Bernadette Andrea

Black Skin, The Queen's Masques: Africanist Ambivalence and Feminine Author (ity) in the Masques of Blackness and Beauty

What is fascinating . . . is to observe how their [literary critics’] lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy-an informing, stabilizing, and disturbing element-in the literature they do study. I t is interesting, not surprising, that the arbiters of critical power in American literature seem to take pleasure in, indeed relish, their ignorance of African-American texts. What is surprising is that their refusal to read black texts-a refusal that makes no disturbance in their intellectual life-repeats itself when they reread the traditional, established works of literature worthy of their attention. -Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

The Ghost of Leo Africanus from the English to the Irish Renaissance

At the close of a millennium marked by the homogenizing forces of global capitalism and the particularizing tendencies of essentialist dogma and sectarian violence, the francophone Lebanese journalist, novelist, and expatriate Amin Maalouf claims a heterogeneous polyglot subjectivity as an antidote to lethally reductive identity politics. Maalouf’s concern in his memoir with the complex imbrication of identity and politics is anticipated by his first novel, Leon l’Africain, which constructs an “imaginary autobiography” for the sixteenth-century poet, diplomat, and exile al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wezzan, also known in the Western European tradition as Leo Africanus.2 The historical Leo Africanus— a name Oumelbanine Zhiri stresses “qu’il ne s’est jamais donne luimeme” (that he never gave himself)—was born in the Islamic kingdom of Granada and exiled as a child to North Africa with the overthrow of this kingdom by the Catholic coalition that would later become the Spanish Hapsburg Empire.3 His youth was spent in diplomatic travel concentrating on North Africa, but also venturing to the distant capitals of Timbuktu, Mecca, and Constantinople. Traversing the Mediterranean during one of his voyages, he was captured by Venetian pirates and presented as a slave to Pope Leo X, who lent him his Christian name. While in Rome, he was baptized and became a scribe in the papal service.

From Invasion to Inquisition: Mapping Malta in Early Modern England

In thus theorizing “The Strange Effects of Ordinary Space,” Patricia Yaeger points toward a fundamental aporia in literary and cultural studies of early modern Malta: the always-already effaced indigenes of the island.1 As in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, numerous colonial and countercolonial contests striate this profoundly overdetermined locale, positioned roughly between the coast of Sicily and the coast of modern Libya (the site of early modern Tunis and ancient Carthage). In The Tempest, a similarly situated Mediterranean island stages the struggle between Prospero, the newest invader, and Caliban, the previous invader now subject to the current colonial hegemony. The indigenes of the island, however, emerge in the play as “what is hidden, encrypted, repressed, or unspoken” through Caliban’s famous paean: “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”2 Similarly, Maltese history from antiquity through the early modern period involves successive invasions by the Phoenicians (ninth century BC), the Carthaginians (eighth and seventh century BC), the Romans (fourth century BC to sixth century AD, with an influential landing by St. Paul in the first century and a possible occupation by the North African Vandals in the fifth century), the Byzantine Greeks (the sixth century AD), the Muslim Arabs (from AD 870, establishing the Maltese language as a cognate of Arabic), the Normans (from AD 1061), and the Aragonese (from AD 1283).

Travellers from Europe in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, 16th–17th Centuries: Seeking, Transforming, Discarding Knowledge

This volume brings together a series of previously published essays by a leading scholar in “the history of science in Islamic societies” that focus on the attempts of western European travelers in...

English Women’s Writing and Islamic Empires, 1610–1690

While much of the current scholarship on England and Islamic culture, politics, and religion deals with writing by men, especially travel narratives and drama, women’s role in this transcultural encounter continues to be underemphasized.1 In response, this chapter will examine English women writers from the early seventeenth century (Mary Wroth), the mid-century (the royalist Margaret Cavendish and the radical sectarians Katherine Evans and Sarah Chevers), and the end of the century (Delarivier Manley). This survey establishes that English women, marginalized by gender, identified with the Islamic ‘other’ in a way not possible for their male counterparts. At the same time, as participants in the English imperial project, they increasingly came to register their allegiances toward patriarchal orientalism. This tension informs the debates at the turn of the eighteenth century about the rights of ‘freeborn Englishwomen’, resulting in the emergence of feminist orientalism. However, counter-orientalist challenges also emerged, starting with Manley and, following her lead, Mary Wortley Montagu.

