Long viewed as Spain's most Moorish city, Granada is now home to a growing Muslim population of Moroccan migrants and European converts to Islam. Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar examines how various residents of Granada mobilize historical narratives about the city's Muslim past in order to navigate tensions surrounding contemporary ethnic and religious pluralism. Focusing particular attention on the gendered, racial, and political dimensions of this new multiculturalism, Rogozen-Soltar explores how Muslim-themed tourism and Islamic cultural institutions coexist with anti-Muslim sentiments.
Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada Reno. Her research focuses on the intersections of religion, migration, historical memory, and gender in the Mediterranean.
Title: Spain Unmoored: Migration, Conversion, and the Politics of Islam (New Anthropologies of Europe)
Author: Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar
ISBN: 9780253024893
Binding:
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication Date: 2017-02-27
Number of Pages: 282
Weight: 0.4401 kg
An impressively accomplished ethnography of the ambivalent inclusion and exclusion of Islam and Muslims in Granada, Andalusia, Spain. Detailing a set of social encounters between migrant Muslims, Spanish Muslim converts, and non-Muslim Granadians, Rogozen-Soltar successfully charts the 'unequal multiculturalism' resulting from the peripheral city's harnessing of a historical narrative of convivencia to its claims for a privileged position within Spanish and European cosmopolitan modernity.
-- Paul Silverstein
[Rogozen-Soltar's] methodological and theoretical approaches provide some lovely insights and very teachable moments about the complexities of European history, categorical difference, social alliances and betrayals, and identity itself.
* City & Society *
This timely, well-researched and engaging book examines the ways Muslim residents of Granada see themselves, and are seen by others, in relation to Granada's Arab past. . . . [B]y illuminating many aspects of the relationships between and within Muslims and non-Muslims in Granada today, Spain Unmoored will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in Spain, Islam and multiculturalism in Europe today.
* Anthropos *
Of all the book's persuasive arguments, what stands out is Rogozen-Soltar's careful engagement of the heterogeneity of Granada's Muslim community and her attention to the ways disparity figures into Muslims' relations with one another as much as their encounters with others. An insightful study of multiculturalism and religion in Europe, relevant to scholars, students, and general readers.
* Choice Reviews *
While Rogozen-Soltar's book is well grounded in anthropological theory, it is not dragged down by jargon or theoretical disquisitions unrelated to the subject matter at hand. On the contrary, Rogozen-Soltar centers her narrative on the analysis of field experiences and uses theory to enrich and contextualize her analysis.
* Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies *
