19th-Century Kitsch in Alcalá de Henares

 

 My first stop in Alcalá de Henares was the Palacete de Laredo, the former home of the Duke of Laredo, done in the monstrously wonderful neo-Mudéjar style that was popular at the end of the nineteenth century in Spain and in England (and, in a largely more restrained way, in the United States as well). The only way I can think to describe the aesthetic is to say that it is a compete hoot. 

 

 

Neo-Medieval (Toledo Photos, Part III)

The Toledo train station:

Dead Languages Karaoke: Medieval, Medievalism, Neo-Medieval

I say this as a person who has attended a live concert of a Sumerian Elvis impersonator: I'm really not sure what to make of the dead languages karaoke that's on the program for the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo this year.

There is a lot of medievalism and neo-medieval kitsch on the program this year, more than I remember there being on past programs. My distaste for Game of Thrones aside, I'm rather fond of the neo-medieval: It's a predeliction that, in part, drives the teaching of the course I mention here most frequently, the one on modern representations of medieval Spain. I pride myself on having a pretty decent collection of medieval-kitsch board games. I'm even working on a medievalist (different from medieval) article right now. There is place for serious medievalism and goofy medievalism.

But there's something about dead languages karaoke (something that I'd normally be pretty amused about) as a formal session in the meeting . Does it tell us anything about medieval performance? What is it really trying to accomplish? Why isn't it just an optional activity? I think that's where I'm really ambivalent: Medieval Studies is still a field that takes itself very, very seriously. There's an awful lot of gatekeeping and disciplinary falling-into-line and intellectual conservatism, especially by and within its old and venerable institutions.

I think that it's important to take the material and the work very seriously and the profession and its trappings not so much; a session like this does the opposite, waving the trappings of Medieval Studies about like a banner without really making much apparent forward progress. It's a bit of an insult, then, that by virtue of its programming choices, one of these conservative, venerable institituions presents neo-medieval kitsch as more academically significant that large swaths of medieval work.

Kalamazoo isn't a meeting that I go to because (not unlike the Medieval Academy meeting, incidentally) the program is overwhelmingly focused on the Anglo-Norman, the English, the French, and the Latin. Jews and Muslims, by in large, figure into the scholarly discourse as objects represented by the English and the French. Arabic texts are sources for the mysticism and the philosophy that would take hold in various Latinate Christian communities. Spain is presented as though the last thirty years of scholarship and historical revision almost didn't happen.

And yet something as wonderfully goofy as dead languages karaoke is not an after-hours activity but is rather slotted into the program with a roundtable discussion. It's a vicious cycle: People like me don't go because it's very hard to get to Kalamazoo and hardly seems worth it for maybe two relevant sessions. But perhaps the cycle is fed by the appearance that neo-medieval kitsch is a higher intellectual and academic priority than large swaths of the academic medieval.

Random Bullets of Game of Thrones

I wasn't really interested in watching Game of Thrones. I should have been, apparently. All my medievalist friends have been watching it from the get-go, loving it, with many lauding its sophisticated use of medieval visual cues and literary history. It just never grabbed me; but now, since season 5 is being filmed at the Alhambra and since I teach a course on representations of medieval Spain in contemporary fiction, I started to feel some sense of professional responsibility to sit down and watch through it. I don't love it and don't feel like I've missed anything by not having watched it: the worst sort of fantasist neo-medieval kitsch with not a lot to redeem it in terms of plot or characters. I might or might not write more about it in the future, but for now, and possibly all ever, some quick thoughts at least as far as I'm up to, a few episodes into season 2.

— If there is a sophisticated use of medieval visual cues and literary history, then I'm missing it. And I'm not sure I am invested enough in it to watch all the episodes again with a more critical eye. (Plus, I don't think I"m missing it.)

— My initial reaction is that there are really too many beheadings and gratuitous, gory deaths to be able to use this in teaching. That said, I have a colleague who uses it for a mini-course, so it is clearly a feasible thing.

— The intention of the author doesn't matter. However, insofar as he has explained it (with all the usual caveats about the great Romantic poets having been too drunk to know what they were doing and so even an author's statement about his own intentions isn't to be trusted) George R.R. Martin's approach to the story is probably contributing to it not turning out very well. His basic approach appears to be ride on the emotional manipulation of the reader/viewer for its own sake: "I killed Ned in the first book and it shocked a lot of people. I killed Ned because everybody thinks he’s the hero and that, sure, he’s going to get into trouble, but then he’ll somehow get out of it. The next predictable thing is to think his eldest son is going to rise up and avenge his father. And everybody is going to expect that. So immediately [killing Robb] became the next thing I had to do."

— The theological system of Westeros is very poorly defined and elaborated. It's a henotheistic system with old gods and new gods, there is a lot of praying to and invoking of those gods, but by the beginning of season 2, that's really all we know. For an aspect of life that is so frequently emphasized, it is curiously underdeveloped. In terms of cable TV blockbusters that are of interest to historians of religion, Battlestar Gallactica is far superior.

— The plot line of Denarys seems like it should be an Orientalist parody — porcelain-white woman with long, flowing hair ravished by the brutish cheiftain rises up to captivate and lead his people after his death — but I don't have the impression that it is anything but an earnest Orientalist abuse.

— The Dothraki word for I is ana. Borrowing from Arabic?

— I finally get this joke. And yes  (especially now as I am going through and fixing the footnotes in my book manuscript) there is tremendous appeal to a Dothraki citation system:

"There are days when a Dothraki academic referencing system holds a certain appeal." @dtollerton via @CrimsonAlkemist pic.twitter.com/BGKrcQ08KK
— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay) August 4, 2014

Translation Diary #17: On Terrorism Medieval and Modern

Source text: "Desde la otra orilla del Éufrates, que nunca volverá a cruzar, Abd al-Rahman presencia la degollación de su hermano y escucha, como paralizado en sueño, los gritos finales de su agonía y su terror."

My translation: From the far bank of the Euphrates, the one he would never cross again, ‘Abd al-Raḥman can just discern the beheading of his brother and hears his last cries of agony and his terror as though they were a nightmare in which he was trapped.

I'm going to continue to play with the clause about being sleep-paralyzed because I don't really like it as it is. (The editing is, I'm discovering, the biggest part of translating, but that's another issue.)

The reason I'm calling attention to this sentence now is because of how current it sounds: beheading emissaries of rival empires on the banks of the Euphrates. Might as well be ISIS. And it is that currency that is making me question my initial decision — which was not even a decision, really, as much as a reflexive resource to a cognate — to translate the Spanish terror as English terror rather than as any of the other synonyms I might use because of the way it doubles down the invocation of the modern "war on terror" and all its trappings.

Does changing the word make me less faithful to the original? Or perhaps more faithful, because it will not distract the reader by evoking the present day in the middle of an 8th-century history?

A Medieval/Age of Enlightenment/Any Excuse to Wear a Codpiece Faire*

Somebody posted to the Medieval Club of New York's Facebook page that the Society for Creative Anachronism was going to be having jousting in front of the Cloisters. I'm not really into the whole creative anachronism scene, but I thought that in that setting, it might be worth a visit. It turned out to have been a whole medieval faire thingie, and the jousting in front of the Cloisters was — a real missed opportunity — sort of down the hill from the museum rather than in front of it.

The falconry was pretty nifty, though.

Click to enlarge any of the images.

Random Bullets of Neo-Medieval

• I had to tell someone walking down Bleecker Street today to watch his sword hand.
• I am succumbing to all of popular culture (or, more precisely, to the fact that they are filming season five at the Alhambra so I sort of feel obligated) and beginning to watch Game of Thrones.  Further bulletins as events warrant.
• I will be hosting Carnivalesque, the pre-modern blog carnival, in this space in just ten short days. Please submit your favorite recent pre-modern blogging here.

