Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Re-routing of European Muslim Identity (PDF)

Lara N. Dotson-Renta is an assistant professor & assistant dean of Career Services at Quinnipiac University.

"In this lively, refreshingly original, and thought-provoking work, Lara Dotson-Renta draws upon recent novels, films, songs and other media to trace the flow of people and ideas between Morocco and Spain. With her focus on traslado a notion of 'translation' that can also signal, in Spanish, the movement of bodies across borders she explores the senses of familiarity, estrangement, and anxiety that characterize contemporary Spanish-Moroccan encounters. As a robust Moroccan Muslim immigrant population takes root in Spain, will the country now become a new Andalusia (reviving its connections to an earlier Islamic heritage), a gateway to modern Europe, or something else entirely? Dotson-Renta maps out these questions about cultural identity in the current age of mass migration, and does so in a way that will appeal to scholars of Spain, North Africa, and the wider Mediterranean world."

Heather J. Sharkey, associate professor of Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, University of Pennsylvania

"Dotson-Renta suggests a new way of looking at the contemporary phenomenon of Islamic immigration to Europe, setting it within a history of movement between the shores of the Mediterranean, particularly between Morocco and Spain. As the author rightly contends, this relationship has its origin in Moorish Andalusia, a reference that has resonance in contemporary fiction in several languages and even, very interestingly, in contemporary rap and hip-hop music. In focusing on a small number of works, she manages to include a diversity of languages and genres, ranging from an autobiographical piece in Catalan to popular music to internationally known literary prizewinners like Tahar ben Jelloun's Partir."

Mary Jean Green, Edward Tuck Professor of French, Dartmouth College