Core Program, 2011–12
Rivalry and Rhetoric in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Envisioning Empire in the Old World
—organized by Center/Clark Professor Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles
The program involves humanities scholars whose research interests relate to the representation of empire and imperial rivalry in the early modern Mediterranean. The field of Mediterranean studies has grown tremendously in recent years, with rich investigations both within the national disciplines and in a comparative framework, placing empires side by side. This series will focus on the imbrication and entanglement of the various actors in the early modern Mediterranean (the Ottoman and the Habsburg empires, Portugal, Morocco, France, England, Venice, and so forth). How is imperial competition managed in different genres? How do literary and cultural productions render the alterity and the attraction of the cultures encountered? Rivalry and Rhetoric will feature three symposia that take us from the broadest problems of representation to a case study—early modern England—for which the “Mediterranean turn” has radically changed the field.
Conference 1: Envisioning Empire in the Old World
October 28, 2011
“Envisioning Empire in the Old World” considers problems of visual, material, and textual representation of contact zones and encounters among the Mediterranean empires. Topics include: Spain in Italy, Spain on the Ottomans, versions of Lepanto, North African borderlands, travel writing, captive’s tales, merchants and ambassadors, citationality and textual traditions, lingua franca and the problems of communication, and contested spaces on the page and the stage.
Session 1: Ottoman Places and Spaces
Chair: Gabriel Piterberg, UCLA
Palmira Brummett, University of Tennessee
“Mapping Trans-Imperial Ottoman Space: Movement, Genre, Temporality, Ethnography of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”
Giancarlo Casale, University of Minnesota
“Rome is Where the Heart Is: Ottoman Humanism and the Politics of Cartography”
Session 2: Turkish Lessons
Chair: Daniela Bleichmar, USC
Andrew Devereux, UCLA Ahmanson-Getty Fellow
“The ruin and slaughter of … fellow Christians”: Representations of the French as a Threat to Christendom in Spanish Assertions of Sovereignty in Italy, 1479–1516”
Elizabeth Wright, University of Georgia
“Modern War, Ancient Form: Lessons from Lepanto for a Latin Seminar in Post-bellum Granada”
Session 3: Reflections
Chair: Sharon Gerstel, UCLA
Larry Silver, University of Pennsylvania
“Europe’s Turkish Nemesis”
Thomas Dandelet, University of California, Berkeley
“Imperial Anxiety, the Roman Mirror, and the Neapolitan Academy of the Duke of Medinaceli, 1696–1701”
Session 4: Telling Empire
Chair: Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA
Karla Mallette, University of Michigan
“Dialogo dei massimi sistemi: Imperial Languages at the Edge of Empire”
Miguel Martínez, Williams College
“A Soldier’s Tale: War, Epic, and Empire in the Habsburg Mediterranean (1550–60)”
Conference 2: Black Legends and Domestic Dissent
February 10, 2012
The conference explores the intersections between the discourses that discredit Spain or the Ottomans as imperial actors, and the contestation of orthodoxy in the domestic sphere. How is anti-Spanish sentiment used across Europe, and how does it enable local or national forms of resistance? How do conceptions of the Ottomans intersect with or influence conceptions of Spain? What is the role of race in the black legends? Conference sessions focus on different iterations of black legends across Europe and the Americas, as well as on their interpenetration.
Session 1: Mediterranean Empires, Universal Ambitions
Chair: Massimo Ciavolella, University of California, Los Angeles
Carina Johnson, Pitzer College
“The Houses of Habsburg and Osman: Rivals, Mirrors, Internecine Families”
Stefania Tutino, University of California, Santa Barbara
“A Spanish Canonist in Post-Reformation Rome: Francisco Peña between National Interests and Universal Authority”
Session 2: The View from England, I
Chair: Debora Shuger, University of California, Los Angeles
Alexander Samson, University College London
“Marian Origins of the Black Legend”
Roland Greene, Stanford University
“The Habsburg and Tudor Poetic Machines”
Session 3: The View from England, II
Chair: Anthony Pagden, University of California, Los Angeles
Eric Griffin, Millsaps College
“Copying ‘the Anti-Spaniard’: Post-Armada Hispanophobia and English Renaissance Drama”
William Goldman, Ahmanson Getty Fellow
“Seeing Spain through Darkened Eyes: The Black Legend and Cornwallis’ Mission to Spain, 1605–09”
Session 4: Black Legends across the Atlantic
Chair: Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles
Peter Arnade, California State University, San Marcos
“Spanish Furies in the Dutch Republican and Imperial Imagination”
Bethany Wiggin, University of Pennsylvania
“Catholic Cruelty and Indian Savagery Compared: Images of War and Terror from the Eighty Years War to the Seven Years War”
Robert Maniquis, University of California, Los Angeles
“The Poetics of Extermination: Caesar, the Black Legend, and the French Revolution”
Conference 3: Imagining the Mediterranean in Early Modern England
May 4, 2012
The conference explores how England engages the Mediterranean as conceptual space, and how this engagement intersects with those of other European nations. What role does the representation of Mediterranean empire serve in thinking through England’s own expansion? How is the threat of the Mediterranean negotiated in various genres? How has the canon of early modern English writing changed in response to the Mediterranean turn of recent years? Topics include the geography of revenge tragedy, Iberian tragedies, Shakespeare’s Mediterranean, Machiavellianism on stage, Spanish plots and plotting-Spaniards, translation and appropriation.
Session 1: Genealogies of Modernity
Chair: Rebecca Lemon, University of Southern California
Jacques Lezra, New York University
“Dramatic and Civil Logic in the Formation of the European State-Form or, A Very Short Treatise of Piratology
Ania Loomba, University of Pennsylvania
“The Mediterranean and Maritime Modernity”
Session 2: Engaging Others
Chair: Jonathan Burton, Whittier College
Brian Lockey, St. John’s University
“The Pope’s Scholars: Papal Supremacy and the 1579 Student Revolt at the English College in Rome”
Nabil Matar, University of Minnesota
“The World through Arab Eyes in the Early Modern Period”
Daniel Vitkus, Florida State University
“English Writing, Ottoman Empire: Sex, Commerce, and Religion in the Early Modern Period”
Session 3: Mediterranean Genres I
Chair: Debora Shuger, University of California, Los Angeles
Emily C. Bartels, Rutgers University
“The Mediterranean and/as the World”
Jane Degenhardt, University of Massachusetts
“Meta-theater and the Mediterranean”
Session 4: Mediterranean Genres II
Chair: Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles
Walter Cohen, Cornell University
“Genre and Geography: Shakespeare and Others”
Emily Weissbourd, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow
“The Spanish Empire in Webster’s Italianate Drama”