“Lucidly written, Eric Calderwood’s On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-

Andalus deftly traces the stories associated with al-Andalus across centuries to explore

how interracial and interreligious harmony was shaped across the Middle East, North

Africa, and Europe. Through a multilingual reading, Calderwood demonstrates how the

richness and elasticity of al-Andalus in the Arabic, English, and Spanish versions of this

legend inspire and influence political imaginations of the past and the politics of colonial

and regional identities of the present. Calderwood smoothly moves back and forth across

genres and disciplines, making his expansive study and multidirectional approach

decidedly comparative. Thinking beyond the universalism of al-Andalus, On Earth or in

Poems foregrounds frictions and demonstrates the best of comparative literary studies in

working with divergence, unevenness, and past and present.”