Death in Babylon
Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient
Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come.
"Death in Babylon" depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, "Death in Babylon" develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, "Death in Babylon" provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.
About the Author
Vincent Barletta is associate professor of Iberian studies in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University.
Reviews
"Vincent Barletta's new book is fascinating and detailed. It moves beyond established theories of imperial reason to argue that Europe's imperial adventure, deployed and theorized by means of Alexandrian myth and history, is in fact inseparable from a deep unease associated with the search for identity through the mediation of the Other. Perhaps this unease, which Emmanuel Levinas has presented as a transcendental condition of selfhood, shapes the nations of the Iberian Peninsula in particularly important ways and reveals their special fragility as human communities whose constitution cannot be separated from a relation with Islam. This book, elegant and profound, is a necessary contribution that works to uncover cultural strata that precede the imperial period described by Tzvetan Todorov while offering elements for a comparative study of empire that goes well beyond the current work of Anthony Pagden" – Jose Luis Berlanga Villacanas, Universidad Complutense, Spain
"Learned and probing, Barletta's elegant monograph is a model of interpretive scholarship on the literary history of early modern Iberia: a profound meditation on imperial dreams and their cultural tropes under the lengthy shadow of Alexander the Great. It deserves the widest readership among medievalists, Islamicists, and any serious student of Portugal and Spain at the dawn of modernity" – Luis M. Giron-Negron, Harvard University
"The historical and imaginative figure of Alexander the Great and his specter underlies Vincent Barletta's wide-ranging, erudite, and critically urgent study of early modern Iberian empire. Barletta brings a plurality of writings in Latin, Greek, Portuguese, Catalan, Castilian, and 'Aljamiado' (Romance texts copied in Arabic script) – many of them unknown until now – to a fresh perspective on Iberian narratives and practices of empire in which death, alterity, and the Orient definitionally coalesce. From the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula to the Muslim regions of Africa and Asia, from classical and medieval times to the early modern period, the geographic and chronological range of Barletta's philologically rigorous analyses of the Alexandrine archive is impressive. 'Death in Babylon' compels us to rethink the early history of imperialism and will appeal to scholars of literature, history, and philosophy alike" – Josiah Blackmore, University of Toronto
"A work of sound scholarship and striking erudition, broad in scope and of remarkable depth and originality, 'Death in Babylon' is a beautifully written book, clear yet complex, subtle yet convincing" – E. Michael Gerli, University of Virginia
"Combining intricate factual detail with theoretical musings, Barletta considers how 15th- and 16th-century historical and literary accounts written in Iberia's three principal Christian kingdoms – Castile, Aragon, and Portugal – offered rationales for Iberian empire-building in Muslim Africa and Asia... This is impressive scholarship supported by sound documentation" – Choice
