Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity 9780300152524

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D

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D Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity

Susan Martin-Márquez

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities and from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College. Copyright © 2008 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin-Marquez, Susan. Disorientations : Spanish colonialism in Africa and the performance of identity / Susan Martin-Marquez. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-12520-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. National characteristics—Spain—History. 2. Spain—Civilization—African influences. 3. Spain—Civilization—Islamic influences. 4. Spain—Colonies—Africa. I. Title. DP48.M2946 2008 909'.0971246—dc22 2007044809 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Evan

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Introduction: Theorizing the Performance of Spanish Identity

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ONE Power Plays: Reformulations of Spanish Identity and the Colonization of Africa 12 TWO The “Savage” Art of Mimicry in Spain’s Colonization of Sub-Saharan Africa 64 THREE Staging the Odalisque’s Conquest in the Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60) 101 FOUR The Masculine Role in the Spanish-Moroccan Theater of War FIVE Unmasking Family Values in Franco’s African Colonies SIX Performance Anxieties on the Edge of Fortress Europe Afterword Notes

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This book would never have been possible without the aid and support of my wonderful friends and colleagues, to whom I would like to extend my profound thanks. Kathleen Davis first called my attention to Benito Pérez Galdós’s fascinating novel Aita Tettauen, and this project initially emerged in the mid-1990s out of our many discussions about Spanish Orientalism. Over the years, César Braga-Pinto, Daniela Flesler, Joseba Gabilondo, Lotfi Sahayi, Benita Sampedro, Bryan Scoular, Camilla Stevens, Michael Ugarte, Katy Vernon, and Eva Woods have inspired me with their work, and have provided a steady stream of stimulating conversation. Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Alberto Egea Fernández-Montesinos, David Gies, Jo Labanyi, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ricardo Padrón, Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and Paul Julian Smith read sections of the text at different stages of the process; I am greatly indebted to them for the crucial guidance they provided along the way. John Beusterien, Beatriz Caamaño-Alegre, Marvin D’Lugo, Rebecca Haidt, Dieter Ingenschay, Anouar Majid, Gabriela Pozzi, and Russell Sebold answered queries and generously offered materials that were fundamental to this study. The anonymous readers for Yale University Press could not have been more helpful in their suggestions for improvement, and I deeply appreciate the care with which they read the manuscript. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Felicia McCarren, who introduced me to the Laichi family, and who along with them has taught me so much about the complexities of the Saharawi situation. I am also grateful to the film director César Fernández Aradavín, who gave freely of his time—as well as his photographs—when I interviewed him in 1999 about the film he shot in the Western Sahara, La llamada de África. I have had the great fortune to learn more about Equatorial Guinea from Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel and Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo,

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and I thank them for the inspirational conversations, essays, and literary works they have shared with me. Research for this book was aided by the efficiency and expertise of the staff members at many libraries and archives, most especially the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, the Archivo General de la Administración in Alcalá de Henares, the Biblioteca Sancho el Sabio in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the Princeton University Library system, and Rutgers University’s Alexander Library. As always, I am indebted to Marga Lobo of the National Film Archive in Madrid, who for nearly two decades has facilitated my work on Spanish cinema, and to Trinidad del Río, Miguel Soria, and Alicia Potes for their conscientious help with screenings, preparing film images, and tracking down copyright holders. I owe special thanks to my friend and colleague Christina Buckley, without whose enthusiastic and dedicated collaboration I could not have secured most of the cinema stills that illustrate this book, and to Jack Abraham, who provided speedy photographic assistance as deadlines approached. I am very grateful, too, for the sabbatical leave and one-semester “assignment to research” granted by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University, which afforded me invaluable time to devote exclusively to the book. I greatly appreciate the support of my editor at Yale University Press, Chris Rogers; I would also like to thank Otto Bohlmann for his astute copyediting, and Ann-Marie Imbornoni for her timely help in guiding the manuscript into print. Finally, I thank my dear friends Ruth O’Brien and Mercedes Trillo Hurley, who have helped me to regain my bearings on the many occasions when I have been overwhelmed by “disorientation.” And Evan Brownstein, to whom this book is dedicated, has always helped me find my way out of the cold rain and snow. Some sections of this book have been published in earlier versions. Portions of the first half of chapter 2 appeared as “A ‘Scientific Confidence’: Manuel Iradier, ‘El Negro de Banyoles,’ and the Re-collection and Re-membering of ‘Spanish Africans,’” Journal of Romance Studies 1.3 (2001): 103–20. Some of the material on Galdós and Fortuny from chapter 3 was published in “‘Here’s Spain Looking at You’: Shifting Perspectives on North African Otherness in Galdós and Fortuny,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 5 (2001): 1–18, and in “Hibridez y modernidad en la obra de Marià Fortuny: El desnudo des-orientado y los retratos de Carmen,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 7 (2003): 83–90. Part of chapter 4 appeared in “Performing Masculinity in the Moroccan Theatre: Virility, Sexuality and Spanish Military Culture from the African War

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to the Civil War,” European Review of History 11.2 (2004): 225–40. And a section from chapter 6 was published as “Brothers and Others: Fraternal Rhetoric and the Negotiation of Spanish and Saharawi Identity,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 7.3 (2006): 241–58. I thank the editors and publishers of these journals for their permission to reproduce this material here.

I: T  P  S I

Newly circumcised, with his body, face, and head shaven, wrapped in a white wool haik and shod in yellow leather slippers, the Catalan scientist and spy Domingo Badía (a.k.a. Alí Bey) prepared to insinuate his way into the most exclusive circle of Moroccan society. By 1803, the date of Badía’s spectacular exercise in “going native,” Spain had experienced several tense decades of amity and enmity with neighboring Morocco. Between 1767 and 1780 the Enlightenment king Charles III had signed several historic political and commercial treaties with his like-minded counterpart, the sultan Muhammad ben Abd Allah, but after the death of both leaders, the relationship between the two countries had soured.¹ When the bloody struggle for succession in Morocco had concluded, the nation again suffered under an autocratic ruler, the sultan Suleiman, who preferred to seek alliances with the British and who repeatedly refused to export wheat to an often hungry Spain (McGaha 15–19). Badía managed to convince himself, as well as Charles IV’s powerful adviser Godoy, that he could resolve the situation. Armed with a smattering of Arabic, the rudiments of Islam, a newly minted identity as the son of exiled Syrian aristocrats, and an endless supply of impressive gifts, he quickly managed to befriend Suleiman himself. Even so, Badía was unable to persuade the sultan to adopt the constitution he had written for Morocco, a document that would have guaranteed property rights and free trade, safeguarding Spanish interests in the region. Badía then devised a different strategy: he would overthrow the sultan and declare himself the new ruler. Confident that he could gather an army of fifty thousand men, Badía worked to instigate revolution among leaders of rebel tribes in the south (Bey, Viajes 469– 82). Just as Spain prepared to send troops and weapons to Morocco to support the uprising, however, Charles IV balked. Wavering support on the home front,

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1. Achille Etna Michallon (artist) and Adam (engraver), Ali Bey el Abbassi. Travels of Ali Bey in Morocco, Tripoli, Cyprus, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Turkey, between the years 1803 and 1807. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816. Frontispiece engraving. Firestone Library, Princeton University. This much-reprinted image also inspired the woodblock engraving accompanying a laudatory article on Alí Bey in the Semanario Pintoresco Español 5 (March 1839): 65–67.

