Figurative Inquisitions

"Erin Graff Zivin’s Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic is an outstanding book that represents a major contribution to contemporary literary and cultural criticism.  Highly original, interdisciplinary, and comparative, it addresses issues that are at once timeless and timely, including the operations and limits of power, and the inherent instability of subjectivity and representation."  --Kate Jenckes, Associate Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan

"In Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic, Erin Graff Zivin does something quite remarkable:  She engages in close readings of Brazilian, Mexican, Portuguese, German, and U.S.-American literature and film, in order to argue in the most convincing of fashions that the persecution of marranos (Jewish converts to Catholicism during the 16th century Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula) stands as the foundation of modern subjectivity and modern political order.  To make this case, she provides lucid theoretical engagements with Benjamin, Derrida, de Man, Althusser, and Žižek, among others, that likewise position marranismo at the core of modern philosophy.  The fact that she can make such a rich and complex argument at all is praise-worthy.  The fact that she does so in such a concise and elegant manner is, like the "Truth" of the marrano itself, almost unspeakable. --Justin Read, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

 

“In Figurative Inquisitions Graff Zivin provides the clearest, most energetic and most consequential treatment I know of the ways in which literary works produce truth effects and sorts of truth askew of principles of identity.  In her hands, the literary and cinematic traditions of Europe and Latin America encounter Levinas, Derrida, and Benjamin in sustained and subtle cross-interpretations.  The result is exhilarating: a major contribution, not just to the cultural historiography of the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic, but to our efforts to understand the incoherent and tormented figures (the figures of allegory, identity, conversion, pain, and above all, truth) that the disciplines of literary criticism and philosophy marshal to bring into contact the languages of ethics and of politics.”—Jacques Lezra, New York University