Religious Dissimulation

Please join students, alumni, faculty, and friends of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at NYU for a humanistic response to the US presidential election and the vandalism and hate crimes that have occurred throughout New York City, including on our own campus, in its wake.

“Protest and Dissimulation: Muslims and Other Minorities in the Spanish-Speaking World” will explore the challenges faced by religious and ethnic minority communities in the Spanish-speaking world from the Middle Ages through the present day and examine the strategies that those communities used to resist, circumvent, survive, and even flourish under the pressure of those challenges. Through discussion and conversation, the evening will yield questions and modes of thinking that are grounded in the unique histories, literatures, and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world and that participants, attendees, and discussants can carry with them out into the wider contemporary world that is presenting its own evolving set of challenges to many modern communities.

This round-table and teach-in will take place on Thursday, December 1, from 6-8pm in the Great Room of 13-19 University Pl. A light supper will be served and attendees are encouraged to continue the discussion over the meal. The event will be live-streamed and archived online.

Speakers will include:

Farah Dih, NYU: "A Caste Society in the First Spanish Modernity"
Erica Field, NYU: “Dissimulation, Piety, and Fear”
Sibylle Fischer, NYU: "Stop Whining: On Politics of Racelessness and Executive Violence in Spanish America"
Nicholas Jones, Bucknell University: “Do Black Lives Matter in Spanish Early Modernity? Blackness, Cognitive Dissonance, Dissimulation”
Seth Kimmel, Columbia University: “The Ends of Multiculturalism”
S.J. Pearce, NYU: “Medieval Jews and Muslims in the Modern Nation”

A Luso-Malay cosmographer who claimed to have discovered Ophir, a Franciscan friar who headed a delegation of shabby fraudulent emissaries from the Orient, a Dominican tertiary's confirmed stigmata eventually revealed as fraud but later venerated again as saintly, a Jewish convert who was suspected of both demonic possession and of feigned sanctity, poor folk who survived by converting time and again in order to enjoy the benefits accorded to neophytes, religious chameleons who adapted themselves to the surroundings in which they found themselves, and a number of possessed girls – these are some of the figures re-enacting their charade in the pages of this volume. Twelve distinguished scholars analyze categories and individual cases of imposture in the age of geographical discoveries, of debates over the category of sanctity, and of forced conversions, thus offering a more nuanced understanding of the meaning of identity and pretense, truth and falsehood, in early modern Europe.