together with Suleiman’s increasing suspicions, would eventually contribute to the failure of Badía’s megalomaniac plan (McGaha 25–41). Badía’s narrative of his travels through Morocco and other Islamic lands was first published in Paris in 1814, with later editions in English, German, Italian (1816–17), and Spanish (1836) (fig. 1). The earliest versions appeared under Badía’s adopted name Alí Bey, and that fictional identity is maintained throughout the text, with varying degrees of success (Goytisolo, Crónicas 111–33). In the 1816 London edition the publishers included a preface admitting that the author was not in fact a Muslim, but insisting that he was taken for one every-

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where he went and that his experiences were genuine (Bey, Travels I: v—xi). Although in the narrative of his travels in Morocco Badía suppresses his political machinations, which were initially a state secret, the text implicitly provides justification for his—and by extension, Spain’s—efforts to annex the lands just across the Strait of Gibraltar. Badía describes Morocco as a country both literally and metaphorically in the dark, as well as in ruins. Walls riddled with cracks line narrow streets plunged in shadows; even the sultan’s palace has sections that are in complete disrepair, and his ministers are consigned to dingy and cramped quarters. Dogmatism masquerades as instruction, and memorization is valued over literacy and logical thinking. Superstition has swept aside scientific knowledge, and a globe of the world is given over to rats. All clocks are imported from abroad, and because no Moroccan is equipped to maintain them, they fail to keep accurate time or have stopped completely (Bey, Viajes 231–56). Only the European-educated Badía is capable of recalibrating the devices; only he will bring progress and the light of reason to this country mired in backwardness (Bey, Viajes 235, 248–49). In one fascinating passage, however, Badía departs from what otherwise might be characterized as textbook Orientalism. Describing the famous Kairouyine Mosque in Fez, he pauses to compare it to a similar structure in Spain: “It has many doors, and there are two beautiful fountains in the patio, but this celebrated temple is not comparable to the cathedral I have seen in Córdoba, Spain, which is entirely superior in grandeur and magnificence” (234). Enumerating the traits that are common to all Moroccan mosques—a patio surrounded by arcades, a square or rectangular enclosed area whose roof is supported by rows of arches, a mihrab or niche on the southern or southeastern wall of the enclosure—Badía insists: “All of these circumstances are to be found in the Córdoba cathedral, which proves with all evidence that it is a religious building constructed by the Moors, and not a Roman market, as some inhabitants of Córdoba say [. . .] it is incontrovertible that the aforementioned temple was originally a mosque built by the Moors, and not a Roman building as some Spanish writers have suggested in an offhand manner” (234–35). Badía stresses here that neither residents of the city nor Spanish writers necessarily understood, or deigned to understand, that the spectacular cathedral in Córdoba had originally been a mosque, exemplifying the brilliant splendor of alAndalus, as those areas of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim domination from 711 to 1492, and linked to North Africa in multifarious and shifting ways, were called.² Rather, the building was assumed to be of Roman origin, perhaps a market. If Badía’s passage can be believed, it attests to the phenomenal success of the “whitewashing” of Spanish history after 1492, whereby representations of the

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past functioned to impart, throughout both the lettered and the popular classes, a particular view of the nation-state that would erase all remnants of Islamic and African influence. Indeed, many Spanish scholars believe that this erasure has continued virtually uninterrupted since the late fifteenth century. As the philosopher Eduardo Subirats has asserted, “Since its historical foundation in 1492 until the present day, [Spanish] national identity has been formed through the oftentimes virulently violent rejection of any sort of reflection concerning the destruction of the historical languages and the religions and cultures that populated the Iberian Peninsula. It has also been formed through the rejection of their memory” (Américo 39). I would argue, however, that in this sweeping statement Subirats overlooks crucial earlier efforts to recover that memory. In fact, Domingo Badía’s insistent “unveiling” of the magnificent Cordoban mosque in the first decades of the nineteenth century anticipates dramatic shifts in the conceptualization of national identity, as previously hegemonic versions of the Spanish national narrative come under increasing scrutiny in the post-Enlightenment era. The profound impact of Spaniards’ recuperation of the Andalusi past during this time period, a phenomenon that has not been fully understood or articulated by cultural theorists and historians, will be a central focus of this book, as will the complete imbrication of that recuperation with neo-imperialist designs on the African continent. Badía’s overweening project to conquer Morocco is fully of a piece with his recognition of the Andalusi legacy in Spain. In their subsequent colonial incursions into Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Spaniards would continue to draw strategically upon revised formulations of the nation’s history and identity. Even in the current postcolonial and democratic era, the medieval past continues to resonate in political and cultural discourse concerning Spain’s relationship to a number of African nations, many of whose citizens are now immigrating to the Iberian Peninsula. This book is devoted to the analysis of this dynamic, which recurs throughout the modern era in Spain, albeit in historically specific permutations. The chapters that follow will scrutinize how cultural representations of Africa and Africans (particularly those colonized by Spain in northern Morocco, the Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea) are implicated in the “performance” of national identities in Spain, from the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60 and the period of sub-Saharan exploration, through the Rif conflict, the Civil War of 1936–39, and the Franco regime, into the current age of African immigration to the Spanish “State of Autonomies.” My analysis engages in dialogue with a number of commentators on national identity, as well as with contemporary postcolonial and performance studies

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theorists, some of whose ideas I shall briefly consider in the following pages. The French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan was perhaps the first to theorize the phenomenon that subtends my own arguments concerning the renegotiation of identities in Spain. In his famous 1882 address at the Sorbonne, “What Is a Nation?” Renan rejected the then commonly held notion that a shared race, language, or religion, or the seemingly “natural” frontiers of geography, were constitutive of the nation. Instead, he argued that national cohesion was achieved through an ongoing consent—what Renan termed the “daily plebiscite”—that depended upon a sense of solidarity forged through the “rich legacy of memories” (19). Fervent belief in a common past of sacrifice, suffering, and glory, as well as a willingness to partake in more of the same for the sake of the nation, was vital. However, even though Renan claimed that “genuine glory” was the “social capital upon which one bases a national ideal,” in another remarkable passage he also asserted that national memories were strategically repressed and/ or falsified: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of ] nationality” (19, 11). Drawing upon this insight, I shall be arguing here that from the late eighteenth century on, novel ways of characterizing Spanish history—in Renan’s words, “progress in historical studies”—would indeed represent a danger for the traditional construction of national identity in Spain. Although cultural memories presumably shared by some groups of Spaniards would never be completely displaced, the vehemence of the rhetoric that emerged concerning the nation’s past as well as its identity reveals that the alternative narrative was deemed a formidable threat indeed. While more recent theorists of the nation have expanded upon Renan’s explicit claim that national identity is not predetermined by an array of shared objective traits, they have also criticized his implicit indulgence in a renewed form of primordialism. Benedict Anderson, for example, notes the peculiarly contradictory nature of the passage in which Renan underlines the importance of forgetting for the creation of national identity. As Anderson observes, by invoking the medieval and early modern massacres of the Midi and Saint Bartholomew (Renan 11), Renan at once assumes that his French readers will recall these episodes of historical violence, even as he claims that the French have been forced to forget them for the sake of national cohesiveness. For Anderson, this passage demonstrates Renan’s own investment in the creation of a genealogy of Frenchness, out of past events involving social actors who would not have identified themselves as French (199–201). Anderson is one of a number of late twentiethcentury theorists who emphasize the ways in which intellectual, political, and

