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Facets of exchange between North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula

We are grateful for the opportunity to guest edit this special issue of The Journal of North African Studies (JNAS) devoted to ‘facets of exchange between North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula’ on behalf of the Spain-North Africa Project (SNAP) and we hope that the journal’s readership will find herein resources to continue the conversations that envision North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula as a whole. SNAP began in 2010 as a means for scholars to re-imagine connections across the straits of Gibraltar, and the group now boasts over 125 members across four continents. As reflective of its mission to bridge divides and disciplines, SNAP membership encompasses different eras, as well as areas of specialisation. Indeed, this issue reflects the SNAP mission by bringing together anthropologists, art historians, ethnomusicologists, historians and archaeologists of the medieval and modern periods to think through relations of exchange across the straits of Gibraltar. The vagaries of nationalist, exceptionalist and exoticizing approaches to the history of the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa have tended to separate the recent academic study of these regions into artificially isolated disciplines (Liang et al. 2013, 7–18). However, as Braudel first noted back in the first half of the twentieth century, the Strait of Gibraltar has more frequently operated as a conduit, connecting people and economies rather than separating them (1928, 190–193). Following in his steps, recent studies of the Mediterranean basin as a whole have concluded that the sea connects far more frequently than it separates (Horden and Purcell 2000), and a raft of newer scholarship has emerged that treats the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa as complimentary halves in a larger Mediterranean world. Much of this scholarship, in fact, goes beyond strict geographic demarcations, including centres such as Sicily, Genoa, Venice, Malta, Athens, Thessaloniki, Istanbul, Izmir, Crete, Beirut, Jaffa, Alexandria, Cairo and perhaps even Timbuktu. This issue thus treats the Iberian Peninsula–North Africa axis as one possible focal point among many for the exploration of relations between peoples in and across the Mediterranean.