Foster Chamberlin

The Memory of al-Andalus

Episode 58 with Eric Calderwood

As part of our continuing series on Spain and Morocco, in this episode Eric Calderwood returns to the podcast to discuss his new book On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus and the many ways in which the idea of al-Andalus, the medieval period of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, has been taken up by groups as varied as Arabs, Berber/Amazigh people, feminists and Palestinians. In the second half of the podcast, we’ll listen to clips from three musical works that illustrate how musicians have also been inspired by al-Andalus to imagine various connections across time and space.

The Episode

The Guest

Eric Calderwood is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also holds faculty appointments in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Department of History, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the Program in Medieval Studies, the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the European Union Center, and the Center for African Studies. His first book, Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture, was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2018. It has been translated into Spanish and Arabic and has won several awards, including the 2019 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies. His second book, On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2023. He has also published articles in PMLA, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Journal of North African Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, and International Journal of Middle East Studies. In addition, he has contributed to public-facing venues like Foreign Policy, McSweeney’s, NPR, and the BBC.

Additional Resources

Suggested Readings

  • Aidi, Hisham D. Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture. New York: Vintage, 2014.
  • Bennison, Amira K. The Almoravid and Almohad Empires. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
  • Booth, Marilyn. Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in fin-de-siècle Egypt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
  • Calderwood, Eric. On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023.
  • ———. “Strait Flow.” PMLA 137, no. 5 (2022): 871-877.
  • Civantos, Christina. The Afterlife of al-Andalus: Muslim Iberia in Contemporary Arab and Hispanic Narratives. Albany: SUNY Press, 2017.
  • Elinson, Alexander E. Looking Back at al-Andalus: The Poetics of Loss and Nostalgia in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Literature. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
  • Ennaji, Moha, ed. Amazighité et Andalousie: Droit d’Appartenance et Hospitalité. Fez: Centre Sud Nord, 2015.
  • Glasser, Jonathan. The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
  • Granara, William. “Nostalgia, Arab Nationalism, and the Andalusian Chronotope in the Evolution of the Modern Arabic Novel.” Journal of Arabic Literature 36, no. 1 (2005): 57-73.
  • Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Leiden: Brill, 1992.
  • Juʿaydi, Muhammad ʿAbd Allah al-. Aʿindakum nabaʾ: Istidʿaʾ al-Andalus fi al-adab al-filastini al-hadith. Beirut: Dar al-Hadi li-l-Tibaʿa wa-l-Nashr, 2002.
  • Machin-Autenrieth, Matthew. “Spanish Musical Responses to Moroccan Immigration and the Cultural Memory of al-Andalus.” Twentieth-Century Music 16, no. 2 (2019): 259-287.
  • Manzano Moreno, Eduardo. “Qurtuba: Algunas reflexiones críticas sobre el califato de Córdoba y el mito de la convivencia.” Awraq 7 (2013): 225-246.
  • Marín, Manuela. Mujeres en al-Ándalus. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000.
  • Martínez Montávez, Pedro. Al-Andalus, España, en la literatura árabe contemporánea. Málaga: Arguval, 1992.
  • Reynolds, Dwight F. The Musical Heritage of al-Andalus. London: Routledge, 2021.
  • Scott, Rachel, AbdoolKarim Vakil, and Julian Weiss, eds. Al-Andalus in Motion: Travelling Concepts and Cross-Cultural Concepts. London: King’s College London CLAMS, 2021.
  • Shannon, Jonathan Holt. Performing al-Andalus: Music and Nostalgia across the Mediterranean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

Music Credits

  1. “Encuentro final”
    From: Macama jonda
    By: José Heredia Maya
    Vocals: ‘Abd al-Sadiq Shaqara and Enrique Morente
    Courtesy of: Centro Andaluz de Documentación del Flamenco
  2. “Las Morillas de Jaén”
    From: Arco Iris
    By: Amina Alaoui
    ECM Records, 2011
    Courtesy of: Amina Alaoui
  3. “Volando recto”
    From: Khaled
    By: Khaled (Jalid Rodríguez)
    Producer: Shean Beats
    YouTube, 9 Apr. 2016

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