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Ideologizing the Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2013

D. Fairchild Ruggles
D. Fairchild Ruggles*
Affiliation:
Department of Landscape Architecture, Program in Art History, and School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, Ill.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Because the ideological landscape of the present does not match the ideological configurations of the past, the past and present of national monuments often collide in ways that complicate their utility as “patrimony” and “heritage.” In Spain, Islamic monuments such as the Alhambra Palace (built in Granada by Nasrid monarchs in the 13th and 14th centuries) exist in the present as popular tourism sites and points of entry for an imaginative encounter with the Iberian peninsula's Andalusi past. The past evoked is a recognized part of Iberian history and yet, as patrimony, it is simultaneously admired as something that distinguishes Spain from the rest of Europe and resisted as something belonging to an exiled people who left long ago for places like Fez and Istanbul. Under Franco's dictatorship (1947–73), Spain was adamantly Catholic and, despite a small wave of conversions to Islam and the recent immigration of Muslims from northern Africa, it remains predominantly Christian.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 574 - 577
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 For a discussion of how demographic changes affect patrimony, see Ruggles, D. F., “The Stratigraphy of Forgetting: The Great Mosque of Cordoba and Its Contested Legacy,” in Contested Cultural Heritage, ed. Silverman, Helaine (New York: Springer, 2011), 51–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Curiously, although the scene shows the courtyard in a disheveled temporary state indicating that the side chambers were under construction, the precise arrangement was copied in an almost identical stereoscope that was the work of José Spreafico. Rivero, Juan Fernández Antonio, “Los Fotógrafos Lamy y Andrieu,” in Una Imagen de España: Fotógrafos esteroscopistas franceses (1856–1867), ed. Piñar Samos, Javier and Gómez, Carlos Sānchez (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, 2011), 81–92Google Scholar.

3 Domingo, José Manuel Rodríguez, “The Alhambra Restored: From Romantic Ruin to Orientalist Fantasy,” in Luz Sobre Papel: La imagen de Granada y la Alhambra en las fotografías de J. Laurent (no editor listed) (Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife, 2007), 312–18Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., 315.