Research and Innovation

Melding the rural and the urban with the local, regional, and global, Levantine cuisine is a mélange of ingredients, recipes, and modes of consumption rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean. Making Levantine Cuisine provides much-needed scholarly attention to the region’s culinary cultures while teasing apart the tangled histories and knotted migrations of food. Akin to the region itself, the culinary repertoires that comprise Levantine cuisine endure and transform—are unified but not uniform. This book delves into the production and circulation of sugar, olive oil, and pistachios; examines the social origins of kibbe, Adana kebab, shakshuka, falafel, and shawarma; and offers a sprinkling of family recipes along the way. The histories of these ingredients and dishes, now so emblematic of the Levant, reveal the processes that codified them as national foods, the faulty binaries of Arab or Jewish and traditional or modern, and the global nature of foodways. Making Levantine Cuisine draws from personal archives and public memory to illustrate the diverse past and persistent cultural unity of a politically divided region.

Es un doble placer: el leer la historia de cómo se enseña y cómo se aprende a ocupar el mundo, y el saber de pronto que esta historia es la traducción –quizás fiel, quizás no, y qué triple placer que no lo fuera– de una narración que se contó desde hace mucho, desde hace poco, en una lengua que es un reto a toda identidad y que es la identidad de la espera y la esperanza.

Walter Benjamin dijo de unas traducciones del griego al alemán hechas por Hölderlin que la armonía entre los dos lenguajes era tan profunda que las palabras tocaban sus significados así como el viento toca un arpa eólica. Saúl Sosnowski ha logrado en este texto la misma proeza: así como el viento toca las cuerdas, aquí el idish toca el español creando una armonía donde se reconoce al espíritu nómada, en la que se enfrenta sin miedo a la barbarie antisemita, donde se recogen los hilos más secretos de la humanidad, en la que se escucha la capacidad de nombrar y de ocupar el nombre, y también cómo se siembra, cómo se cultiva, cómo se derrota al tiempo. Y cómo se ama el amor.

El país que ahora llamaban suyo es la traducción perfecta: narración que sustituye a la original dejando intacta su autoridad fundacional; así como el nuevo país es propio sin borrar el menor detalle de la geografía de aquél que viene de ese otro lado. Doble placer ofrece este relato: reconocer lo invisible, olvidar lo inolvidable. Placer único: aquí, en este libro, con cada palabra el otro aparece en mí.

Jorge Aguilar Mora

“‘Ici ou ailleurs c’est pareil’ dans un ‘monde-en-mouvement’: La littérature-monde de Wajdi Mouawad: Transculturelle, transnationale et sans frontières”, La Revue des Lettres Romanes, Dossier thématique « Interroger le pouvoir herméneutique des littératures francophones » Eds. Boutaghou- Bessière-Dehoux (Vol. 75, n° 1-2, 2021 :101-119)

This article analyzes Wajdi Mouawad’s plays through the concept of La littérature-monde. His many works encourage thinking about possible explorations in stories written in French outside the Metropolis. Written from several diasporic perspectives - Lebanon, Canada, France - Mouawad portrays the characters in his plays, Littoral, Incendies, Forêts and Ciels as those of a multicultural, cosmopolitan world, comprised of many pasts and elsewheres. His works inspire reflecting on the positionality of words such as “French” and “French-speaking”. In Mouawad’s works, these labels are displaced by a literary universe that is not rooted in a single colonial or postcolonial past, but rather conceived in terms of “relations” (to use the concept of Édouard Glissant) with other identities and reference points of our contemporary world. Mouawad forces us to compare and contrast regions and nations, borders and peripheries, heres and elsewheres, and how these are linked through the thousands of stories of displacement currently unfolding on our planet.

Hervé-Thomas Campangne, University of Maryland

France’s recent recall of its ambassador to the United States was an exceptional move in the long history of France-U.S. relations, which began with the 1778 treaties that created a military and commercial alliance between the two countries.

In France, President Joe Biden’s Sept. 15, 2021 announcement of a new trilateral security partnership between the U.S., Australia and Great Britain was met with disbelief and outrage.

The alliance, which enables Australia to acquire U.S. nuclear-powered submarine technology, voids a US$66 billion submarine deal Australia signed with France in 2016.

Beyond the financial implications his country will face after Australia’s change of mind, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian accused the U.S. and its partners of “lying, duplicity, a major breach of trust and contempt.”

A Sept. 22 telephone conversation between Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron helped sketch a path toward reconciliation. The two leaders agreed on in-depth consultations on matters of strategic interest, to be followed by a meeting in Europe at the end of October. Yet Le Drian acknowledged that resolving the crisis “would take time and require actions.”