Medieval PSA: Ms. Marvel and the Sarajevo Haggadah

The reboot of the Ms. Marvel comic appeared this week, and has attracted a lot of attention because the superhero has been reimagined as a Muslim high school student from Jersey City. It has invited a lot of discussion, much of it productive and positive, about comics as a medium for social commentary. This is not a totally new phenomenon, though.*

***

When I teach chivalric romances in my classes, I assign a late-fifteenth/early-sixteenth-century text called Amadís de Gaula, a work perhaps most famous for being the book that Don Quixote read before going mad and inspiring his satirical chivalric adventures. I take my student up to the Metropolitan Museum to view a tapestry from a series that recounts the major events in the tale; when we talk about the visual art, I ask them to imagine superimposing comic strip panels on the tapestry since it features a series of exploits by the hero and he appears in several scenes in the single hanging. The passage of time is represented spatially.

High-res, zoomable images are available at the Met's web site.

These lower-res images are annotated with boxes that indicate

the location of the hero in each scene and the direction of "reading."

Illuminated miniatures in medieval manuscripts often bear an even more concrete resemblance to comic book pages. You can watch the action unfold in these two illustrations from a collection of miracles attributed to the Virgin Mary:

To be sure, in several of these tales Muslims and Jews are the foils or the hapless victims shown the light by the Virgin, but particularly in the illuminations, the representations are more complex, demonstrating deeper relationships between members of different faiths as well as members of all three participating in regular sets of day-to-day activities ranging from playing music to engaging in diplomacy; these illustrations have become the basis for a certain kind of historical sociological study.

This is among the artistic conventions that were adopted and adapted for use in religious contexts. For example, a variety of Passover haggadot produced in Christian lands were illuminated in a style that is more typically associated with Christian than Jewish art and reflects participation in wider artistic conversations. This page from the Golden Haggadah tells the story in panels:

This panel, from the Sarajevo Haggadah, originally produced in Spain, is thought by many scholars to reflect the ethnic diversity of the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century:

This one is a secular Arabo-Islamicate text from Spain, a tale of two lovers and their matchmaker. The representations of Andalusi architecture come to make up the "panels" of the medieval "comic strip."

***

All of which brings me to the new Ms. Marvel. Ever since the publication of Maus in the mid-1980s, there has been little doubt that comics are a viable and powerful form for social commentary. This first installment of Ms. Marvel only gets as far as Kamala Khan realizing that she's about to become a superhero, but it still manages to address basic day-to-day negotiations of life 

These include intrafamilial tensions over religion and culture that appear in ways and forms and contexts that outsiders might not expect...

... language choice...

... and trying to negotiate an individual identity against the uncomprehending demands of others.

Comic books that deliberately or unintentionally illustrate day-to-day life and the ways in which members of different faiths negotiate their own cultures and their participation in the multiconfessional world? We've got almost a thousand  years' worth of them.

***

*I don't keep up with the wonderful British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog as often as I should, and so I didn't notice this post, which also identifies a sort of "medieval comic book" until a few days after I started writing this post, when I was looking for a few images to show my undergraduates. It is, then, a connection that other medievalists have made, as well.

Medieval PSA: Chosen People 2.0

I hope it's obvious that I don't actually believe what I wrote below that medievalists should disengage. It was a depressing sentence to write in the same week that I had my undergraduates read "Writing Without Footnotes," talked with them about why medievalists should read Salman Rushdie, and asked them what they thought their responsibilities were to the wider world.

That discussion, long-planned as part of the introduction to my seminar this semester, happened to come on the heels of a post I wrote about the modern world going — well, not quite viral, but certainly getting far more page views than anything I'd ever written. In a way it was a little disappointing since I didn't think it was a hugely interesting post at all. (In fact, I'd still recommend this post and this one if you'd like to read something more interesting on the relationship between the medieval and modern worlds.) But it also gave me the idea to write a series of short posts, maybe weekly or bi-weekly, that contextualized modern phenomena in their roots in the Middle Ages or, Ecclesiastes/Pete Seeger-style, as things that have happened before and will happen again. Public service announcements from the Middle Ages. Even if this isn't a hugely visible forum, it's part of my responsibility as a medievalist to engage with the wider world.

