on the effect of Islam’s initial incursion into the Mediterranean (in his 1937 study Mahomet et Charlemagne) and especially in the wake of 9/11/2001, specialists and non-specialists alike have cast the Middle Ages as the foundational moment of a "clash of civilizations" (Huntington) between Islam and "the West." Studies in this vein thus posit a long history of conflict, often based on fixed and essentializing notions of culture and cultural identity and burdened by assumptions of the manifest destiny of northwest Europe and its North American successor. One by-product of this mode of thinking is to emphasize divisions between peoples and civilizations, whether figured as the contrast between East and West (as in Edward Said’s Orientalism, 1978) or between North and South (emphasizing, for example, the uneven historical temporalities governing the European and African shores of the Mediterranean), constructing false cultural and institutional genealogies to reflect presumptions regarding the essentiality of northwestern European nation-states. This tendency to root the modern "West" in the culture of northwestern Europe leads to the historical marginalization of Mediterranean Europe itself—as recently evidenced in ongoing debates over the European Union.

In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty calls for alternatives to the social scientific paradigms developed in the Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment West but subsequently universalized to account for the history and structures of non-Western societies. Our contention is that Chakrabarty’s project of provincializing Europe has much in common with that of de-provincializing the Middle Ages (Kinoshita). Our understanding of the medieval world has been ill-served by the retrospective application of modern categories and modes of analysis (nation, race, class, the separation of economic/political/cultural spheres). In the Mediterranean, this issue is exacerbated by (for example) the problematic nature of the very period designation "medieval," whose applicability to the Islamic world (as to other non-Western cultures such as China or India) has recently come under critical scrutiny.

Our focus on the medieval Mediterranean provides a platform for challenging some of these geographical and temporal parochialisms in ways that have important implications both for Medieval Studies and for larger critical debates in areas such as Nation and Empire Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Race Studies, etc., as outlined in the "Goals and Objectives" section, below.

Institutional Context
Our project on the medieval Mediterranean participates in a general upsurge of interest in Mediterranean Studies, fueled by a range of factors, including post-national interest in regions often regarded as "peripheral" (the Balkans, southern Italy, the Crown of Aragon, the Maghrib) and the shift from the study of the internal dynamics of discrete political entities to a focus on their political, economic, and cultural interconnectedness. In recent years this interest has taken the form of the proliferation of Centers for Mediterranean Studies, both in the Mediterranean itself (in France, Catalonia, Italy, Greece, Malta, Serbia, Turkey, Israel, and Tunisia), where such initiatives often enjoy the financial support of the European Union, and further afield (in the UK at Exeter, King’s College London, and Reading; and in the US at Tufts, NYU, Georgetown, Indiana, etc). In addition to these site-specific programs, there has been the foundation of academic societies such as the Mediterranean Studies Association, the Canadian Society for Mediterranean Studies, and the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean; the establishment of journals dedicated to almost every aspect of the Mediterranean (see bibliography), and a plethora of conferences, monographs, collected essays, and journal articles. At UCSC, Professor Kinoshita and I have for the past two years directed the Mediterranean Studies Research Unit. Founded in 2001 under the aegis of UCSC’s Institute for Humanities Research, this group of faculty and graduate students from History, Literature, Languages, Anthropology, Politics, History of Consciousness and other disciplines has met three times a quarter as a reading group and sponsored three guest speakers a year. The theme of this UCHRI Research Group arises directly out of the conversations and debates which the Research Unit has served as a forum for. We believe this to be a propitious moment for the promotion of Mediterranean Studies within the UC System, both to consolidate and synthesize the work of individual scholars already interested in the topic but often working in relative isolation, as well as to encourage scholars in related areas to explore the advantages this emerging critical paradigm may have to offer.

Goals and Objectives
Our Residential Research group proposes bringing together scholars from different disciplines engaged in the study of the medieval Mediterranean as a locus of various kinds of political, economic, social, and cultural interactions. In so doing, we hope to encourage conversation and interchange between participants examining similar questions from different disciplinary perspectives: for example, literary and art historians working on textual and visual representations of "the other" with social and economic historians analyzing examples of inter-ethnic or inter-confessional relations both within and between cultures. In addition, bringing together specialists focusing on different sites within the Mediterranean offers the opportunity to test the viability of recognizable "Mediterranean" models of social organization, institutions and practices. In the process, we will engage a range of questions relevant to the current orientation of the field of Medieval Studies as a whole, but which also raise issues providing a point of contact with specialists in the Early Modern and Modern periods. These theoretical foci include:

The "de-nationalization" of our objects of study. Shaped as an academic and professional discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, Medieval Studies were strongly informed by the exigencies of nationalist agendas and ideologies. As a heuristic device, the Mediterranean allows us to displace the nation-state as the default category of analysis. Removing the study of the Middle Ages from the teleological pull of various national historical traditions reveals the strategic importance of sub- or supra-national entities such as the Crown of Aragon, Angevin Naples, Norman Sicily, the maritime empires of Venice and Genoa, and islands like Lusignan Cyprus and Hospitaller Rhodes. For modernists, recognizing the prominence such sites enjoyed in the high and late Middle Ages provides a better basis for understanding the tensions between nationalism and regionalisms in modern Spain or Italy and reconfigures our understanding of the place of "medieval Europe" in the long march of "Western Civilization."

One corollary of displacing the nation-state as a relevant category of analysis is to pose the question of the specificity of medieval conceptions of empire. Intervening in recent discussions (Hardt and Negri, etc.) that appropriate "empire" as a way of apprehending the current phrase of post-modernity/American hegemony/late capitalism, we propose exploring "empire" as a premodern strategy (with a long history in ancient West Asia and the late antique Mediterranean) for managing multiethnic, multilingual, and/or multiconfessional populations. Its inclusionary strategies (as opposed to the often exclusionary strategies of the proto-national states emerging in the sixteenth century, with their increased emphasis on homogeneity of language and religion) help delineate the discontinuity between medieval Mediterranean and modern models of political-social organization and provide a better basis for understanding the "anomaly" of the Ottoman or Habsburg empires throughout the modern era to the early twentieth century.

Orientalism and the Clash of Civilizations. Events of recent years have drawn popular attention to the Mediterranean, which—in its guise as frontier between the Islamic and Christian worlds—is seen distortedly as a either a precursor of today’s dilemmas or an idealized vanished world which may hold the keys to resolving them. By focusing on the medieval Mediterranean as a "shared world" (Greene) defined by exchange and communication—by no means peaceful, but by no means characterized by warfare and strife—we displace the Crusades as the dominant model of "east–west" contact in order to understand the mechanisms of these interconnections, ranging from a common religio-philosophical tradition (Amin, Bulliett) to political alliances and economic networks: "pathways of portability" (Hoffman) for peoples, commodities, ideas and institutions.

The Social Construction of Race, Ethnicity, and Religious Affiliation. The recognition of race as a constitutive feature of modernity raises questions of premodern constructions of identity. Moving beyond the well-explored terrain of representations of "the other" in literature and the visual arts, we will reexamine medieval Mediterranean negotiations of identity, with special attention to shifting political and social contexts. Rather than taking religious and ethnic minority groups in isolation, we analyze them as part of "one cultural system" (Klein) in order to move toward a more integrated understanding of diverse societies (Brann, Catlos, Glick, Guichard, Hames, Klein, Nirenberg). This includes an examination of "selective acculturation" (Klein) and ethnogenesis, and of cases where religious or ethnic difference is subordinated to commonalities, across confessional lines, of status, social function, or self-interest.

Postcolonial Medievalism. The influence of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies has helped put on the medievalist’s agenda questions of colonialism (McKee), ethnic and religious pluralism (Catlos and many others), hybridity, cultural contact, and transculturation (Kinoshita, Mallette, Tronzo). Investigating premodern forms of these phenomena in the period "before European hegemony" (Abu-Lughod) and the rise of "Eurocentrism" (Amin), offers a test to assertions of the long and continuous histories of "Western" Orientalism and forms of colonial exploitation.

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Bibliography
Theory/General

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Kinoshita, Sharon. "Discrepant Medievalisms: Deprovincializing the Middle Ages." In Worldings: World Literature, Field Imaginaries, Future Practices. Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Ed. Rob Wilson and Chris Connery. Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, forthcoming, 2006.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1978].

Mediterranean Studies

Abulafia, David. Mediterranean Encounters, Economic, Religious, Political, 1100-1550. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.

Albera, Dionigi, Anton Blok, and Christian Bromberger. L’anthropologie de la Méditerranée: Anthropology of the Mediterranean. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001.

Arbel, Benjamin, ed. Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean. London: Frank Cass, 1996.

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995 [1972].

Constable, Olivia Remie. Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Driessen, Henk. "The Connecting Sea: History, Anthropology, and the Mediterranean." American Anthropologist 103 (2001): 528-31.

Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society. The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. 4 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Harris, W. V., ed. Rethinking the Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.

Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2000.

al-Masaq: Studia Arabo-Islamica Mediterranea (University of Leeds: Leeds, UK).

Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture in Dialogue and Confluence (U. Minnesota/ Brill).

Mediterranean Historical Review (Tel Aviv, Israel).