But despite French outrage over the deal, there is little chance of irreparable damage between the two countries. If anything, the current diplomatic crisis highlights a cycle of conflict and rapprochement that, as my research shows, has been characteristic of U.S.-France relations since the very beginning.

High expectations between the U.S. and a country that is often described as its “oldest ally” have often led to diplomatic misunderstandings and quarrels in the past.

‘Perfidy,’ privateers and protests

Less than 20 years after French and American soldiers fought side by side against the British on the battlefields of Brandywine and Yorktown, the two nations were at odds over the Jay Treaty of 1794, which restored economic relations between the U.S. and Great Britain.

France considered the treaty a betrayal by America. In a note that echoes minister Le Drian’s recent grievances, the governing five-member French Directorate complained that “The government of the United States has added the full measure of perfidy towards the French Republic, its most faithful ally.”

France consequently allowed its privateers to seize U.S. merchant ships, inflicting considerable injury to American commerce.

In the U.S., protests erupted in Philadelphia demanding war with France. And Congress soon passed legislation to fund a naval force, as well as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which increased the residency requirement for American citizenship from five to 14 years, allowed the deportation of foreigners who were considered dangerous and restricted speech critical of the government.

The undeclared naval war that followed, later known as the “Quasi-War,” continued until the 1800 Treaty of Mortefontaine, which reestablished more friendly relations between the two countries. During the hostilities, France seized over 2,000 American ships along the Atlantic coast and in the West Indies.

US ill will

The two nations again barely avoided war during the 1852-1870 reign of Napoleon III.

In 1862, the French emperor attempted to establish a puppet regime in Mexico and installed Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor of Mexico.

For Napoleon III, this Catholic and Latin monarchy would counter the influence of the Protestant and republican U.S. in the New World.

The U.S. considered the move a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, the foreign policy established in 1823 by President James Monroe which stated that any European interference in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed as a hostile act against the U.S.

By 1865, with the Civil War over, talk of a Franco-American war became widespread after President Andrew Johnson sent General John M. Schofield to Paris to warn the French that time was running out before the U.S. would resort to military intervention to expel Napoleon III’s forces from Mexico.

Although Napoleon III finally agreed to withdraw his troops, this Mexican intervention earned France much ill will in the U.S.

Its effects would be felt during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, when despite the U.S. government’s neutral position, American public opinion clearly favored the Germans over the French.

20th-century tension

Diplomatic crises between the U.S. and France recurred throughout the 20th century.

According to U.S. diplomat George Vest, President Charles de Gaulle’s decision to withdraw France from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966 prompted former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and other foreign policy advisors to “figure every single way to throw the book back at France, put our relations to the minimum, retaliate in every punitive way we could.”

In the end, however, President Lyndon B. Johnson responded by telling de Gaulle that the U.S. was determined to join with other NATO members in preserving the deterrent system of the alliance.

In 1986, relations again soured after President François Mitterrand refused to let American bomber planes fly through French airspace on their way to strike military targets in Libya. Anti-French demonstrations followed in several U.S. cities. Crowds poured Bordeaux wine down the gutter and burned French products in bonfires.

Another crisis followed France’s refusal to support the U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003. American officials’ anger and desire to “punish France” was accompanied by a media campaign against the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”

The diplomatic confrontation left very serious strains, which were not fully resolved until 2005, when bilateral relations resumed a more normal course.

In all these instances, as in today’s crisis, reactions on both sides went beyond the realm of politics: The language of passion replaced the more neutral discourse of diplomacy.

This passionate turn is the result of the mythology that surrounds France’s vision of itself as the “oldest ally” of the U.S. and of America’s idealistic vision of itself as France’s sole savior during World War I and World War II.

This mythology that whatever happens, France and the U.S. should always be on the same side – politically, economically and diplomatically – hinders more realistic relations between the two countries.

Going beyond the “oldest ally” rhetoric could allow both countries to take a more productive look at the true nature of their relations: those of two democratic nations whose interests sometimes coincide, sometimes diverge in the complex world of 21st-century international relations.

Hervé-Thomas Campangne, Professor of French Studies, University of Maryland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Central American migrants in the United States have been historically identified as criminals, gang members, disease carriers, public charges, and “illegals," but rarely have they been designated formally as refugees, even when fleeing from civil wars, systemic violence, and climate change. Thus, in 2018, when then-President Trump indecorously and infamously claimed that Central Americans and other undesirables migrants came to the United States from “s-hole countries," he certified their status as an eminent “Latino threat" in the public eye, as Leo Chávez writes in his 2008 book. Under this representational regime, Central Americans during the Trump administration, if not before and after, became the moving target, object, and rationale for draconian immigration policies in the United States. In this talk, Professor Ana Patricia Rodríguez examines the discursive and legal construction of Central American asylum seekers and refugees in the U.S. immigrant cultural imaginary and the counter-narratives produced in contemporary Latinx prose, poetry, and cultural representations. She pays particular attention to works by U.S. Central American writers such as Javier Zamora, Claudia Rojas, and others, who “create dangerously," in the words of Edwidge Danticat (2010), as they represent the harrowing migration stories of Central American refugees and asylum seekers in the twenty-first century.

