Rachel Schine
Biographic Data
| ID | 1694312 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachel Schine |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachel |
| FAMILY NAME | Schine |
| SIGNATURE | SCHINE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
A Slave per Day in Perpetuity
A curious repetition occurs in narratives of the Muslims’ first encounters with polities along the Sahara’s edge, extending from Nubia to Niger. At each turn, agreements involving tributes of 360 enslaved persons were reached with local leaders. I use this recurrence to explore two aspects of Islamic conquest literatures: the significance within this genre of numbers in describing worldly events and the cosmic structures that background them, and…
Performing Blackness in the Medieval Muslim Metropolis
This essay aims to chart a path between premodern blackface performance and postcolonial theory that escapes colonial teleologies. It analyzes moments from the Abbasid through Mamluk era (ca. 750–1517) popular literary forms—shadow plays, epics, and advice manuals—in which performances of blackness by non-Black people, real and imagined, occur. It argues for the simultaneous historical contingency and interpretative flexibility of these performan…
The Intricate World and the Mundane University
The Riḥlahs and Road Trips of Modern Iraqi Literature
This article situates the 1955 novel Abū Nuwās fī Amrīkā by Ṣafāʾ Khulūṣī as an exemplar of and commentary on the dynamics of twentieth-century Iraqi cultural production. Drawing on Margaret Litvin’s application of “travel literature readings” to modern diasporic and expatriate literatures, it analyzes the novel’s protagonist—in the form of a reincarnated, radically reformed version of the Abbasid-era poet Abū Nuwās—as engaging in a “ riḥlah -roa…
Roma in the Medieval Islamic World
The 1619 Project Forum
Why has the American Historical Review commissioned nineteen scholars to review the 1619 Project? There is no precedent in the history of the journal for a review forum of this scope and magnitude. Without question, the 1619 Project has become a very public flash point within academic and public debates centered on the work history does in the world. Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay that opened the project…
Translating Race in the Islamic Studies Classroom
This article offers a set of race-conscious approaches to teaching premodern Arabic texts in translation, tailored to courses in Islamic studies and related subject areas. Throughout, I address the productive tension generated by the fact that many contemporary translations do not consistently signpost moments of racial thinking as such despite the increase in scholarship on medieval race and racism as well as in the call, on the part of students…
Approaching Islamicate fictionalities
Impostures
A Mirror for the Modern Man
Historically, the siyar šaʿbiyya (sing. sīra ) corpus—a collection of popular, orally-performed Arabic chivalric legends—have been cast as being outside of the ambit of adab ( belles-lettres ). Rather, scholars and critics both classical and modern have tended to regard them as tall tales and pseudo-histories. In closing his 1887 Judeo-Arabic edition of Sīrat Sayf b. Ḏī Yazan ( Sīrat al-azaliyya ), the Tunisian-Jewish litterateur Rabbi Eliezer (L…
Conceiving the Pre-Modern Black-Arab Hero
ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s character in Sīrat al-amīrah dhāt al-himmah is but one example of a black hero who figures prominently in a sīrah shaʿbiyyah, or popular heroic cycle, the earliest references to which appear in the twelfth century and several of which remain in circulation today. Like several of his counterparts, not only is he black, but he is also alone among his relatives in being so. The explanation supplied in the text of his mother Fāṭimah’…
Signs from Above
This article presents excerpts from two near-contemporary works of popular prose from the medieval Near East: the Persian Dārāb-nāmeh and the Arabic Sīrat Banī Hilāl . In each, birds or birdlike characters (the sīmorgh and the crow, respectively) that share in having had theriomorphic, mythic significance in regional pre-Islamic traditions dispense premonitory wisdom to Muslim characters. Comparing these passages, the article contends that the ch…
Conceiving the Pre-Modern Black-Arab Hero
ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s character in Sīrat al-amīrah dhāt al-himmah is but one example of a black hero who figures prominently in a sīrah shaʿbiyyah, or popular heroic cycle, the earliest references to which appear in the twelfth century and several of which remain in circulation today. Like several of his counterparts, not only is he black, but he is also alone among his relatives in being so. The explanation supplied in the text of his mother Fāṭimah’…
Conceiving the Pre-Modern Black-Arab Hero
ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s character in Sīrat al-amīrah dhāt al-himmah is but one example of a black hero who figures prominently in a sīrah shaʿbiyyah, or popular heroic cycle, the earliest references to which appear in the twelfth century and several of which remain in circulation today. Like several of his counterparts, not only is he black, but he is also alone among his relatives in being so. The explanation supplied in the text of his mother Fāṭimah’…
Signs from Above
This article presents excerpts from two near-contemporary works of popular prose from the medieval Near East: the Persian Dārāb-nāmeh and the Arabic Sīrat Banī Hilāl . In each, birds or birdlike characters (the sīmorgh and the crow, respectively) that share in having had theriomorphic, mythic significance in regional pre-Islamic traditions dispense premonitory wisdom to Muslim characters. Comparing these passages, the article contends that the ch…
A Mirror for the Modern Man
Historically, the siyar šaʿbiyya (sing. sīra ) corpus—a collection of popular, orally-performed Arabic chivalric legends—have been cast as being outside of the ambit of adab ( belles-lettres ). Rather, scholars and critics both classical and modern have tended to regard them as tall tales and pseudo-histories. In closing his 1887 Judeo-Arabic edition of Sīrat Sayf b. Ḏī Yazan ( Sīrat al-azaliyya ), the Tunisian-Jewish litterateur Rabbi Eliezer (L…
Impostures
Translating Race in the Islamic Studies Classroom
This article offers a set of race-conscious approaches to teaching premodern Arabic texts in translation, tailored to courses in Islamic studies and related subject areas. Throughout, I address the productive tension generated by the fact that many contemporary translations do not consistently signpost moments of racial thinking as such despite the increase in scholarship on medieval race and racism as well as in the call, on the part of students…
Approaching Islamicate fictionalities
The 1619 Project Forum
Why has the American Historical Review commissioned nineteen scholars to review the 1619 Project? There is no precedent in the history of the journal for a review forum of this scope and magnitude. Without question, the 1619 Project has become a very public flash point within academic and public debates centered on the work history does in the world. Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay that opened the project…
The Intricate World and the Mundane University
The Riḥlahs and Road Trips of Modern Iraqi Literature
This article situates the 1955 novel Abū Nuwās fī Amrīkā by Ṣafāʾ Khulūṣī as an exemplar of and commentary on the dynamics of twentieth-century Iraqi cultural production. Drawing on Margaret Litvin’s application of “travel literature readings” to modern diasporic and expatriate literatures, it analyzes the novel’s protagonist—in the form of a reincarnated, radically reformed version of the Abbasid-era poet Abū Nuwās—as engaging in a “ riḥlah -roa…
Roma in the Medieval Islamic World
Performing Blackness in the Medieval Muslim Metropolis
This essay aims to chart a path between premodern blackface performance and postcolonial theory that escapes colonial teleologies. It analyzes moments from the Abbasid through Mamluk era (ca. 750–1517) popular literary forms—shadow plays, epics, and advice manuals—in which performances of blackness by non-Black people, real and imagined, occur. It argues for the simultaneous historical contingency and interpretative flexibility of these performan…
A Slave per Day in Perpetuity
A curious repetition occurs in narratives of the Muslims’ first encounters with polities along the Sahara’s edge, extending from Nubia to Niger. At each turn, agreements involving tributes of 360 enslaved persons were reached with local leaders. I use this recurrence to explore two aspects of Islamic conquest literatures: the significance within this genre of numbers in describing worldly events and the cosmic structures that background them, and…
History (8 works) · African history and culture analysis (6 works) · History (6 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Islam (4 works) · Islamic Studies and History (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Arabic (3 works) · Archaeology (3 works)