Mediterranean Language Review (Wiesbaden, Germany).

Mediterranean Studies (Mediterranean Studies Association: Aldershot UK).

Mediterraneans (Association Mediterraneans/Méditerranéens: Paris, France).

Peristiany, J. G., ed. Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. London, 1965.

Peuples méditerranéens. (Paris, France).

Pryor, John H. Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Scripta Mediterranea (Canadian Society for Mediterranean Studies: Toronto, Canada)

Interconfessional and Interethnic Relations

Barth, Fredrik, ed. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969.

Blau, Peter, and Joseph E. Schwartz. Crosscutting Circles. Testing a Macrostructural Theory of Intergroup Relations. Orlando, 1984.

Bulliet, Richard W. The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. New York: Columbia UP, 2004.

Catlos, Brian A. "Contexto social y "conveniencia" en la Corona de Aragón. Propuesta para un modelo de interacción entre grupos etno-religiosos minoritarios y mayoritarios." Revista d’història medieval 12 (2002): 220–35.

–––––. The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050-1300. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Greene, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2000.

Hames, Harvey J. The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century. Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2000.

Klein, Elka. Community and King: Jews, Christian Society and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming.

LeVine, Robert A., and Donald T. Campbell. Ethnocentrism: Theories of Conflict, Ethnic Attitudes and Group Behaviour. New York: John Wiley, 1972.

McKee, Sally. Uncommon Dominion. Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

Mittal, Sushil. Surprising Bedfellows: Hindus and Muslims in Medieval and Early Modern India. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003.

Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence. Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996.

Pirenne, Henri. Mahomet et Charlemagne. Paris: 1937.

Economic Relations, Social Organization

Constable, Olivia Remie. Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900-1500. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Glick, Thomas F. "Muhtasib and Mustasaf: A Case-Study of Institutional Diffusion." Viator 2 (1971): 59–81.

––––. Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1979.

––––. "«Thin Hegemony» and Consensual Communities in the Medieval Crown of Aragon." in El feudalisme comptat i debatut. Formació i expansió del feudalisme català, 523-38. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2003.

Goody, Jack. "Women and Lineages: Europe and Africa." In Mujeres, Familia y Linaje en la Edad Media. Ed. Carmen Trillo San José. Granada: Universidad de Granada, forthcoming.

––––. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

Greif, Avnar. "Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies." Journal of Political Economy 102 (1994): 912–50.

–––––. "Contract Enforceablity and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders’ Coalition." American Economic Review 83 (1993): 525-48.

Guichard, Pierre. Structures sociales "orientales" et "occidentales" dans l’Espagne musulmane. Paris: Mouton, 1977.

Jacoby, David. Commercial Exchange across the Mediterranean: Byzantium, the Crusader Levant, Egypt and Italy. Aldershot: Variorum, 2005.

–––––. "Silk Economies and Cross-Cultural Artistic Interaction: Byzantium, the Muslim World, and the Christian West." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004).

Redfield, Robert. Peasant Culture and Society. Chicago, 1956.

Rothstein, David. "Culture Creation and Social Reconstruction: The Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Intergroup Contact." American Sociological Review 37 (1972): 671-78.

Scott, J. C. "Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance." Journal of Peasant Studies 13 (1987): 5–35.

Literary, Artistic, and Cultural Relations

Brann, Ross. Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2002.

Caskey, Jill. Art and Patronage in the Medieval Mediterranean: Merchant Culture in the Region of Amalfi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Cutler, Anthony. "Gifts and Gift Exchange as Aspects of the Byzantine, Arab, and Related Economies." Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001).

Grabar, Oleg. "The Shared Culture of Objects." In Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204. Washington DC, 1997.

Hoffman, Eva R. "Pathways of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century." Art History 24 (2001).

Howard, Deborah. Venice & the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100-1500. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

Kinoshita, Sharon. "Almería Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary: Toward a ‘Material’ History of the Medieval Mediterranean." In Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Cloth Work, and Other Cultural Imaginings. Ed. E. Jane Burns. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

–––––, and Jason Jacobs. "Ports of Call: Boccaccio’s Alatiel in the Medieval Mediterranean." In "Mapping the Mediterranean." Ed. Valeria Finucci and Grant Parker. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:1. Forthcoming, 2007.

Mack, Rosamond. Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Mallette, Karla. Kingdom of Sicily 1100-1250: A Literary History. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Menocal, María Rosa. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

Shepard, Jonathan. "Courts in East and West." In The Medieval World. Eds. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson. London: Routledge, 2001.

Tronzo, William. The Cultures of His Kingdom: Roger II and the Cappella Palatina in Palermo. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997.

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