Ana is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the U.S. Latina/o Studies program at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she teaches classes on Latin American, Central American, and U.S. Latina/o literatures and cultures. She has published widely on Central American transnational cultural production. She is the author of Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures (University of Texas Press, 2009) and co-editor (with Linda J. Craft and Astvaldur Astvaldsson) of De la hamaca al trono y al más allá: Lecturas críticas de la obra de Manlio Argueta (San Salvador: Universidad Tecnológica, 2013). She is completing book manuscripts on trauma and (post)memory in the Central American diasporas, and Central American cultural production in the DMV (D.C., Maryland, and Virginia). She dedicates a great part of her time to working on community-based projects with the local immigrant communities in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Frisch’s HIAS project examines the relationship between news and historiography about the French Wars of Religion in the 16th - and 17th -centuries. The age of the Reformation and the American Encounter marks a critical moment in which ‘history’ and ‘memory’ were beginning to be seen as fundamentally divergent types of discourse, not just in France, but across Western Europe. "The Rise of Unmemorable History" traces the conditions under which ‘news’ was assimilated to or excluded from ‘history’, with particular attention to early modern conceptions of the ‘memorable’ and the ‘true’. More information is available at the HIAS Hamburg site

Congratulations to Dr. Laura Demaría on the publication of her most recent book of microfictions out of Borde Perdido Editora in Córdoba, Argentina. 

Here is a sample:

"Escribo como quien se hurga en una lastimadura hasta sacarse la cascarita. No porque quiera hacerme daño. Más bien, por curiosidad. O para explorar el avance de esos hilitos de sangre que salen, inexorablemente, fuera de mi cuerpo."

Based on their extensive academic, research and professional careers in several European and North American countries, Manel Lacorte and Agustín Reyes-Torres rely on consolidated theoretical and practical paradigms on language acquisition and teaching to propose a pedagogy of Spanish 2/L that successfully includes different types of pedagogical, linguistic, cultural and social knowledge. This book has as its basic reference the 2/L teacher's individual and collective reflection on (1) the use of appropriate resources, processes, and strategies for 2/L learning in different sociocultural contexts; (2) contemporary notions of multiliteracies and multimodality embedded in the teaching of languages, literatures, and cultures; and (3) the perspectives and interests of the participants in 2/L instruction, that is, learners and pre-service and in-service teachers. The book gives special attention to the individual circumstances, needs, and interests of 2/L Spanish educators in these times defined by marked job mobility and constant technological innovations in all social and professional spheres.

More specifically, this article examines the thematic and aesthetics implications of ennui in Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu Dors Nicole (2014) and Rafael Ouellet’s Gurov & Anna (2014) to better understand this new trend in the post-referendum Quebec context of the new millennium, which is simultaneously marked by weariness in the face of the question of national sovereignty, and an acceleration of cultural and economic globalization. To do so, I will first look at how ennui shapes films from the Quebec New Wave; I will then see how the films Tu Dors Nicole and Gurov & Anna both approach the question of ennui differently by questioning concepts of realism, reality, fantasy, and fiction; and finally I will explore the centrality of ennui in the Quebec New Wave in connection with the current socio-political conjuncture of Quebec. Full reference: “Cinéma indé et esthétique de l’ennui dans le renouveau du cinéma québécois,” Contemporary French Civilization, vol. 44, nos. 2-3, 2019, pp. 201-219.

Modern treatments of Sufi love theory have had a pronounced tendency to disembody and "straighten" Sufi eroticism in various ways. Focusing primarily on a series of anecdotes from the hagiography of the thirteenth-century Persian poet and profligate Sufi lover, Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī, the author argues that the centrality of bodies and embodied textual performances of Sufi love theory in Sufi hagiographic works not only militates against efforts to reduce this form of desire to a disembodied or philosophical love of "beautiful forms," but it also helps us to re-embody a particular type of beloved: a same-sex beloved who often gets obscured and metaphorized out of corporeal existence in much modern scholarship. Medieval Sufi eroticism, the author concludes, should not be viewed as a rejection of the body and sexuality, but rather an effort to harness the considerable affective potency inherent in these phenomena for spiritual ends.