Elizabeth I and Persian Exchanges

Recent scholarship on English relations with the Islamic world during the Elizabethan era has focused on exchange as a way to counter two persistent fallacies: the first, based on medieval anti-Islamic polemics and brought forward into modern “clash of civilization” diatribes, posits an unbridgeable gap between “East” and “West”; the second, drawn from anachronistic applications of the postcolonial critique epitomized by Edward Said’s Orientalism, assumes the West has always dominated the East.1 Seeking to remedy both views, Lisa Jardine’s influential cultural history, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (1996), situates Constantinople, renamed Istanbul after the Ottoman conquest of 1453, at the hub of a global network of exchange that constituted the European Renaissance in its cultural, as well as its mercantile, aspects. As she asserts, “in the panorama we are surveying of emerging influences on European culture, the cultural as well as the political might of the Ottomans plays a vital part.”2 With Jerry Brotton, she expands this focus in Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (2000), whose opening chapter, “Exchanging Identity: Breaching the Boundaries of Renaissance Europe, ” examines the Islamic influences on the Renaissance man’s self-fashioning.3 From this perspective, the Ottoman empire and other Islamic powers no longer seem absolutely “other” to western Christendom nor does the West invariably hold “the relative upper hand” in relation to them.4

Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia

This paper seeks to explicate the imaginary geographies of Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) by tracing conflicting early modern genealogies of the Tartar—conventionally represented as issuing from Central Asia during the Middle Ages and threatening Western Europe up to the early modern period—in relation to English engagement with the Ottoman and Safavid empires around the turn of the seventeenth century.1 Wroth’s Urania is significant as the first original, as opposed to translated, prose romance by an English woman to appear in print.2 She was forced to withdraw the first part from circulation shortly after its initial publication under pressure from powerful men for whom her depictions of the patriarchal abuse of wives, daughters, and servants struck too close to home; however, she continued with an equally substantial second part, which remained in manuscript until its publication as a scholarly edition in 1999.3 In this second part, Wroth shifts from the classical emphasis of the first part to an increasingly belligerent assertion of a universalistic Christian identity, albeit one primarily in service of political expansionism and not presented as a spiritual practice or doctrine.4 Ultimately, the Urania links this identity to a polity encompassing “East” (Asia) and “West” (Europe) under the auspices of an imaginary Holy Roman Empire, which in Wroth’s era was “a phantom” of “a universal imperialist hope” for Western Europeans and not a political reality.5

Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's "Urania"

Cherished Torment offers the first detailed account of the intellectual foundation of the first prose romance published by a woman in English: The Countess of Montgomerys Urania, written by Lady Mary Wroth, the niece of Sir Philip Sidney. Part one, printed in 1621, prompted an intense outcry due to Lady Mary Wroths thinly veiled representation of actual events in the lives of prominent families. It was not republished until 1995. The remainder of Urania, published in 2000, marks the first opportunity for most readers to experience this 600,000-word romance firsthand. The Uranias lengthy text may initially appear daunting, but Cavanagh argues that the romance rewards its readers with a richly textured narrative that artfully engages with numerous aesthetic, literary and intellectual concerns from the early seventeenth century, including race relations, tensions between Christianity and the occult, global expansion and the composition of the universe. A sophisticated and erudite study, Cherished Torment moves beyond the intriguing and scandalous events of Wroths personal life that have understandably captivated the attention of many modern readers to a closer look at the latters masterful integration of the issues fueling her eras political, scientific and philosophical debates. Cavanaghs important study will enable readers to better recognize and appreciate Uranias intellectual heritage.