De Grenade à Jérusalem

The present article examines the drama Birds of a Kind by the Lebanese-Canadian author Wajdi Mouawad. It analyses the allegorical character of Wazzan which is based on the historical figure Leo Africanus, a Moroccan diplomat and polymath of Granadan origin who in the early 16th century was kidnapped by Christian pirates and offered to Pope Leon X. Following his conversion from Islam to Catholicism he became the first author to present Africa to the Europeans through his works, published under the patronage of two popes from the Medici family. Leo Africanus was introduced to Mouawad by the American scholar Natalie Zemon Davis. In her study Trickster Travels (2006) she discusses the ambiguity and the evasiveness of this enigmatic historical figure whose character she highlights through the story of the amphibious bird. It is a parable placed as the author’s paratextual notice at the beginning of The Book of Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526 [1550]), Leo Africanus’s most important scholarly work, and in spite of many possible sources, it is definitely his own invention. This article aims to demonstrate how Mouawad distanced his dramatic character from the original figure – the historiographic image of a trickster – by changing the point of the aforementioned parable. The story of the amphibious bird in Birds of a Kind, told by Wazzan to a Jew who right before his death is revealed to have an Arabic origin, is transformed form the parable of a trickster into a legend of someone who manages to overcome prejudice in order to find his identity. For Mouawad, Wazzan personifies the reconciliation between Judaism and Islam, transmitting at the same time an idea of the world dreamed of by the humanism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Diversifying academic communication in anti-racist scholarship: The value of a translingual orientation

This article develops a complex orientation to linguistic domination and resistance to demonstrate how academic communication can be diversified to facilitate anti-racist scholarship. While it draws from social sciences which provide complex theories of social structuration, it demonstrates how linguists can offer fine-grained analytical tools to track these processes across diverse scales of space, time, and institutions. The objective of this article is to introduce an orientation to language which goes beyond traditional reductive and overdetermined perspectives to accommodate its generative and resistant potential. It introduces translingual practice as accommodating the theoretical developments discussed, and demonstrates how methods of indexical analyses can help scholars study texts and communication across various spatiotemporal scales in achieving structuration. This approach is applied to the writing practice of African American scholar, Geneva Smitherman, to demonstrate how her anti-racist scholarship renegotiates established structures of academic communication and generates change. While this article will help applied linguists to develop an appreciation of writers and writing in constructing diversified academic communication, it can provide linguistic tools to social scientists for tracing the workings of structuration and change at diverse spatiotemporal and social scales of consideration.

In Dystopian Retrospect of a Crisis Mood: My Life as a Spy by Katherine Verdery

My essay bears a deliberately oxymoronic title as it offers, on the one hand, a reminiscence of 1984, as a most depressing year in the actual history of Romania and likewise in my own earliest career memories. On the other hand, it proposes a contemplation of George Orwell’s British postmodern dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Last but not least, it presents certain 1984 aspects as rendered by the following exceptional book, a great challenge for any scholar of my homeland and my generation: My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (2018). Distinguished Professor Katherine Verdery, its author, a contemporary American scholar, belongs now also to our Romanian academic elite. Yet this book testifies to her darkest experience in our country, just before the Iron Curtain fell down. Although the parallel between these two books may seem risky at first sight, they share much more than meets the eye; and my claim endeavors to go beyond this visible pretext of the new COVID-19 pandemic, another crisis which has intruded upon all our lives – just like a spy.

“In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme”: Don Quijote en spanglish y los desafíos de la traducción bilingüe

Spanglish, the mixing of Spanish and English in oral and written communi-cation, has an increasing importance as a literary code. Challenged by derogatory comments on the poor aesthetic possibilities of Spanglish, Mexican American scholar Ilan Stavans translated the first chapter of Cervantes’ Don Quijote into a mixed language made of English, Spanish and hybrid words. The result provoked the hilarity of many readers, but also the indignation of Castilian purists who opposed the invasion of their mother tongue by a foreign language and the desecration of the most out- standing monument of the Hispanic Culture, while American Chicanos criticized the quality of the translation, arguing that Stavans ’ Spanglish fails to reflect accurately the reality of bilingual speech in daily life. In my paper I propose some reflections about this controversy and I try to analyse Stavans’ intentions and strategies in this translation of a canonical classical text into a non-normative and highly stigmatized variety of spoken language. As it is directed to a bilingual audience, this translation loses its principal raison d’être, that is to make the text understandable for foreign readers, but it fulfils other functions.

Deconstructing grand narratives in Applied Linguistics:

My objective in this paper is to present some contributions from queer praxiologies to the field of language education. More specifically, I propose an inquiring analysis of the constructs education, language, beliefs, and interaction, which still reproduce a variety of concepts rooted in modern/colonial grand narratives that have operated as grand narratives themselves within Applied Linguistics. Based on a range of critical studies carried out in Brazil, the queering of these four constructs enables the comprehension of language education as queer literacies practice, that is, as an activity mediated by a set of textual repertoires which may foster the construction of new meanings of gender, sexuality, and other identity categories in the classroom. As a Brazilian/Latin American scholar, I hope my reflections work as a subversive micro-narrative from the tropics, inspiring other dialogues and teaching performances that might turn language education into a transformative activity in different contexts around the globe.

Transitioning from Early to Mid-Career as an Asian American Scholar of Religion

This article explores the post-tenure challenges and opportunities for Asian American scholars of religion. Although the pressure of service can be a burden on mid-level faculty, service can offer a fulfilling way to integrate one’s scholarly work and one’s commitment to Asian American communities. Moreover, even as excellence in teaching often is not given much (if any) weight in promotion to full professor, it can be mutually illuminative to experiment with teaching at the same time as one is also reassessing one’s field and place within it. Indeed, the mid-career offers a unique standpoint from which one can bring teaching and research together in a synergistic way. Revised approaches to courses in comparative theology and Hinduism both enhanced the author’s scholarship as well as allowed her to better serve her students. Integrating teaching, scholarship, and advocacy can be deeply productive for Asian American scholars of religion after tenure.

The Paradox of Authenticity

The book on the Slovakian authentic folklore movement by the American scholar Joseph Grim Feinberg working in the Czech Republic is a special treat for those interested in dance anthropology. It is always inspiring to look at social and cultural phenomena about the East-Central European region through the eyes of a researcher who is an outlander; this applies to the realm of music and dance, too. The title suggests two fundamental issues that may be interesting and important for Hungarian readers acquainted with the world of folk dancing. One of them is the authenticity of folk-dance related practices; the other is folk dance politics, a topic addressed extensively in the international world of dance anthropology.