Dissidences Josiah Blackmore,
University of Toronto
Dissidences as the conceptual center of my
present remarks is also the term I would use to characterize the divide between
literary scholars and some historians that emerged in the first published
reviews of Queer Iberia. Its not necessary to repeat the
particulars of those reviews, since theyre available to all; rather,
Id like simply to take one key idea from them as a springboard to
consider the overall project of the volume, as evidenced both in the collective
work of the original contributors and in the provocative, forward-looking
research trajectories presented by our new contributors here this weekend. It
has to do with how we conceive of heterogeneity as a way to reconstruct,
redirect, and push forward the critical historiography of the Iberian
past.
That one point, voiced by a pair of reviewers, is that Queer
Iberia revives a debate that saw its heydey years ago: the
Castro/Sánchez-Albornoz polemic. While of course that polemic must be
accounted for in any contemporary reading of the Iberian (especially Spanish)
past, to see the collective project of the anthology as merely a resuscitation
of this debate in its original terms is to overlook the problematic
introduction of the new terms of sexuality, gender, and fluid notions of
difference into the mix of historical, literary, and cultural accounts of
medieval and early modern Iberia. This perhaps seems almost too self-evident to
mention, but the politics of disciplinary studies evident in some reviews and
discussions at conferences since the volumes publication require us to
pose again this question: what kind of history are we attempting to trace, to
expose? How might we encourage a program of productive dissidences among
scholars and students as we rethink the boundaries and possibilities of our
collective field of academic inquiry?
Especially in the case of Iberian
Studies, one of the histories documented in Queer Iberia is
the still-emerging interactive arena of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries in which we are witnessing a dialogue among a plurality
of formal academic disciplines. This interdisciplinary, or cross-disciplinary,
methodology is particularly apt and welcome for the study of Iberian letters,
culture, and history, whether were speaking about the passions of St.
Pelagius or the most recent novel by Catalán writer Lluís
Fernàndez. While the Iberians of earlier epochs may have had contact
with the intellectual, artistic, or political currents of northern Europe, and
while there may have been much travel between countries and exchange of ideas
with an implementation of northern European models of learning and exchange in
southern Europe, we still maintain that Iberia is singular because of its
heterogeneous sociological and cultural landscape, however we might choose to
define the tenor of interaction between Christians, Muslims, and Jews, or the
extent to which a monolithic Latinity operated as a historical and cultural
determinant. And this leads me to engage histories on the level
that primarily motivated Queer Iberias very existence: how do the
complementary and conflictive interactions of culture, gender, sexuality, race
and difference in Iberia require us to think metacritically -or
meta-historiographically, if you prefer- about codifying, interpreting, or
exploring the Iberian past and present, or indeed, any past or present?
In this regard, the analysis of Iberia might serve as an exemplum of how to
reinvigorate critical positionalities in their most dissident, and therefore
productive, possibilities. If we do nothing more than gesture toward a modified
critical path, toward a new continuum of influence between categories of
historical experience and exegetical practice, then weve done our job. On
such a continuum, for example, even a broad, multifaceted term such as
culture might enjoy new life. Iberian queerness -wherever we might
identify or locate instantiations of this concept, with whatever discursive or
textual examples- is part of Iberian culture and its criticism in the
ecumenical and vital sense of process, of mobilizing and shaping
identities, both personal and collective.
The work of Queer
Iberia (including the thoughts presented by contributors, respondents, and
symposium participants this weekend) demonstrates that culture must
be released from its moorings as a category of fixity or stasis, that it
necessarily pre-exists a moment of textual, artistic, or even theological
expression. We would be better served to remember the components of Queer
Iberias subtitle -Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the
Middle Ages to the Renaissance- and our collective return to it here, not
as discrete and often intersecting entities but as a simultaneous, often
dissonant, perhaps even self-contradictory, dynamic of the structuration of
meaning. A poet might not work solely within a given cultural context so
much as the poet might perform culture, even create it. Indeed, in my own
contribution to Queer Iberia, one of the points I made was that the
culture of sexuality of the medieval Galician-Portuguese poets does
not exist a priori outside the poems as context, but that
the poets engage in a dialogic of creating a culture in their texts through the
agency and sociology of trobar (The Poets of Sodom).
Another dissidence that is often erased by metonymic association with the
books title is the one between the cultural histories of Spain and
Portugal under the aegis of Iberia. While Portugal shares the
overall profile of the heterogeneous, sociological mix characteristic of early
Iberia, there are some differences. The Portuguese scene is where we can locate
a more conservative, Latin culture in medieval and early modern times, replete
though it might be with Jewish and Arabic intellectuals. (We shouldnt
forget that the Galician-Portuguese lyric, the lingua franca of Iberian poetic
creation for nearly two centuries, had as much to do with Portugal as it did
with Galicia or Castile.) Expressions of queerness are generally more
understated in early Portuguese culture, and we must dig deeper to excavate
them, but theyre there, as the recent work of my Toronto colleague David
Higgs has shown in the case of Inquisitorial records detailing the trials and
confessions of sodomites and heretics or the fascinating, self-imposed
identities of marginalized groups in seventeenth-century Lisbon and Coimbra.
The Portuguese Inquisitors appear to be very much concerned with naming,
defining, and delimiting queerness: for the Portuguese Inquisition, the
non-normative (i.e., that which contravenes a nossa santa
fé e bons costumes) can manifest itself in any number of social
moments. As scholars working on the other end of the spectrum of
Inquisitorial logic (in Leora Levs apt expression), the
attention to labels, definitions of terms, delineations of working hypotheses
-such as academes evolving notions of queerness- acquire a liberating
force, even if, or especially because, we find it hard to agree.
Id like to conclude by offering a few thoughts on what I take to be the
lesson of Queer Iberia. We need to take the aims of the anthology and
follow the trajectories further outward, across disciplines and across
chronologies. All of the papers presented this weekend testify to the viability
of this, and to the engaging and productive scholarly results. There is an
opportunity to continue work in Iberian Studies by broadening our reach of
reference to include primary sources (so many of them still ignored, even among
Iberianists) and critical practices, to offer problem sets of dissidences in
the task of investing Luso-Hispanomedievalism with a healthy flexibility. The
book and the example of this conference point to possibilities of renewed
exchange between historians and literary scholars, between philologists (in all
valences of that term) and theorists, or between any type of critic who takes
concrete instances of discourse or textual production as a platform for
scholarly elaboration. One of the advantages of post-postmodern scholarly
inquiry is that it allows for a more integrated and informed encounter between
academics working within different national or geographic boundaries. It allows
Iberianists opportunities to make contributions to theoretical debates
traditionally promoted by those working in other academic areas or fields. It
allows us to tackle head-on scholarly practices that would otherwise blur vital
questions of difference and dissidence.