Browsing by Subject "Christendom"

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The paradoxical exemplar : the image of Saladin in Don Juan Manuel's El conde lucanor
(2011-12) Atmaca, Delia Avila; Harney, Michael, 1948-; Sutherland-Meier, Madeline
Don Juan Manuel’s laudatory portrayal of Saladin, the Muslim Sultan of Babylon, in Exempla 25 and 50 of El Conde Lucanor presents an interesting paradox, particularly when considering that the fourteenth-century text was intended as moral instruction for a Christian audience. This report addresses this paradox by determining Saladin’s placement within Juan Manuel’s moral and spiritual philosophy through textual and comparative character analyses. The first section applies Victor Turner’s social drama theory in a textual analysis of Exempla 25 and 50 to establish Juan Manuel’s representation of Saladin as a triumphant figure, capable of meeting and overcoming challenges to his honor and virtue. The second section applies M. M. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to engage in a closer examination of Saladin’s “voice” in relation to other characters of Juan Manuel’s exempla for the purpose of revealing the ambiguities and finer intricacies of Saladin’s character. These analyses serve to raise and address paradoxical questions relating to Juan Manuel’s presentation of Saladin as both a Muslim adversary and friend of Christendom.
The Rebellion of the Victims and the Slow Invention of the Secular State
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Padilla Rosas, Eric J.
To better understand section four in the first chapter of Política de la liberaición: Historia mundial y crítica, entitled “The rebellion of the victims and the slow invention of the secular State”, we must note that, for Enrique Dussel, history is a constructive, progressive movement, which can be categorized into four stages: 1) The Egyptian-Mesopotamian (from the IV millennium BC), 2) the Indo-European (from the II millennium BC), 3) the Asian-Afro-Mediterranean (from the IV century AD) and 4) the world-system (from 1492 AD). In this section of the first chapter, Dussel introduces us to the third stage, which is made up of a) the regions of Persia and of the Turán-Tarim, and later the Muslim world (from the 7th century AD), as the center of commercial connections; b) India, as a productive center; c) China, as the extreme east; d) Bantu Africa, as the extreme southwest; e) the Byzantine-Russian world, as the Occidental extreme and f) Western Europe, as the western extreme. In this paper, I pay particular attention to how the third stage differs from the second; thus, the transformations that occur in stage III will denote, not only the limits of stage II, but will also demonstrate the constructive-progressive movement of history.