The first version of the first of the regular medieval PSAs was up for all of about ninety seconds before someone on Twitter called it a troll-post. My response, taking it down, was as much about the comment and about not having the stamina or desire for Twitter fireworks  as it was about the comment hitting a raw nerve. Obviously, I don't think the post was trollish, but at the same time, it wasn't tightly written and it was a little overambitious and fell short because, frankly, as much as I want to write about things that are relevant to more than the six people I talk to on a regular basis, my first priority still has to be finishing my book manuscript. I took the full ninety seconds it is permissible to spend freaking out about being criticized meanly in print and freaked out; and then I got on with my evening.

But I decided that I wanted to try it again. I've tightened and shortened the post. I've cut down on the flippancy. I've reduced the scope. It's still a public service announcement. Academics aren't really the intended audience, though I hope some will find some value in it. Academics of the sort who don't think that medievalists should read or teach or write about Rushdie will get nothing out of this and will spare themselves and me a lot of grief if they just stop reading here. In trying something new there are always bound to be missteps. I hope you'll bear with me as I find my footing with this. And besides, next week I'm going to write about comic books. I think it'll be okay in the end.

***

Amy Chua, she of Tiger Mom fame, and her husband Jed Rubenfeld, Yale professors both, are about to release a book about what they characterize as the disproportionate success in America of eight "cultural groups": their own groups, Chinese Americans and Jews, naturally, as well as Cuban exiles, Nigerians, Lebanese-, Indian-, and Iranian-Americans, and Mormons. Their PR machine is kicking into high gear in advance of the release, and managed to land them both space on the New York Times op-ed page and a profile in the paper's magazine yesterday.

The profile makes Amy Chua come across as a hugely unreliable narrator. A serial courter of controversy, she tells her interlocutor: “I don’t want to be controversial. I just want to be liked.” Yet at the same time, she comes across especially unaware later in the piece when she marvels that people just didn't realize that she is a completely unreliable narrator. She seems blind to the exact nature of her own unreliability while marshaling it to deflect criticism.

The run of the journal Eugenics Quarterly on the shelves in Bobst.

Photo not my own. Borrowed from the Facebook page of a friend.

This unreliable narrator and her partner insist that her argument is not a racial one: "The good news is that it's not some magic gene generating these groups' disproportionate success. Instead their success is... open to anyone." The messiness of their categories says otherwise. In an especially telling moment, she contrasts the parenting techniques of Jews and Mormons favorably to those of white parents. The parameters of the meta-group of successful groups ignore the fact that a category like "Indians" is subject to very recent borders drawn in the collapse of the British Empire. Chua and Rubenfeld seem not to know that Lebanon, Iran, and India have historically had large Jewish populations. How are they defining race, religion and culture? A far sharper reader of medieval texts than I wrote that "if a master of the art of writing commits such blunders as would shame an intelligent high school boy, it is reasonable to assume that they are intentional" and that they invite the reader to seek an esoteric sense between the lines as they are written. Between these lines there is oversight and flattening out of distinctions and the undertones of 1920s racialist theory that necessarily permeate any discussion of why certain minority groups might be distinct from the group. In between the lines, this argument is almost obscenely biological.

A miniature from the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Passover liturgy from medieval Spain.

Stay tuned for next weeks' PSA, which will feature this image more prominently.

One passage in Chua and Rubenfeld's op-ed piece jumps out especially: "At their first Passover Seders, most Jewish children hear that Jews are the 'chosen' people; later they may be taught that Jews are a moral people, a people of law and intellect, a people of survivors." They're not the first ones to try to construct religion — or even more specifically, the idea of Jewish "chosenness" — as a racial category. A wide variety of medieval thinkers argued that the basis for religious identification was rooted in doctrinal correctness and the resulting correct behavior. And then there was Judah Halevi: talented poet, shrewd(ish) operator, and medieval Amy Chua.

Toward the end of his life, Judah Halevi wrote a text that is at least nominally a defense of the Jewish faith in the form of a series of dialogues that a mythical Khazar king plagued by the idea that his religious practice is insufficient conducts with a priest, an imam and a philosopher. After the king does not find any of their world views to be suitable or coherent, he deigns to invite a Jewish interlocutor to the discussion. He goes from assuming that the wretchedness of Jews in history was due to their lowly nature and insufficient faith to signing on wholesale and converting along with his subjects. Despite the major intervention of conversion to Judaism in this text, Halevi's concept of chosenness is inherently biological, passed down through blood lines. His vision of Judaism is explicitly historicizing, but that history is predicated upon a biological imperative.

