The book contends that the acceptance of translation and imitation in the literary life of a country does not imply denying the specific conditions created by political borders in the constitution of a national literature, that is, the existence of national borders framing literary life. What it does is recognize new and different frontiers that destabilize the national confines (as well as the nationalistic values) of literary history. In translation and imitation, borders are experienced not as the demarcation of otherness, but rather as crossroads in the quest for identity."--Jacket.

Consists of English translations of articles in the Spanish American press.

A “groundbreaking” portrait of the migration and resettlement of Spain’s Jewish community after 1492, and how the Sephardic identity emerged (American Historical Review). Honorable Mention, Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History presented by the Association for Jewish Studies On August 3, 1492, the same day that Columbus set sail from Spain, the long and glorious history of that nation’s Jewish community officially came to a close. The expulsion of Europe’s last major Jewish community ended more than a thousand years of unparalleled prosperity, cultural vitality, and intellectual productivity. Yet, the crisis of 1492 also gave rise to a dynamic and resilient diaspora society spanning East and West. After Expulsion traces the various paths of migration and resettlement of Sephardic Jews and Conversos over the course of the tumultuous sixteenth century. Pivotally, the volume argues that the exiles did not become “Sephardic Jews” overnight. Only in the second and third generation did these disparate groups coalesce and adopt a “Sephardic Jewish” identity. This is a new and fascinating portrait of Jewish society in transition from the medieval to the early modern period—a portrait that challenges many longstanding assumptions about the differences between Europe and the Middle East. “A rich and compelling history . . . With its intense focus on one century, Ray’s book makes a distant time and trauma painfully vivid and immediate to the reader.” ―Jewish Currents Magazine

Essays on how Jews, Muslims, and Christians have coexisted—or not—over the centuries, from “a particularly incisive and trustworthy historian of religion” (Commonweal). Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are usually treated as autonomous religions, but in fact across the long course of their histories the three religions have developed in interaction with one another. In Neighboring Faiths, David Nirenberg examines how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived with and thought about each other during the Middle Ages and what the medieval past can tell us about how they do so today. There have been countless scripture-based studies of the three “religions of the book,” but Nirenberg goes beyond those to pay close attention to how the three religious neighbors loved, tolerated, massacred, and expelled each other—all in the name of God—in periods and places both long ago and far away. Nirenberg argues that the three religions need to be studied in terms of how each affected the development of the others over time, their proximity of religious and philosophical thought as well as their overlapping geographies, and how the three “neighbors” define—and continue to define—themselves and their place in terms of one another. From dangerous attractions leading to interfaith marriage; to interreligious conflicts leading to segregation, violence, and sometimes extermination; to strategies for bridging the interfaith gap through language, vocabulary, and poetry, Nirenberg aims to understand the intertwined past of the three faiths as a way for their heirs to produce the future—together. “Will be of extraordinary importance not only for specialists in the field but also for general readers and anyone interested in the relations among the three religions.” —Teofilo F. Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles