European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism (review)

Karla Mallette is a gifted storyteller. In her new book, European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean, Mallette tells the colorful tales of a century past when scholars doubled as adventurers, revolutionaries, and colonial governors in negotiating between the East and the West. Her aim is ostensibly to look forward by means of looking backward, and to chart a new course for Mediterranean studies that incorporates the continual engagement with Arab culture in our historical and critical considerations. Mallette ranges wide in laying out her vision of the Arab Mediterranean, moving from the Italian context of Dante and Islam and Sicilian Orientalism to the crafting of the Maltese language to Andalusia as a meeting place of Arabic and Spanish poetry. She bookends these chapters with an analysis and reconstructive history of the Arabian Nights, first with a consideration of Scheherezade as she is taken up by the West and finally with Shahrazad as she comes to be restored to her native context. Mallette's use of the Nights in this regard is quite fruitful, as she draws upon the work's dual status as a philological quagmire and a cultural commonplace as it moves from East to West and back again.

In this review, I will concentrate more on my own primary areas of study and specialization, much as Mallette herself has done, and therefore emphasize the Italian at the expense of the Spanish and Maltese. It should be noted, however, that the "philological" readings of Spanish poetry and the hybrid nature of the Maltese language in an Arabic context that Mallette undertakes are largely successful because of the direct cultural and historical circumstances that make such readings both plausible and beneficial. When it comes to the Italian material, looking past the precious tales of such figures as Michele Amari and Enrico Cerulli, there is more reflexive justification of Mallette's own prior work than there is "new philology".

It is, in part, the methodology that is suspect. In her introductory chapter, Mallette narrates the history of philology with an eye for the wrinkles of dissent and space for interpretation. In this, she takes up the mantle of "new philology" that has been put forth time and again, from Paul de Man to Edward Said, in a way that is highly suggestive yet ultimately lacking. While she links the philological endeavors of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to nationalism, Mallette's focus on "Orientalist philology" and her attempt to reinvent it for the modern day force her to stretch beyond the traditional limits of philology in exploring Arab-European interactions in the Mediterranean. In a sense, she is continually looking to redeem the work of the Orientalist scholars that she presents in such vivid, narrative terms.

The clearest example of this is perhaps in the second chapter: when Mallette dwells upon the "philologically irresponsible" (35) claim of Pietro Valerga that Petrarch was the reincarnation of the Muslim poet Ibn al-Farid, she at once presents the extreme against which her own hypotheses seem all the more reasonable and justifies Valerga's claim as being in the right spirit. Mallette says that she regrets the mechanics of Valerga's argument, for it denied him the just due of having his work taken seriously: "Were his literary style not so atrocious, had he hit upon a concept less silly than metempsychosis to express his notion of 'free and noble imitation,' his thesis might have become more widely known and discussed" (36). While she goes to some lengths to defend Valerga's intuitive reading of Petrarch under the influence of Ibn al-Farid, Mallette's point is made all the more forceful when she makes a claim of her own that Petrarch was influenced by Hermannus Alemannus's translation of Averroes' commentary on Aristotle's Poetics. She stakes her claim cautiously, and we are struck by the seeming plausibility and reasonableness...