Historians and political theorists from Josephus to Disraeli have written about a unitary "Hebrew race." Modern recourse to DNA sequencing muddies the waters without providing any clear way forward. The relationship between race and religion is complex even within specific cultural contexts. Andalusi Jews influenced by Greco-Arabic philosophy and writing about Judaism within the space of the same century (the long twelfth) did not agree on what constituted being Jewish and what the relationship was between race and religion. Chua and Rubenfeld predicate their argument upon a mistake that should embarrass a high school student without the promise of any esoteric revelation; but it's not a mistake without historical precedent.

This isn't very deep as far as conclusions go, but it seems that one of the take-aways is that  it's simply difficult to belief that a book that attempts to span a variety of cultures and cultural categories and subsume them, race, religion and all, into a single group of super-achievers is going to have very much to say that will be of use at all.

***

This has just been a quick public service announcement. There's a lot I would have liked to do in a longer piece, particularly taking up the challenge of teasing apart Halevi in the light of Strauss' critical methodology and offering a more detailed and sensitive reading of the Kuzari. Truly, I am aware of the shortcomings of this post and wish I could make it better, but unfortunately this isn't the space or the time of the semester for that kind of thought experiment or intellectual work. If you'd like to read more, start by contrasting the portrayals of Judah Halevi in two relatively recent biographies: here, and here.

Medieval PSA: *Poof*

Screw it. Just like law professors shouldn't write works of sociology of religion, pressed-for-time medievalists shouldn't engage with the modern world. Paradoxically, there's too much at stake.

Fighting Speech with Speech: A Public Service Announcement from the Middle Ages

Those who don't know history... yeah, yeah, yeah... doomed to repeat...whatever.  I'm not a medieval historian primarily to engage with the modern world. But sometimes my academic expertise comes in handy in contextualizing issues that crop up now and then. Sometimes the Middle Ages and the modern world intersect in wonderful, productive, lovely ways; but other times, it is the ignorance from that period that seems to have survived instead.And my approach to ignorance, hatred and bigotry is not to shout people down or tell them to go google to find out why it's a problem; I'd prefer to put together some answers and resources to address the problem. So consider this a bit of a public service message about a problem that has (like the plague*) survived from the Middle Ages and crops up now and again.

***

What is blood libel? Blood libel is a false claim that Jews ritually slaughter children for a variety of reasons, including to use their blood to bake matzah for Passover and because of general evilness.

When and where did it originate? The twelfth century, in Norwich, England (Scroll down the linked page for images of the castle keep where Norwich Jews sought protection in vain from their Christian neighbors who suddenly wanted to exact collective punishment.) Over 100 subsequent cases of this libel are documented in medieval Europe. Cases were reported as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, and this libel was one prong of the Nazis' anti-Semitic propaganda.

What typically happened after blood-libel accusations were made? As alluded to in the previous answer, collective punishment was exacted for these crimes that never occurred. Not only were the supposed perpetrators executed, but so were many members of various Jewish communities at large. As recently as this month a French Jew who was executed on the basis of a blood-libel claim was exonerated for his "crime," 350 years after his death.

Why is this still relevant today? This is still a concern because people still believe it. For example, I'm bringing this up now because of a page that is making its way around Facebook that repeats the blood libel and claims to offer proof of many cases of children having been ritually murdered by Jews. A campaign underway to report it to Facebook as hate speech has so far been unsuccessful.

(Click to enlarge to a readable size.)

Why is this still relevant today (Part II, updated 8/29/14)? With the recent rise in anti-semitic attacks that go far beyond the purview of condemning Israel's action in Gaza this summer, the blood libel is one of the major reasons invoked for firebombing and stoning synagogues (as happened while I was in Paris last month) and assaulting Jewish citizens of any and all countries. This video struck me particularly, as a Hamas official tried to hedge for an English-speaking audience, not disavowing his comments that he personally witnessed Jews slaughtering children ritually for matzah-baking purposes, but instead trying to blame the whole thing on medieval Christians. For a very brief period yesterday, Facebook finally classified blood libel as hate speech and removed the pages with "evidence" of ritual murder by Jews. This morning it reversed itself and returned to its previous position that it is a challenging idea, not hate speech.