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artistic elites, such as Renan himself, have worked to construct the nation in accordance with concrete ideological goals. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, maintains that national traditions are “invented,” deliberate “exercises in social engineering” that encourage the community to perceive its union as originating in a more or less remote past (“Introduction” 1–2, 13–14). Ernest Gellner concurs, noting that while national discourse may sometimes draw upon a preexisting wealth of cultural practices, “the cultures it claims to defend and revive are often its own inventions, or are modified out of all recognition” (56). In my consideration of the Spanish case I shall adopt the current assumption that nations are, in fact, “constructions.” According to this theorization, although nationalist ideas are largely the creation of elites, they frequently appeal to perceptions of popular practices and sentiments, and may exert a powerful influence over the communities they function to exalt. They are also subject to an ongoing process of contestation and revision. Gellner asserts that while individual national identities may be considered “fictitious,” nationalism in general is a wholly factual phenomenon, arising from very specific historical circumstances (55–56). Along with Hobsbawm and Anderson, Gellner argues that nations are an exclusive product of the modern era. Although they diverge in their apprehension of the details, all three agree that the decline of religion and absolutism, the emergence of secular notions of sovereignty, and industrialization and capitalist development were crucial preconditions for, or accompaniments to, the creation of nations. Hobsbawm, however, is clearly aware that in the Spanish case it is tempting to argue—as any number of scholars have done—that a cohesive national identity emerged several centuries earlier. He works to counter this notion by scrutinizing entries from the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. Affirming that the dictionary “does not use the terminology of state, nation and language in the modern manner before its edition of 1884,” Hobsbawm concludes that “the element of a common and supreme state” is not articulated as a central preoccupation until then (Nations 14). Although I would agree with Hobsbawm’s assertion that nation-states, as modern political entities, did not attain prominence until the nineteenth century, I also believe that politically strategic expressions of nationalist sentiment had begun to circulate well before that time. As I shall discuss in detail in chapter 1, what I term “second-wave nation building,” which emerged in Spain in the post-Enlightenment era of the rise of the nation-state, was forced to negotiate earlier conceptualizations of a unified Spanish identity—“firstwave nation building”—tied in large measure to the dramatic events of 1492: the publication of the first Castilian grammar, the final conquest of the Muslim

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Kingdom of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews, and the “discovery” of the New World. Ideas about national identity in Spain spread in part through the increasing circulation of books, and although the early modern era is not the main focus of my study, it is evident that Anderson’s illuminating observations concerning the central role of print culture in the construction of nations are pertinent to the consideration of that time period as well. Even so, Anderson underlines the fundamental importance of modern economic development for the transition to “print capitalism,” which greatly accelerated the dissemination of nationalist ideas and enabled members of the national community to “imagine” themselves as simultaneously engaged in the same quotidian activities, such as newspaper reading (33–46). My exploration of the increasing impact of Spanish historical scholarship over the course of the nineteenth century—the period of secondwave nation building—will draw upon Anderson’s association of the rise of nationalism with the expansion of print capitalism. It will also highlight the complementary role of the communal visual spectacles that were gaining in popularity alongside literary culture. The work of Gellner, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, that of Anderson and Hobsbawm, tends to show how cultural expression becomes more homogeneous as it gravitates toward a singular conceptualization of the nation. But other scholars have emphasized the unavoidable plurality of nationalist and other articulations of identity. Prasenjit Duara has noted, for example, that the same print culture and mass media that are so essential to the inculcation of hegemonic ideas of the nation have also allowed alternative formulations of national identity to circulate (9). Indeed, successful propagation of those alternative formulations may threaten the dominant narrative, and may also enable minoritarian groups to attain a national consciousness and pursue autonomy or even independence (see Hroch), a process of significant interest for the advent of peripheral nationalisms in Spain, which as I shall show in later chapters is intimately linked to the “African question.” Duara also presents a finely rendered analysis of the multifaceted nature of identification, as well as of the ways in which groups may move from one totalizing identity to another. As Duara explains it, “the ‘prior’ self which identifies, or is sutured with a representation of, say, the nation, is itself another set of subject positions—say, woman, Korean-American, Baptist—produced by other representations. Thus the self is constituted neither primordially nor monolithically but within a network of changing and often conflicting representations” (7). For Duara, different communities may be separated or united by a multitude of boundaries, associated with a variety of subject positions based on

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such categories as religious faith, language, or “race”; at any given moment, some of those boundaries are deemphasized and seen as “soft,” while others are prioritized and conceptualized as “hard.” But for a wide range of historical reasons, social agents—usually elites, such as intellectuals and politicians—may choose to alter the significance of these boundaries, working to transform a given border, for example, from soft to hard; the concomitant processes of “othering” produce new communities and identities. Duara coins the term “discent” to characterize the dissenting narratives of descent that are mobilized in order strategically to shift the perception of boundaries. Dominant identities are always contingent and subject to contestation, according to Duara, for the soft boundaries that are everywhere present within communities might at any time become hardened and radically alter the paradigms of identification (15, 65–69). In syntony with Duara’s ideas, my study of modern-era Spain will seek to highlight this variability and multiplicity of national and other interrelated conceptualizations of identity. At the same time, while Duara, along with many other theorists of the nation, emphasizes the inescapable role of othering in the creation of distinctive identities, I believe that an analysis of the Spanish situation may complicate our understanding of this process. Here it is crucial to consider the unique positioning of Spaniards within Orientalist discourse. Edward Said has defined Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” where “Orient” refers primarily to Muslim North Africa and the Middle East (3). Although Orientalism is of fundamental importance to the modern trajectory of identity formations in Spain, there is surprisingly little precedent for the reading of Spanish cultural practices and texts through this particular theoretical lens. Said himself failed to study Spain—an omission he openly acknowledges (1, 17)—and his analysis of French, British, and American discourse has been criticized for neglecting to highlight the “differences among the various modes of orientalist representation and in the field of its power relations” (Behdad 11). In fact, the differences presented by the Spanish case are quite striking. The Spain that Said occasionally mentions in passing in Orientalism is as often a premodern Islamic “other” deemed threatening to the West (see for example 59, 74, 304, 315) as it is a modern producer of presumably European forms of culture (for example, 63, 93), a curious duality that Said does not address. Moreover, as the following chapter will show, the post-Enlightenment “rediscovery” of the Andalusi past led Spaniards and foreigners alike to Orientalize the Iberian nation. While some of the Spanish elite reveled in self-exoticization, others responded anxiously by projecting their “own” alterity onto the “usual suspects” in Africa and the Middle East—but also onto other Spaniards. In

