Modern Foreign Languages

This paper examines the viability of memetics for approaching Aljamiado-Morisco writing, as well as its potential for conceptualizing the transmission of ideas and culture across the Hispano-Muslim communities that produced and consumed Aljamiado texts. Memetics, whose proponents describe it as a means to explain and understand the transmission of cultural information using evolutionary models (thus the meme is analogous to the gene), provides an appealing theoretical framework for approaching the discourse of these communities, singularly concerned with survival and the preservation of cultural heritage and religious identity. The paper first examines the concept of the meme and its potential for discussing the substance and form of Aljamiado writing. This is followed by the identification and examination of possible memes that circulated broadly within Morisco discourse, and their representation in a selection of pseudo-prophetic texts and other writings prominent among Morisco communities.

espanolEn este articulo se examina la viabilidad de memetics para aproximarse a la escritura y los escritos Aljamiado - Moriscos, y a su vez el uso posible de memetics para conceptualizar la transmision de ideas y cultura a traves de las comunidades hispano-musulmanes que producian y consumian los textos Aljamiados. Memetics, cuyos proponentes lo describen como un modo de explicar y comprender la transmision de informacion cultural mediante el modelo del proceso evolutivo (segun el cual el meme es analogo al gen), proporciona un marco teorico interesante para acercarse al discurso de estas comunidades, singularmente preocupadas con su sobrevivencia y la preservacion de una herencia cultural y una identidad religiosa. El articulo examina primero el concepto del meme y su potencial para tratar el contenido y la forma del fenomeno Aljamiado. Luego se identifican algunos de los posibles memes que circulaban dentro del discurso Morisco, y se examinan su representacion en una seleccion de...

A wagon with spoked wheels carries not only grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.-Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea As citizens of a world increasingly dominated by web-based social media, many of us are familiar with the Internet meme: an image or video that, for seemingly inexplicable reasons, rapidly captures the attention of web-users, who generate an unending series of quickly-spreading imitations and copies. Most of us have been exposed, one way or another, to such images and videos; they permeate our social media, and they are often picked up by more traditional forms of media. We regularly rely on our most conventional form of cultural transmission when we speak of them to our friends and family members or, for example, "invite" them to do the "Ice Bucket Challenge." 1 Sometimes such digital content is replicated exactly and "goes viral"; other times it is slightly, sometimes deliberately, modified, as a way to playfully participate in the memespreading game. In Memes and Digital Culture, Limor Shifman describes the Internet meme as digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience, "a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which were created with awareness of each other, and were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users" (41). What, however, could any Internet meme possibly have to do with a minority group living in 16 th-century Spain and their writing? No one speaks of this or that crypto-Muslim blogger from Aragón, after all. Although the Internet is a relatively new phenomenon, the activity and behavior that lie at the heart of what Shifman describes are not native to it-simply remove the words "digital" and "quickly," replace the terms "web" and "Internet" with any other medium, and we will likely observe the same (or very similar) phenomenon in communities across history. While my purpose here is not to address Internet phenomena, I do wish to examine a few things about memes and how the concept may serve when we wish to speak about the ways in which ideas, practices, culture, were transmitted-textually or otherwise-among Morisco communities of 16 th-and early-17 th century Spain. Today we use the term Morisco to refer to those Muslims who converted-willingly or by force-to Christianity after the fall of Granada in 1492. Conversion was not always complete or sincere, as shown by writings that circulated in secret among some Morisco communities prior to their expulsion from Spain in the early 17 th century. Written in Aljamiado-a heavily Arabized and "Islamified" Spanish expressed in Arabic characters-these writings are dominated by themes, topics and substance that enshrine a distinctly Hispano-Arab and Islamic heritage at a time in which those who identified with them were under extreme duress. 2

Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specific conditions is that the photocopy is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research." If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of that order would involve violation of copyright law.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-68924-7#toc

This book undertakes a psychotropic analysis of texts that deal with the violence of drug trafficking and interdiction, especially in Mexico. While most critics of so-called narcoculture have either focused on an aesthetic “sobriety” in these works or discounted them altogether as exploitative and unworthy of serious attention, Drugs, Violence, and Latin America illuminates how such work may reflect and intervene in global networks of intoxication. Theorizing a “dialectics of intoxication” that illustrates how psychotropy may either solidify or destabilize the self and its relationship to the other, it proposes that these tendencies influence human behavior in distinct ways and are leveraged for social control within both licit and illicit economies. A consideration of a countercultural genealogy in Latin America provides a contrastive psychotropic context for contemporary novels that exposes links between narcoviolence and consumerism, challenging our addictions of thought and feeling about ourselves and our relationships to drugs and narco-violence.