***

Part of my goal in writing this blog post is to contextualize a claim that might, on the face of it, just seem gross or mean but in fact has a much deeper historical problem encoded in it. This most current iteration is actually a pretty amateurish one that, consequently, doesn't really scare me. Compare it, for example, to the campaign fliers that were produced a few years ago in San Francisco in support of a proposed law banning infant circumcision (which we are decidedly not going to discuss here). I'm sure that it's possible to run a campaign about that issue without resorting to centuries-old stereotypes about Jews and imagery reminiscent of the way that stereotype played out specifically in Nazi Germany, but this one didn't manage that**:

From random ignorant people posting a few sketchy things on Facebook to slick political machines, this belief persists both explicitly and implicitly in wider discourse about Jewish practice. Without knowing the history, it might not immediately be clear that this kind of claim is, in effect, a call for violence.

What to do about it? My own answer is to let hate speech stand and to combat it not by silencing it but by educating and writing and speaking out just as loudly and a lot more eloquently. We fight speech with speech. Bottom line, end of story. We don't need to value free speech*** to express our desire for world peace or the pleasantness of fluffy puppies. The freedom to speak protects the most marginal, the most outlandish, the most controversial and, yes, the most vile ideas. The purpose of that protection is not to let changing tastes dictate the exchange of ideas, with the consequence that things that would never be a matter of taste are also protected.

But what happens when Facebook considers itself to be a self-contained, private community with its own speech standards that ban hate speech rather than being society at large? First of all, I'm not sure I buy it. Facebook, for better or for worse, is society at large. But if we take it at face value for a moment and call it a community with its own self-regulating norms that do not permit hate speech, then why doesn't the blood libel constitute a prohibited category of speech?

Along with several others, I reported this page as hate speech.  I differ from some of them in that I'm not sure I'd want it taken down. I believe fighting speech with more speech. I want the world to know that it is populated with people who believe that I murder Christian children and bake matzah with their blood. However I would definitely like an explanation from Facebook about what their corporate-community entity considers to constitute hate speech, and I'd like for their arbiters of same to understand why the blood libel is such a big deal.

****

*The specific nature of the medieval plague bacterium and whether it is in fact co-identified with modern plague is a favored subject of long and loud debate in certain medieval history circles. I'm using the example as a metaphor here and don't really want to derail the conversation with a discussion of Y. pestis.

** As it happened, this particular campaign also couldn't manage to make its point without gay-baiting, either. Regardless of what one thinks about the issue in the abstract, this campaign was deeply problematic and steeped in ignorance and hatred.

***And yes, I know that this isn't a First Amendment issue per se because it's not the government interfering. Whether one wants to make the case that the conglomeration of media outlets means that corporations should also be bound by that protection as a matter of ethics is a separate issue. Nevertheless, we can talk about the freedoms of speech and expression in the abstract as something we value (or don't) as a society.

Pass (Part III)

Part I is here and Part II is here.

I attended a public magnet high school in San Francisco that, while I was a student there, was just coming out from under federal supervision — a consent decree that had been in place since the year I was born — because the school’s population was considered to be insufficiently diverse: too many Chinese and Chinese-American students, the Northern California circuit of the United States District Court had ruled. Despite the federal supervision and an admissions scheme that required different test scores for students of different racial and ethnic groups, the plurality of the student body was still Chinese-American.

Lowell was a relatively comfortable place for me. After a miserable four years in a private middle school full of new money and a false, forced doctrine of multiculturalism that paid lip service to celebrating other cultures and made tokens out of the one black kid, the one Asian kid, the one Jewish kid in each class, I suddenly inhabited a world where I didn’t get mocked for — forget about not having — not caring about designer clothes and not going on outlandish ski vacations, and where being smart wasn’t bad or even all that exceptional. I still didn’t find myself in the default position, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. I remember that there was the occasional indignity or insult, but they were so minor that fifteen years on, I don’t even remember the details. It wasn’t always a walk in the park — it was high school, after all — but most of the fights I had were about editing the school newspaper rather than race.