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this sense, Spain is a nation that is at once Orientalized and Orientalizing. The dynamic resembles a Möbius strip, calling into question the possibility of any location “outside” Orientalist discourse. For Spaniards, this positioning on both “sides” of Orientalism—as simultaneously “self ” and “other”—may bring about a profound sense of “disorientation.” Disorientation is something that many (although not all) of the works studied by Said quite scrupulously avoid. Said underlines the importance of the cartographic imaginary to Orientalism: colonial powers attempt to gain control over the space of the Orient by “mapping” it, both literally and metaphorically. David Spurr has explained the crucial significance of “orienting the Orient” to imperialist rhetoric. Citing the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of “orient,” Spurr notes that “these diverging senses of the word come from the differing ways in which the notion of the Orient has been used in Western writing: as a space against which the West defines or orients itself, and as a source of dazzling, disorienting brilliance” (142). Yet according to Spurr, those who seek out the “dazzling, disorienting brilliance” of the Orient do so only in order to (re)locate themselves with more authority in opposition to the “other”: “One ‘finds out where one is’ by putting the Orient, with its undefined categories of subjective and objective experience, over there” (142; Spurr’s emphasis). While Spaniards may also “locate” the Orient (namely, North Africa) as “over there,” as we shall see, many of the texts that will be examined in this book depart from the rigorously differentialist logic of ostensibly Western constructions of subjectivity. Said has also described Orientalist rhetoric as akin to the stylized costumes worn by actors in a play (71), and he develops at length the metaphor of Orientalism as a particular “staging” of the Orient for a Western audience (67). Despite Said’s own disavowals, his famous analogy has been criticized as propagating the association between theater and mis-representation. In more recent years, however, other scholars have turned to theorizations of performance in order to describe in a more nuanced way the complex fabrications of self and other within different colonial contexts. Performance theory, which has a foundation in both theatrical and anthropological studies, has now enriched considerably our understanding of the embodiment of multiple forms of identity. The field has expanded from the analysis of staged dramas or ritualized interactions within a given community to the myriad ways in which human actions and articulations are “framed” and/or reiterated. In this book, theories of performance will be brought to bear on specific examples of identity construction in modern Spain, and the concept of the performative may enhance our comprehension of how the multifarious and contingent identities described by Duara are enacted and negotiated.

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In her work, for example, Anne McClintock emphasizes that the mapping out of spaces and the performance of identities are eminently gendered acts. McClintock begins her brilliant study Imperial Leather by exploring the map that opens Henry Rider Haggard’s best-selling 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines. In an unusually graphic visualization of the customary imperialist feminization of a terrain to be conquered, here the geography reflects the contours of a female body that is immobilized and splayed, with the mouth of the “treasure cave,” surrounded by a triangular thicket of heather, marking the site of the vulva. While McClintock notes that such images have been highlighted by Said and others as insidious tropes of colonial dominance, she insists that “seeing sexuality as a metaphor runs the risk of eliding gender as a constitutive dynamic of imperial and anti-imperial power” (14; McClintock’s emphasis). McClintock urges us to look at rather than beyond these gendered metaphors, which do not simply substitute for hierarchical associations among men. Moreover, rather than viewing tropes of racial, gender, sexual, and economic identities and relationships as analogous and interchangeable, McClintock underlines both their irreducibility and their mutual imbrication: “No social category exists in privileged isolation; each comes into being in social relation to other categories, if in uneven and contradictory ways” (9; see also 16, 61–62). For McClintock, those categories are too frequently treated in isolation by contemporary theorists, as is the case with the widely disseminated performative models that she builds upon: Luce Irigaray’s explanation of feminine mimicry (in “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine”), and Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the “mimic men” of the colonial sphere (in The Location of Culture’s “Of Mimicry and Man” [85–92]). McClintock chooses to read these two together, reflecting upon their points of convergence and divergence. Irigaray (who does not address questions of race or class) argues that mimicry is assigned to women, but that they must learn to “jam the system” through a more studied performance of heterosexual femininity. By artfully playing with and against patriarchal norms—engaging in an excessive overacting—women may expose the disconnect between “nature” and gender (Irigaray 76–78). Bhabha (who sidesteps gender and class issues) appears to present a parallel argument: in their mimicry the colonized are compelled to construct themselves as “almost the same, but not white,” a habit that destabilizes notions of difference and thus “menaces” colonial authority (Bhabha, Location 89, 88). McClintock emphasizes that despite the structural similarities, neither form of mimicry is reducible to the other. In her own work, McClintock seeks to avoid collapsing all forms of difference into a single category, arguing that it is possible to arrive at a more subtle analysis by directing serious attention to the specific

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historical contexts out of which real-world practices of mimicry emerge. For this reason, she also focuses centrally on the question of agency. In Bhabha’s formulation, mimicry represents a systemic threat to colonialism; troubling gaps between identity and difference inevitably emerge out of the interactions between colonized and colonizer. As McClintock explains, “Colonial authority appears to be displaced less by shifting social contradictions or the militant strategies of the colonized than by the formal ambivalence of colonial representation itself ” (63). Later, in his “Signs Taken for Wonders” (Location 102–22), Bhabha revises his conceptualization of mimicry to acknowledge the role of resistance, of such crucial importance for Irigaray—-and clearly for McClintock too—in the subversion of power structures.³ But McClintock’s view of agency, which she defines as “the host of difficult ways in which people’s actions and desires are mediated through institutions of power: the family, the media, the law, armies, nationalist movements” (15), is far from utopian: agency serves to maintain as often as to subvert hegemonic systems and discourses. In the chapters that follow, I hope to illuminate the historically specific negotiations of power and agency that are so integral to the performance of modern identities in Spain. As I shall indicate in chapter 1, it is of particular importance that the “rediscovery” of the Andalusi past coincided not only with the rise of “scientific racism” throughout Europe but also with the reemergence of an imperial agenda in Spain, newly linked to the African continent. Successive chapters of the book will explore the implication of colonial as well as metropolitan regimes of power with struggles related to shifts in the conceptualization of racial, gender, sexual, class, religious, and peripheral national identities in discrete periods. In choosing from among the surprisingly daunting number of texts that construct Spanish identities in relationship to the African colonies, I have endeavored to include a significant number of works or cultural phenomena that once enjoyed prominence in elite circles or popularity with a mass audience. In some cases, these materials are considerably less well known today, perhaps because they do not always coincide with currently prevalent understandings. While I discuss major historical players (such as Francisco Franco) and writers and visual artists who are now deemed canonical (Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marià Fortuny, Ángel Ganivet, and Carmen de Burgos, for example), I also include figures who are all but forgotten, as well as some who are new and still relatively unfamiliar. Throughout, I seek to combine a rigorous textual analysis with a careful consideration of pertinent contextual factors, in order to provide a productive orientation to the “dazzling disorientations” that are so characteristic of the discourses that take center stage in this book.

1

P P: R  S I   C  A

Expanding upon a number of the phenomena that I briefly sketched out in the Introduction, in this chapter I provide the crucial historical context for the remainder of the book’s analyses. I begin by revisiting the notion of “first-wave” and “second-wave” nation building, considering some of the diverse ways in which previous conceptualizations of the Spanish nation were reworked from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, as the precise nature of Spain’s “African legacy” was described and debated. The central role of Arabism in this process will be detailed, along with the gradual spread of innovative views on Spain’s past from elite circles to a broader audience, through print media and other cultural venues and forms. I then address the significant anxieties that emerged over the racial make-up of Spaniards, as “scientific racism” came to the fore throughout Europe. Finally, I begin to explore the imbrication of these discourses with the initiation of Spanish colonialism in Africa, in order to demonstrate the profound ambivalence, as well as the eminently strategic negotiation, of ideas concerning the nation’s history and identity. FIRST-WAVE NATION BUILDING IN SPAIN: EXPULSION OF RACIALIZED OTHERS, 1492–1614

In his book Faith in Nation (2003) Anthony Marx has articulated within a larger European context what many Hispanists now take for granted: that in the case of Spain, nation building was initiated long before the nineteenth century. The dramatic confluence of events in 1492 (the final “Reconquest” of the Kingdom of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella; the forced conversion or expulsion of the Jews; the “discovery” of the Americas; and, not incidentally, Antonio

