Writing History
by Brianna Diaz • Photos by Nick Lacy

In 2012, four faculty members from Trinity’s History Department expect to publish new books. Additionally, two books published by history faculty during the past few years continue to be met with critical acclaim and translated into new languages. The Reporter asked each of these faculty members to comment on their books.

Zayde Antrim, assistant professor of history and international studies

Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World Oxford University Press; to be released in 2012

Reporter: Can you explain the title – what do you mean by “the power of place?”
Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land from the ninth through the eleventh centuries, the first two centuries of intensive written production in the early Islamic world. The title of the book is an English translation of a frequently used title for Arabic geographical works from this period “Kitab al-Masalik wa-l-Mamalik” (Book of Routes and Realms). It is also a reference to two widely shared ways of imagining territory: as traversed by routes or as divided into realms. “The power of place” refers to the act of imagining territories in texts and, in so doing, transforming them into widely resonant categories of belonging. Representing plots of land as homes, cities, and regions in texts as diverse as world geographies, topographical histories, poetry, maps, religious treatises, and literary anthologies was a powerful way to claim loyalty, authority, and belonging in the early Islamic world.

Reporter: What contributions to this field of study do you hope to make with this book?
Routes and Realms features a new conceptual framework, the “discourse of place,” which brings together a wide range of formal texts over a substantial period of time, illuminating patterns among works that are not usually analyzed together. It proposes innovative readings of the earliest surviving examples of geographically-oriented Arabic writing. It considers maps and images side-by-side with written texts and provokes a reconsideration of the importance of the earliest regional mapping tradition in the Islamic world. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines insights from the fields of geography and literary criticism, such as place and performance, with historical methods. These insights allow Routes and Realms to shed light on the circulation and reception of texts in a period for which very few sources exist. Finally, it challenges a widespread tendency to underestimate the importance of territory and to over-emphasize the importance of religion and family to notions of community and belonging among Muslims and Arabs, both in the past and today.

Reporter: How did you become interested in the subject?
I have always been interested in geography and the ways in which the geographical imagination shapes the way we see and act in the world. I have had the privilege of exploring and deepening this interest in the Trinity classroom, especially in my courses on mapping, such as INTS300: Mapping the World and HIST319: Mapping the Middle East. I have also long been concerned that Americans do not believe that Arabs and Muslims experience the same kind of rootedness in land that we do, and I hope that my book interrupts such assumptions.

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