Linguistically I was well on the outside, though I learned enough to at least be able to be polite. One of my classmates whose parents spoke limited English taught some of us who were her friends how to ask for her on the phone so that when we called her house we didn’t just have to shout: “Cynthia? Cynthia!” into the receiver at her mom and dad. I may not know how to do anything in Cantonese once I get Cynthia on the phone, and I wouldn’t even be able to understand if the answer were something along the lines of her not being there and might I want to leave a message, but I do at least know how to ask that the phone please be passed to her: “Mm-goi Cynthia tieng denwa?”

And when anyone in the media or from outside of Lowell would write or say anything negative about Chinese-Americans as a group or when parents of some of the white kids would go on about how there were just too many Asian kids who were making the environment of academic competition intolerable, I would start to feel not just angry but defensive, reflexively thinking: “Those are my people you’re talking about!” Even though, of course, they really weren’t. Maybe the most extreme example of that perspective came on a very early college-visit trip I made to the Washington University in St. Louis. I came through Kansas City, and when I stepped off the plane and into the airport, my panicked reaction was: “There are all these white people here. I bet I totally stick out.” It took me a few minutes to realize that I was the only one there who would ever think to peg me as Asian rather than white. I may have been so comfortable in my majority Chinese-American high school that I was (and still sometimes am) uncomfortable in a veritable sea of white people, but I also recognize that in most of the country, it’s a privilege that I’m the only one who knows that. At the same time, my experience in my particular, cosmopolitan corner of the world means that I don’t take the privilege of invisibility for granted on the occasions that I do have it, as I did at a distance from the crowd in the Kansas City airport. I can step out into the wider world and disappear, but I also know what it’s like to stick out, both in reality and in my own imagination.

In my professional life I have come across a startling number of people in my pretty obscure, pretty narrow academic field of study who were also products, if not of Lowell then of the San Francisco Unified School District. One of my other colleagues — senior, well-liked and respected, widely published, and a graduate of Washington High School, the school I would have attended had I not gone to Lowell — who suggested that it was something about that environment that had primed us to study religious, cultural and language contact in the medieval Mediterranean basin, something about those cosmopolitan grungy, badly-lit hallways and centralized clock systems that never worked right, those transcendent red terry gym shorts, the native hybridity sprung up in the classrooms that were too cold in the mornings and too warm all October, something from there that called us inexorably to the Med. The way she put it was this: There are lots of languages around you, some of which you understand and some of which you don’t, and that’s okay. It scales up: There are a bunch of cultural modes at play, all of which you can participate in and draw upon to lesser and greater extents without it being appropriation because the presence of different cultural paradigms is simply the mode in which everyone operates: You’re no longer responding to being in the minority or the majority, but living in a microcosm that, if never perfectly, draws upon all.

Convivencia is a term that has become a hot potato in my field. Literally it just means the state of living together and, at its core, describes readership and other cultural practices where there is significant overlap amongst Jews, Christians, and Muslims, specifically in Spain. But, largely through a deliberate collective scholarly misreading of a popular book that restricts itself to cross-cultural literary contacts, the term is viewed as an intellectual crutch, signifying a sort of happy-go-lucky kumbaya attitude in which members of the three Abrahamic faiths respected and enjoyed each other’s religious traditions and ushered in a Middle Ages in which people weren’t running around killing each other willy-nilly for God or territory. But that’s not what it is at all; I like to think of it more along the lines of people from different religious traditions reading the same kinds of things and asking the same kinds of questions, not so much in parallel but because they are living and practicing their religions within a single multivalent culture.

But to those of us who grew up like that, an honest reading of convivencia makes good, visceral sense. Even though they were East Asian rather than Mediterranean languages that surrounded us, the kind of community that one finds in San Francisco, especially in the public schools, is what made convivencia not a theoretical term, not something that needs explication or qualification, but simply what I believe it to be: a local, natively hybrid mode of cultural production. It simply is what it is; and I am lost in the textual places, be they the Twitterverse or a student research paper, where it is otherwise.