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de Nebrija’s publication of the first Castilian grammar) appeared to move the project forward. There was a concerted effort to found Spanish identity upon the selective exclusion of religious “others,” which provided an illusion of homogeneity and unity within an otherwise exceptionally diverse population. Marx fails to acknowledge, however, the ways in which in Spain religious differences had already been, and even more increasingly became, racialized (Elliott 217). Here it is important to understand how the notion of race might be theorized for early modern Spain. I prefer to use the term “race” throughout this book, instead of the term “ethnicity,” to reflect the current theoretical understanding of racial constructions as based upon perceived “biological” traits and phenomena but also wedded to a range of cultural practices, broadly understood (see for example Stoler; Loomba; Holt). My study is grounded in the conviction that from very early on in Spain, “biology” frequently underpins the imagination of national identities, albeit in ever-shifting, historically contingent ways. The ostensibly religious exclusions of the early modern era are a case in point. Beginning in the late fourteenth century and throughout the fifteenth, as a result of pogroms tens if not hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced or chose to adopt Catholicism, and eventually many became sincere Christians (Jerome Friedman 5, 8, 14; Netanyahu). In 1478, the Spanish Inquisition was created to scrutinize the populations’ adherence to Catholic doctrine, and attention was initially directed toward conversos, or Jewish converts, in particular. “Old Christians” resented the accession of “New Christians” to greater professional opportunities, and suspected the conversos of hidden heterodox beliefs and behaviors, even when they showed all outward signs of orthodoxy. Given the lack of clear external indicators of difference, an internal difference thus had to be posited: blood. Beginning in the city of Toledo in 1449, “blood purity” norms prohibited people of Jewish descent from practicing certain elite professions or holding public office. As Jerome Friedman has noted, “These new exclusionary legal conventions were called ‘pure blood laws’ because it was maintained that degenerate Jewish blood was impervious to baptism and grace. If mixed with Christian blood, the Jewish blood would contaminate subsequent generations and would continue to do so indefinitely. Jewishness, then, was not a statement of faith or even a series of ethnic practices but a biological consideration” (16). That these laws were applied not to Jews, but rather to New Christians, writes Friedman, “demonstrates the poverty of the idea that sixteenth-century society was antiJudaistic but not racially anti-Semitic” (27; see also Mariscal 10–11; Netanyahu 381–82; Perry, “Politics” 38). Over the course of the sixteenth century, Moriscos (Muslims who had remained in Spain after 1492 and who by 1526 would be forced to convert as well) also came to be portrayed as irremediably different

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from “true” Spaniards. Friedman describes how, prior to 1530, conversos were often brought before the Inquisition for certain practices, such as avoidance of pork and lard, changing sheets on Friday, and preferring Old Testament names, that were assumed (usually incorrectly) to indicate Jewish observance; it is not surprising that those practices soon disappeared (15). Subsequently, as Deborah Root and Mary Elizabeth Perry point out, Moriscos too were forced to alter their habits of daily life and avoid, for example, washing at work, using cosmetic henna, or eating while seated on the floor (Root 121–27; Perry, “Politics” 38–39, Handless 38–64). As in the case of the conversos, once purportedly heterodox behaviors were driven underground and became increasingly difficult to police, preoccupation with cultural difference shifted toward fear of biological difference. Moriscos were animalized and considered carriers of disease, and their presence was ultimately deemed a threat not only to the Catholic faith but also to Spanish blood (Root 130–32). As these examples suggest, in the production of race there is a complex interplay between culture and “biology,” which is associated with the transmission of certain traits through various forms of contamination as well as through sexual reproduction (hence the imbrication of questions of gender and sexuality in racialized formations as well). Phenotype is not necessarily essential to the construction of racial distinctions, and often the very absence of distinguishing physical characteristics is what makes racialized others so very threatening. Even so, when no defining peculiarities are apparent, they are sometimes “discovered” or invented, as when men of Jewish origin became associated with hooked noses and were said to lactate and menstruate (Loomba 144). In the case of Spain, it is crucial to consider as well the coincidence of the racialization of conversos and Moriscos with the arrival of ever greater numbers of African slaves to the peninsula and to the New World, as Seville became a central port in the transatlantic trade (see Cortés López). Recently scholars have begun to explore how blood purity laws intersected with the discrimination of enslaved and free blacks. John Beusterien posits the existence of two forms of racism in early modern Spain, one directed against “invisible” conversos and the other against visibly distinctive Africans, but he also acknowledges that pure blood discourse came to inflect the justification of black slavery (25–30). Both Ania Loomba and María Elena Martínez reconsider an oft-cited 1604 passage by Fray Prudencio de Sandoval: “But who can deny that in the descendents of the Jews there persists and endures the evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in blacks [there persists] the inseparability of their blackness?” In their readings of Sandoval, both critics emphasize that for the theoretically “hidden” converso as well as for the somatically marked African, moral turpitude and religious

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heterodoxy were linked to biological otherness, to a “race which infects and defiles him” (Sandoval 3: 319; Loomba 68; Martínez par. 10).¹ For Martínez, because Spaniards had argued that the enslavement of Africans would allow them to be converted to Christianity, there emerged a “strong association of bondage not only with debasement but also with religious deviance or heterodoxy” (par. 13). Yet it is important to note that conversos were not sold into bondage, while Moriscos as well as Arabs and Berbers captured in skirmishes in Spain and throughout the Mediterranean were increasingly enslaved in significant numbers (Ben Mansour 109). Throughout the Middle Ages it had not been unusual to find northern Iberian and northern European as well as African slaves on the peninsula, but by the sixteenth century slavery had been redefined as the “natural” condition of “inferior” races. Regardless of their skin color, Moriscos were considered, along with individuals of African origin, fair game for enslavement, while Christians from the north (and conversos, for that matter) were not. As Isidoro Moreno has indicated, Moriscos suffered from the same atmosphere of intolerance as blacks and mulattos, as well as Gypsies, another recently arrived group of racialized others (86; Mariscal 12–13). Many Moriscos, for their part, responded by rebelling, in increasingly well-organized fashion, culminating in the bloody Alpujarras War of 1568–70. By the early seventeenth century, the solution pursued by the Spanish crown would be expulsion. As Georgina Dopico has asserted, the terms of the expulsions of 1609–14 also betray the complications of the construction of racialized identities in Spain. All children under five years of age were separated from their parents and compelled to remain behind in Spain, under the assumption that they had not yet been fully “infected” by Muslim teachings and Morisco culture and might still be saved. For Dopico, this significant provision of the edict undermines the logic of blood purity, as well as the official exclusion of Moriscos from Spanish national identity (190–96). At the same time, there are parallels to be found in the earlier expulsion of the Jews in 1492: just as that measure was deemed to protect the sizable converso population from contamination by those who insisted upon retaining their Jewish faith (Jerome Friedman 12; Netanyahu 1092), here Morisco children would be removed from the contaminating influence of their families and communities. In both cases, there is a noticeable slippage between “biology” and culture in the formulation of race; although race can be passed on from generation to generation through blood, close physical and even cultural contact may also produce an unredeemable contagion of the body (politic). Removing the Morisco contagion would remain a problem for Spaniards. José María Perceval has noted that the physical expulsion of the Moriscos was followed by their metaphorical expulsion from the field of history as well, as

