Awards

• Commended for MLA Prize 2013

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9780226016214

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Nadia R. Altschul has been responsible for some of the most searching studies of the links between the European premodern past and the colonial enterprise. In her new book, she turns her attention to the Americas and to the central role of Andres Bello in the formation of Latin American cultural identities. The result is a fundamental rethinking of an apparently authoritative humanism, revealing its Creole status. Beneath Altschul's lucid and precise prose is a passionate intelligence. It will be welcomed not only by students of Spanish-language literatures but also by those in postcolonial studies and transnational American studies. (John M. Ganim, author of Medievalism and Orientalism)

Like Michelle Warren's Creole Medievalism, Nadia R. Altschul's meticulous and comprehensive study belongs among those fascinating second-wave historiographies of academic medievalism that complicate the traditional monocausal connections drawn between medievalists' nationality and the ideologies informing their philological practices. Her brilliant study of the medievalist work of polymath Andres Bello (1781-1865) reveals an example of modern medieval scholarship anchored in a multiplicity of simultaneous subject positions: Creole vis-a-vis Spain; Venezuelan/Chilean vis-a-vis other 'national' American identities; Creole vis-a-vis Amerindians; and Creole vis-a-vis populations of African extraction. Within this web of mutually competing and/or reinforcing positionalities, Altschul questions simplistic binarities such as colonial/postcolonial, empire/colony, and indigenous/ criollo and enriches our understanding of the constructed quality of the contested intellectual terrain medieval

Author Information

Nadia R. Altschul teaches in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. She is coeditor of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ""the Middle Ages"" Outside Europe.

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