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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I am Emily Tampkin, and this week we will be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm speaking today with Dr. Adam Talbot.
He is the Assistant Professor and Director of Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University in the UK. And we are going to be discussing his piece, Alsadhi, his critics, and the drag of philological time. Adam, thank you so much for taking some time today. Thank you for inviting me.
So before we get started for our listeners, how do you, as the author of this piece, define philological time? OK, that's a very good question because it's sort of in the title of the article. So when I talk about philological time, I essentially am talking about the history of Arabic literature, right? So the history of writing in Arabic, which dates back probably in classical Arabic one to two centuries before the profit and carries on in classical Arabic until the beginning of the 20th century.
So it's this very long period, you know, more than a millennium, nearly a millennium and a half of literary history. And it's not quite as old as Chinese literature, but it is among the oldest world literatures. And the geographical expanse is huge. So in addition to it being very old, it also spreads from, you know, North Africa, West Africa, the Red Sea, southern Spain, all the way over to the Indian subcontinent and into Southeast Asia.
OK, so you know, if anyone listening, let's pull up Adam's bio, you've worked on this for quite some time. You've written a book, you've written chapters of books. Why did you feel that the time was sort of right to write about alsadhi and to the drag of philological time? Like, how did this fit into your broader body of research?
Yeah, well, OK, so I started as a fresh faced, you know, graduate student in 2008, let's say I started working on my PhD. And at the time, the big campaign was to turn our attention to Arabic literature being produced after a period of political turbulence. So we have the Crusades and then you have the Mongol invasion and you have the Black Death in the Middle East. And people thought that the quality of intellectual and cultural production in the Arabic speaking world was markedly less good after those, you know, turbulent political events.
So a group of people started, you know, way before me working on recovering that history. And that's how I kind of got into it. And how do you see this as as fitting into or not the other writing you've done? Do you see it as standalone or in conversation with?
So I think it is a standalone. But of course, I mean, so in this article, what I'm trying to do is to hold my earlier self accountable, if that kind of makes sense. So in my, you know, in the first phase, let's say over the past decade, what I've been doing is I've been quite, let's say in campaign mode, you know, I've been trying to uncover literary history. I've been working a lot in manuscripts.
I've been sort of bringing things to light and trying to draw people's attention to the value of this material. So in this article, I actually wanted to stop for a second and sort of think to myself about whether, you know, whether there is intrinsic value in what I've been doing over the past decade and like where we are now. I mean, so if we've spent about roughly 20 years in a revisionist campaign to redeem this period of Arabic literary history, now I think it's kind of time for us to stop and say, where are we and what has our revisionist scholarship done? Like, I mean, you know, in what way is revisionism also another form of distortion.
Hmm. Can you say a bit more about that? When you say revisionism is a form of distortion, do you mean that you are undoing or redoing the past? Do you mean it's unfair to the writers as they were writing?
Kind of what is the same more about what you mean by that, please? Yeah. Well, so I mean, if you think about political time, you think about like a political reading of history, right? So people used to think that because of turbulent political events and because of let's presume contracting, you know, like a contracting economy in Arab world, then the literary and cultural production would have been less valuable, especially when people are drawing comparisons to late medieval and early modern Europe.
You know, so the argument goes that because of these big world historical factors, ergo, the cultural production is not as good. And so I spent and me and lots of other people who've done more than me spent time saying that isn't true and that we need to take these things seriously and read them in their own terms. But of course, in doing that, you know, you focus intently on a period of time and you do it in kind of a, I don't want to say, tendentious. I don't think we were making arguments out of thin air, but we obviously were, you know, advocating a particular ideology in doing that, right?
I mean, if you say to your colleagues, I am going to deliberately study this neglected period of literary history, then you've already told them what the outcome of your study was, you know, you know, you're not going to do that. So you know, the outcome of your study will be, right? Nobody thinks that a period of literary history is neglected and then will continue to sort of say that it deserves to be neglected. I mean, you say it's neglected and then you make a case of why it should no longer be neglected.
You're signifying something, you're signifying something, but in fact, you're saying this has been a neglected period. Totally, yeah. Yeah. Where do you, I just asked where you, you know, you've gone in one direction and you've gone in the other now, where kind of the end of this one off journey, do you find yourself on revisionism?
Well, that's a very difficult question. I think revisionism is a very healthy scholarly practice. And I think I will always be revisionist. I mean, you know, it's very, like, it's very, scholarship is boring and it's lonely and it's slow.
And in order for me to be motivated enough to do an activity with boring and slow and lonely, I need to feel like I have some skin in the game. So revisionism is a way that I approach my work. Does that make sense? It makes a lot of sense.
Yes. Yes. So I think I'll always be revisionist. I mean, I am just interested in helping people think better about things.
And so I kind of have, I kind of adopt that position in my scholarship. Right. And then finally, if I, if you could give us a sense of what's next, what the next, what, what's the next interesting products that will be the result of the boring and lonely work that you do. Well, okay.
So in, you know, what I'm currently working on is, is not related to this material. So I spent, let's say, the first decade of my career, very interested in 14th and 15th century literary culture and what followed after that. I'm currently working on a project in which I am writing a book about the way that sexual violence is depicted in classical Arabic literature and also trying to draw connections to Persian and Ottoman literature. And last question, I promise, what sort of prompted the move from the one to the other, other than the fact that you've been working on this for a decade now.
Well, I think that the topic kind of engaged me, you know, the kind of the topic, but I approach like so I approach all things as readerly problems right so I want to understand how readers make sense of text, especially texts from the past I mean that's the thing that I'm most interested in. So just as you know in this article I'm trying to understand how scholars can take one particular work of literary history and make it into an exceptional kind of like a literary masterpiece there's this kind of way of reading a literary masterpiece which is different from reading an ordinary historical text. So I'm also interested now in how we as a scholarly community and how readers at the time would have understood these representations of sexual violence. I was speaking with Dr Adam Palette of Durham University, we were speaking about his work including this piece of topics critics and the drag of theological time published in philological encounters and thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you.