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they were subjected to “an official unremembering” (44–46; see also Goytisolo, Crónicas 185). The ceremony held every January 2nd in the Alhambra Palace in Granada to mark the end of the Reconquest celebrated, paradoxically, the definitive absence of the Moors, not the legacy of their nine-centuries-long presence, so vividly inscribed in the ornately decorated walls of the palace itself. In his popular work The Alhambra, Washington Irving remarks dryly that traditional dances “inherited from the Moors” were also performed that day (839). The place that Spanish Muslims may have been afforded in popular memory—as evidenced, for example, in the centuries-old Festivals of Moors and Christians, in which episodes of the Reconquest are reenacted—most likely only reified, through the annual repetition of performance, their status as a despised enemy always destined to be overcome through military defeat and, finally, to be expelled from Spanish soil (Flesler and Pérez Melgosa 155). While Anthony Marx, following Ernest Renan, asserts that normally the exclusionary violence essential to the formation of the nation-state must be forgotten by all and expunged from the historical record in order to solidify national cohesion (29–32), it might be argued that in the case of Spain, where the victims of exclusion had been “disappeared,” that violence, by contrast, had to be staged and restaged in an ongoing effort to assert an always elusive national unity, founded as it was upon an absence. Year after year, the ferocious Moorish phantasm had to be invoked and exorcised, so that, for a brief period at least, Spaniards might feel as one in their hatred. Yet as Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa astutely observe of the contemporary Festivals of Moors and Christians, the very excess of the reenactments “becomes an index of an underlying doubt” (154). Jacques Lezra encounters a precedent for that “underlying doubt” in his brilliant study of Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language, 1611), the first vulgate dictionary in Europe and a work that is customarily credited with aiding in the consolidation of Spanish national identity. Analyzing a richly complex metaphorical passage in which Covarrubias associates his lexicographical search with the pursuit of the treasures of an “enchanted Moorish woman,” Lezra asserts that the dictionary “serves to express correlative anxieties about external and internal pressures on the nation’s ‘unidad de destino’” (7). Indeed, that notion of a “united destiny” never fully cohered, according to a number of historians, who have characterized early modern Spain as a state, or perhaps more accurately, an empire, without a nation (Marx 42–44). Although the conquest of Granada in 1492 theoretically accomplished the goal of Spanish territorial unity, which had advanced significantly in 1469 with the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, as a rule the Catholic Monarchs had preferred to build upon

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local political institutions rather than replace them with national administrative structures. As John Elliott has noted, “The new Spain was therefore a plural, not a unitary, state and consisted of a series of separate patrimonies governed in accordance with their own distinctive laws” (82; see also Herzog 199; Kamen, Empire 335). While it was certainly the most effective strategy that Isabella and Ferdinand had chosen to employ in order to impose a national allegiance (Elliott 107–8), the persecution and expulsion of religious-cum-racial others could not fully unify the diverse peoples of the Iberian Peninsula, who, isolated from one another by rugged geography, spoke separate languages, enjoyed different customs, and were immersed in divergent local economies. Furthermore, when in the wake of Columbus’s voyage of “discovery” the Catholic Monarchs and their most ambitious successors, Charles V and Philip II, sought to globalize the reach of the empire, they were hard pressed to devote sufficient resources to the creation of national solidarity at home, despite increasing efforts at centralization and pursuit of a politics of homogeneity. Much more than the treasures of conquest—or the treasures of Covarrubias’s dictionary—would be required to accomplish such a task. In his famous Lettres persanes of 1721, the baron de Montesquieu includes a letter from a (fictional) Frenchman who has traveled through Spain and who remarks, in effect, the paradoxical legacy of 1492: “[The Spaniards] have made enormous discoveries in the New World, and yet they do not know their own country; their rivers are not entirely explored, and their mountains hold nations unknown to them” (qtd. in C. Gibson 116). The letter’s reference to mountains populated by “unknown nations,” while certainly evocative of the tremendous regional diversity and geographical isolation that characterized Spain, might also recall ongoing legends concerning the Sierra de Ronda and, most especially, the Alpujarras, areas that were rumored to be inhabited by descendents of Moriscos who had managed to escape the expulsion edict (Irving 836).² But by the end of Montesquieu’s century, national “exploration” would indeed begin to be undertaken by Spaniards. From the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, previous efforts to construct Spain as a uniformly Catholic and ethnically and racially pure entity would be questioned, and the densely layered traces of nine centuries of coexistence between Christians, Muslims, and Jews would be excavated. Thus, as many other modern nation-states were being formed for the first time, Spain embarked upon what might be termed second-wave nation building, with significant sectors of the population promoting an iconoclastic view of the national past (drawing, perhaps, upon centuries of doubts), even as adherents to tradition scrambled to shore up their more hegemonic understanding of history. Coinciding with the loss of colonies in the Americas, this era of

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national “reconstruction” was also accompanied by the compensatory gesture of second-wave colonization, as the Spanish “Africanists” began to advocate pursuit of a new imperial future on the African continent. In this sense, the seemingly peculiar conjunction of obsessions evinced by Domingo Badía/Alí Bey, which I discussed in the Introduction—his insistence upon the splendid cultural legacy of al-Andalus, even as he plotted to bring all of Morocco under Spanish domination—in fact anticipated the later association between Spain’s historical recuperation of the African inheritance and Spanish colonial aspirations in Africa. SECOND-WAVE NATION BUILDING IN SPAIN: INITIAL EXCAVATIONS OF THE PAST, FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE ROMANTIC ERA

Although, as I mentioned in the Introduction, Badía’s narrative foregrounded the Córdoba mosque as uniquely indicative of the rich heritage of al-Andalus, from the late eighteenth century on another national monument would be converted, by Spaniards and foreigners alike, into the signifier par excellence of Spain’s true cultural legacy: the Alhambra. The palace, largely unknown outside Granada, had been neglected for generations and had fallen into a state of decay and disrepair, but in the eighteenth century the Spanish monarchy began to demonstrate interest in restoring and publicizing the monument. In 1730, the Bourbon king Philip V briefly set up court in the Alhambra, and his son the future king Ferdinand VI would not forget the experience. It was during Ferdinand’s rule, beginning in 1756, and subsequently throughout the reign of his brother Charles III, that the newly formed Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts) undertook to “preserve” the Alhambra in the form of detailed illustrations and elevations. The Academy planned to publish the resulting work as the first of a (never completed) series of books on national monuments in Spain (D. Rodríguez 35). One of the earliest artists involved in the project, Diego Sánchez Sarabia, was asked to copy all of the Arabic inscriptions and to acquire their Spanish translations, which were in the possession of a church official in Granada, for they would “contribute a great deal to the illumination of the History of the Nation” (qtd. in D. Rodríguez 36). The Arabist Miguel Casiri was later called upon to undertake translations, and the Academy planned to incorporate a section on the historical background of the Alhambra, drawn from Casiri’s annotated bibliography of Arabic texts (D. Rodríguez 125–28). Plans were also made to include additional monuments from Granada and Córdoba. Interest in the subject was building both locally and abroad, as is evident from the guidebook Paseos por Granada (Strolls

