By Jazmyn Bradford

UNM Today
February 24, 2010

http://www.unm.edu/~market/cgi-bin/archives/004821.html

The Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Chicano Hispano Mexicano Studies, Southwest Hispanic Research Institute, Latin American and Iberian Institute, Foreign Languages and Literatures, American Studies, and the Department of Student Affairs will co-host the 16th annual UNM Conference on Ibero-American Culture and Society, “Moros, Moriscos, Marranos y Mestizos: Alterity, Hybridity Identity in Diaspora.”

The conference will be held on Feb. 25 through Feb. 27. On Thursday, the event will be held in the Student Union Building, Acoma, Isleta and Sandía rooms. On Friday, it will move to at the National Hispanic Resource Center. On Saturday, participants have the option of touring the Santa Fe Museum.

“Moros, Moriscos, Marranos y Mestizos” seeks to recognize and remember the 400th anniversary of the removal of 300,000 Spanish Christians (Moriscos) and the largest ethnic cleansing to take place in Western Europe until the twentieth century.

“We are considering historic and contemporary texts, traditions, and expressive culture from Moorish, Jewish, Christian and Native American encounters in Iberia and the Americas,” said Enrique Lamadrid, the director of Chicano Hispano Mexicano Studies.

The event will emphasize the historical questions of religious difference and violence, yet it will also explore the many ways that literature, folklore, festivals, music, visual art can provide a place for exchange and cross-cultural understanding.

“We are all working for better intercultural communication, especially between Moslems, Christians, and Jews,” Lamadrid said.

The key note speakers, Anouar Majid from the University of England and Michelle Hamilton from the University of Minnesota, will present the lecture “Pure Selves Impure Bodies” and “The Fall of Muslim Granada and the Expulsion of the Jews,” respectively.

There will also be performances by the Zevk Emsemble who will perform, “Music of the Morisco Diaspora: From Spain to North Africa and Turkey” and Las Inditas Nuevomexicanas who will perform “Música Mestiza de Nuevo México.

Participants must register to attend. Registration is $100 for professors and $50 for graduate students. Participants who also wish to attend the tour of the Santa Fe Museum as part of the conference will be charged $25 person at the museum.

Event – details: Moros y Mestizos Conference Set for Feb. 25-27

http://www.unm.edu/~spanconf/

On the 400th anniversary of the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, we consider historic and contemporary texts, traditions, and expressive culture from Moorish – Jewish – Christian – Native American encounters in Iberia and the Americas.

Keynote Speakers

This year we have the pleasure to present the following speakers:

* Anouar Majid – University of New England
“Pure Selves/Impure Bodies”
Feb 25th 4:15 – 5:15 Acoma Room SUB
* Michelle Hamilton – University of Minnesota
“The Fall of Muslim Granada and the Expulsion of the Jews”
Feb 26th 4:00 – 5:00 Salón Ortega

Highlight Speakers

* Victor M. Solís – Instituto Cultural de Aguascalientes
* Lucia Costigan – Ohio State University

Performers

Come enjoy the art of this year’s performers:

* Zevk Ensemble
Feb 25th – 6:00 pm Acoma Room
Student Union Building – UNM
* Las Inditas Nuevomexicanas
Feb 26th – 5:00 pm Salón Ortega
The National Hispanic Cultural Center

* Anouar Majid – University of New England
A native of Tangier, Morocco, Anouar Majid, is founding director of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England in Maine and author of several critically acclaimed books on Islam and the West in the last half millennium. His work has been profiled on PBS’s Bill Moyers Journal and on Al Jazeera’s Date in Exile program, as well as by several national and international media organizations. His new book, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Islam and Other Minorities, traces the ideological origins of the concept of minority to the long wars of Islam and Christianity in medieval Europe.

* Michelle Hamilton – University of Minnesota
With research focusing on the literature and culture of medieval Iberia, Hamilton’s publications include investigations of cultural contact in medieval Hebrew and Arab works from Iberia, as well as analysis of the intellectual indebtedness of canonical Spanish works to Judeo- and Arabo-Iberian works. Recent publications include “Hispanism and Sephardic Studies” Journal for Medieval Iberian Studies 1.2 (2009), “The Musical Book: Judeo-Andalusi Hermeneutics in the Libro de buen amor.” La Corónica 37.2 (2009), and Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature (Palgrave, 2007).

¿Por qué Moros y Cristianos?

The year 2009 marked the 400th anniversary of the expulsion of Moriscos from Spain. As important as the infamous year of 1492, if less well known, 1609 was the beginning of the removal of some 300,000 Spanish Christians (for the Moriscos were at least nominally Christians) and marked the largest ethnic cleansing to take place in Western Europe until the twentieth century. Indeed, because Muslims had been a presence on the Iberian Peninsula for eight centuries, their expulsion was even questioned by much of the Iberian population at that time.

Our conference aims to not only commemorate the above and the Muslim era that preceded it, but also endeavors to make connections between that historical moment and its many more contemporary variations: what can we say about identity, patrimony, religious difference, and nationhood from Al-Andalus to the present? How are such topics expressed in cultural production? How are ideas about the Reconquest, the Jewish and Morisco expulsions, and otherness re-interpreted in the colonial New World? How are they understood today both in the United States and in the rest of the Americas?

Beyond the appropriate timing of the conference, the topic is particularly pertinent here in New Mexico. Many in our community, our student body, and our faculty understand firsthand the arbitrariness and permeability of borders, and the violence that can accompany state-sanctioned otherness. The conference thus aims to address not only how religious identity is defined in Al-Andalus and during the Reconquest, but also how religious and ethnic difference continue to be relevant in contemporary Latin America, Spain, and the United States. What does it mean when Osama Bin Laden invokes Al-Andalus? And, by the same token, what does it mean when Spaniards call Moroccan immigrants “moros?” Scholars attending the conference will underscore the historical continuity of questions of religious difference and violence, exploring the many ways that culture–literature, folklore, festivals, music, visual art–can provide a rich site for exchange and cross-cultural understanding.