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Through Granada, 1764), gathered in two volumes from periodical publications by Juan Velázquez de Echeverría and others, which featured a running dialogue between a Granadan antiquarian and a foreign visitor concerning the meaning of the Arabic texts that adorned so much of the city’s architecture (CharnonDeutsch, Spanish Gypsy 180). After an Englishman, Henry Swinburne, published a travel narrative in 1779 that included a number of engravings of the Alhambra—effectively trumping the Spaniards—the Enlightenment writer and politician Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was recruited to make recommendations regarding the status of the Academy’s project (D. Rodríguez 282–83). Jovellanos urged those involved to complete the project promptly, but without neglecting to include a rigorous critical apparatus, noting that “the literate world knows nothing of this; why shouldn’t we aspire to be the first to illuminate such an important point in the history of our arts?” (qtd. in D. Rodríguez 283). In 1787, a year after Jovellanos’s report, a preliminary volume was finally published under the title Antigüedades árabes de Granada y Córdoba (Arab Antiquities of Granada and Córdoba) and upon the recommendation of another important figure of the day, the Count of Floridablanca, some 150 different loose booklets of engravings were also sold before the appearance of the final two-volume work, Antigüedades árabes de España (Arab Antiquities of Spain), in 1804 (D. Rodríguez 128, 134).³ Although the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts is usually associated with the propagation of traditional views of Spanish national identity, the importance granted to this project, conceptualized as the founding volume in a series devoted to national monuments, is revelatory. Moreover, the Academy’s engravings would form the basis for many of the depictions of the Alhambra undertaken by the foreign artists who flocked to Granada in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries (D. Rodríguez 9, 50, 134), which often carried the representation of Spain’s past—and present—into uncharted and disquieting territory. Enlightenment-era engravings of the Alhambra undertaken by foreigners depict empty spaces traversed by upper-class tourists, including Muslims, who contemplate the ornamental architecture with a serenely studious gaze (fig. 2; for additional images by James C. Murphy and Jean-Lubin Vauzelle, see Galera Andreu 58, 67, and 75). By the Romantic era, however, artists had repopulated the palace, either with contemporaneous working-class Spaniards, or with the imagined original inhabitants. Girault de Prangey’s view of the Court of Lions (1837), for example, features a reposing sultan with narghile in hand, being served a tray of delicacies by a diminutive black slave (Galera Andreu 119). Henri Regnault’s later painting, the spectacularly gory Execution without Trial under the Moor Kings of Granada (1870; fig. 3) (evidently inspired by the fa-

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2. James Cavanah Murphy (artist) and S. Porter (engraver), A Perspective View of the Court and Fountain of Lions. James Cavanah Murphy, The Arabian Antiquities of Spain. London: Cadell & Davies, 1815. Plate XXXIII. Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

mous massacre of the Abencerrajes),⁴ depicts a black executioner who wipes the blood from his sword after completing a beheading in the Alhambra complex; the mutilated victim lies at his feet. Regnault’s work indicates underneath the signature that it was painted in Tangier, revealing a geographical superimposition not uncommon to Orientalist representations of the era. Many of the most important northern European and North American Orientalist painters, such as David Wilkie, David Roberts, John Frederick Lewis, Samuel Colman, Edwin Lord Weeks, Alfred Dehodencq, and Georges Clairin, as well as Regnault, visited southern Spain before or after traveling to North Africa and the Islamic Near East (Peltre 100–101, 220–23; Weeks 161), and sketches from one side of the Strait of Gibraltar would be incorporated into paintings produced on the other. The acclaimed Catalan artist Marià Fortuny (who is discussed in detail in chapter 3) also drew upon images from his Moroccan albums for the historical 3. Henri Regnault, Execution without Trial under the Moor Kings of Granada (1870). Oil on canvas, 100.7 × 48.6 cm. Photo: Jean Schormans. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

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works he completed in Granada. The practice attests to Orientalist notions of “time travel” (evident as well in Badía’s descriptions of Morocco): movement outside the West also entailed movement back in time, to earlier historical eras (Miller 171–72). Al-Andalus could be re-created in visual works by representing and combining, as in a collage, the architectural remains of Spain with human types and cultural traditions still deemed to be alive and well in North Africa. In this way, Orientalist stereotypes of Arabs and/or Muslims as indolent, predisposed to the indulgence of sensual pleasures, and horrifyingly bloodthirsty could be attributed to the historical residents of Spain as well as to contemporary North Africans. Not all nineteenth-century representations of the Iberian nation, however, associated such stereotypical characteristics exclusively with Spaniards of the past. As Victor Hugo famously claimed in the prologue to his book of poetry Les Orientales (1829), “Spain is still the Orient; Spain is half African” (4). For his part, when the painter Eugène Delacroix visited Andalusia after a lengthy trip to Morocco, he claimed to have “found in Spain everything I had left among the Moors. [. . .] Nothing changes, only the religion” (qtd. in Galán and Henares Cuéllar 67). Many of the Romantic engravings of the Alhambra rework the depiction of reposing sultans of a bygone era by presenting languorous modern-day Spaniards who lean, recline, and slumber against the palace’s graceful columns and exquisitely carved and tiled walls (fig. 4; for additional images by Girault de Prangey, Jean-Auguste Asselineau, and Gustave Doré, see Galera Andreu 122, 126, 165, and 177). Omnipresent guitars and details of clothing function as markers of what José Antonio González Alcantud has characterized as “an equally mysterious ethnicity” (Extraña 109): colorful Gypsies serve as stand-ins (though they rarely have the energy to stand) for the Moorish royalty and sub-Saharan servants of an earlier time. Indeed, many travelers to Granada attributed the Alhambra’s state of neglect to the presumed backwardness and southern sloth of Spaniards. Richard Ford’s travel narratives and guidebooks, for example, are replete with racist invectives that promote foreign intervention in order to save Spain’s abused national patrimony—which in the case of the Alhambra is feminized, in classic Orientalist tradition, when compared to a “beautiful woman” (II: 561). Ford laments: “Sad is this non-appreciation of the Alhambra by the native [. . .] such are Orientals, with whom sufficient for the day is their to-day; they care neither for the past nor for the future [. . .] like them, most Spaniards, although not wearing turbans, lack the organs of veneration, and admiration for anything beyond matters connected with the first person and the present tense” (II: 545; Ford’s emphasis).⁵

4. Girault de Prangey (artist), Bayot (figures) and Monthelier (lithographer), Patio de la Alberca. Girault de Prangey, Monuments arabes et moresques de Cordove, Séville et Granade: Dessines et measures en 1832 et 1833. Paris: Veith & Hauser, 1836–39. Plate XV.

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Other foreign writers of the era, however, present a somewhat more nuanced view of the legacy of al-Andalus. In Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa (published in extracts in France beginning in 1813 [Potocki xiii]), which features a half-Spanish hero who is seduced by his cousins, lascivious Muslim sisters who also delight in an incestuous lesbianism, the complex layering of fantastical narratives confirms even as it ironizes the notion that all Spaniards are in some sense Muslims, Jews, or Gypsies. For his part, Washington Irving, rather than problematizing clichéd associations between Spaniards and “Oriental others,” occasionally valorizes them. Within the first few pages of The Alhambra (1832), Irving describes the Spanish geography as “partaking of the savage and solitary character of Africa” (725), and he avows that “the country, the habits, the very looks of the people, have something of the Arabian character” (726), emphasizing the dark complexions and rugged manliness of the peasants he encounters, who travel as if in Eastern caravans (726–27). Although like Potocki he underlines the murderous nature of the bandits to be found in mountain regions, Irving also finds many praiseworthy characteristics among the Spanish, which he attributes to the Moorish inheritance: “This talent of singing and improvising is frequent in Spain, and is said to have been inherited from the Moors” (728); “this hospitable usage [generosity with food], inherited from their Moslem invaders, and originating in the tent of the Arab, is universal throughout the land, and observed by the poorest Spaniard” (837); “the common people of Spain have an Oriental passion for story-telling” (843). In other chapters of The Alhambra, Irving endeavors to correct “perverse” yet widespread misperceptions of historical figures, such as Boabdil, the last king of Granada, which reify the linkage of Muslims with despotic cruelty (820–35). Irving also exalts the brilliant cultural achievements of al-Andalus and the chivalric traditions of that era (1020–31). For Irving, present-day Spaniards are laudable inasmuch as they have managed to maintain, if only inadvertently, the more noble or poetic of Moorish traits. Spanish writers themselves were hardly immune to the Romantic fervor for geographical and temporal exoticism—indeed, according to Russell Sebold the most seductive form of escapism for Spaniards was Orientalism (103)—and they, too, found a wealth of enticing material in their own national past. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, innumerable historical novels and plays featured Muslim characters. The medieval romance, or ballad, was recuperated and imitated, with the romance morisco enjoying particular popularity, and the publication of translations of Arabic verse helped inspire the new taste for the oriental, a brief poetic form that typically centered on the passion of a Muslim for a Christian, or of a Christian for a Muslim (Sebold 103–4). Spaniards, however, could not help but take these literary fashions personally. As Jo Labanyi has

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incisively observed, “‘Oriental Spain’ was a topos in European and indeed North American Romanticism, but its inflection in the Spanish case is especially complex since the ‘Moors’ and Moriscos are not simply picturesque ‘others’ but raise the central question of the extent to which they are part of the ‘we in the past’ that constitutes national history” (“Love” 232). Although José Álvarez Junco insists that throughout the nineteenth century writers in Spain continued to expel all Muslims from that history (Mater 243–47), in fact many Spanish Romantics demonstrated greater subtlety in their reconsiderations of the past. While derogatory images of Moorish cruelty and sexual predation surface in some of their works, as do Romantic Orientalist commonplaces (such as the impossible love between practitioners of different faiths, occasionally resolved through the capitulation to conversion by the “infidel”), more iconoclastic perspectives may also be present, especially among liberal writers. It is important to remember, moreover, that many artists and intellectuals were forced into exile after the Peninsular War, when the despotic King Ferdinand VII returned to power in Spain (1814–33). As a consequence, according to José María Perceval, “it was logical that these expelled rebels identified with the Moriscos” (47). As Labanyi has shown, in Francisco Martínez de la Rosa’s play Aben Humeya, o la rebelión de los moriscos (Aben Humeya, or the Rebellion of the Moriscos), which appeared in France in 1830 while the writer was in exile (the Spanish version was published in 1836), the Moriscos, like the Spanish Romantics, are portrayed as struggling against monarchical absolutism. The audience is encouraged to identify with the tragedy of their loss, recognizing as well the absence which subtends the construction of a homogeneous Spanish nation (“Love” 238). For Labanyi, the experience of exile enables Spanish Romantic writers to engage in a “radical construction of a ‘border subjectivity’” and to valorize a cultural hybridity rejected by traditional formulations of national identity (“Love” 231). For example, in the Duque de Rivas’s El moro expósito (The Foundling Moor, published in Spain 1834, but also written in exile), the two central characters, Kerima and Mudarra, undertake a multitude of border crossings, as divergent terrains, rather than being carefully circumscribed, are traversed and conflated. Both protagonists are revealed to be of mixed race: the rape of a Christian woman by a Muslim results in Kerima’s birth; Mudarra is the love child of an imprisoned Christian father and Arab mother. Both exhibit androgynous characteristics, and at one point Kerima must cross-dress in order to pass into Christian territory.⁶ Burgos’s barbarism is contrasted with Córdoba’s civilization, but good and evil tendencies are found among Christians and Muslims alike. Although the ending repeats the racial segregation enforced in so many Romantic texts (through the death or separation of the lovers), it is

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significant that Kerima’s conversion to Christianity and her decision to enter the convent may be attributed to the nefarious influence of her fanatical Christian slave. As Labanyi notes, “It is impossible to read Kerima’s renunciation as an edifying Christian end” (“Love” 241). Ultimately, according to Labanyi, it is evident that Mudarra is only able to take possession of his Christian inheritance by suffering the painful loss of Muslim Spain. The text of El moro expósito includes an abundance of footnotes that document the depiction of Moorish history and customs, indicating as well where the author has taken creative license. Labanyi has noted that Rivas relies in particular on the Spaniard José Antonio Conde’s history of al-Andalus, published posthumously in 1820–21 (“Love” 236). A similarly extensive use of footnotes—with references to a variety of contemporary Spanish scholars—can also be found in Martínez de la Rosa’s novel Isabel de Solís, reina de Granada (Isabel de Solís, Queen of Granada, 1837), in José Zorrilla’s poetic narrative Granada, poema oriental (Granada, An Oriental Poem, 1852), and in numerous other literary works with Muslim themes. Furthermore, Manuel Fernández y González, a prolific cultivator of novels based on Hispano-Arabic legends, replete with erudite footnotes, was himself the brother of the renowned Arabist Francisco Fernández y González (Benítez 686). Washington Irving, too, acknowledges his reliance on current Spanish sources, including Pascual de Gayangos, Miguel Lafuente Alcántara, and Conde, in his notes to several chapters of The Alhambra (for example, 824, 830, 870, 1028, 1031).⁷ Through these literary works, many of which reached a mass audience over many generations (Irving’s Alhambra, for example, has never been out of print [Adorno 49]), the assertions of Spanish Arabists are popularized. While glorification of the Muslim past is all too often characterized as a foreign imposition, as a distortion against which Spaniards have always had to struggle, in fact this particular “marketing” of Spain is conceived of by Spaniards at the same time if not before the northern European and North American “discovery” of al-Andalus. It is a process that begins, alongside the rescue of Hispano-Arabic architectural treasures, with late eighteenth-century intellectuals, most particularly with Spanish and Spanish-sponsored Arabists. For James Monroe, the phenomenon can be explained in part through reference to the desire of many Spaniards to participate within the new European (and especially French) Enlightenment, while highlighting the unique qualities of their own history and traditions (36, 44). As early as the mid-eighteenth century, Spanish reformists preoccupied with the larger Western project to modernize agricultural production had sought out the wisdom of their Andalusi forebears. A complete translation of Abu Zakariya Ibn al-Awwam’s treatise on the subject was eventually published in Spain in 1802, and well into the nine-

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teenth century public intellectuals continued to call for a return to HispanoArabic cultivation practices (López García, “Enigmas” 34; Torrecilla 103). Jesús Torrecilla has detailed how eighteenth-century Spanish elites, such as Juan Pablo Forner, hastened to bolster their European credentials by emphasizing the role of al-Andalus in the development of the scientific and technological advances that presumably culminated in Western modernity (99–100). With respect to cultural capital, Spaniards were not only keen to share the splendors of their medieval past with the rest of the world, they also endeavored to demonstrate that al-Andalus had irrevocably altered larger European artistic movements. The theory that the poetry of the troubadours had originated in HispanoArabic verse first emerges in full force during this time period (Menocal, Arabic 79–80); Washington Irving would later relay the idea in The Alhambra, citing Miguel Lafuente Alcántara as his source (1028). Similarly, the notion that Arabic architecture had inspired the Gothic also surfaces in these years; Jovellanos’s involvement in the Alhambra project sponsored by the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts was largely motivated by his desire to prove that “German or Gothic architecture is the legitimate daughter of Arabic [architecture]” (qtd. in D. Rodríguez 283). Andalusi architecture is also viewed as concrete evidence that Spaniards’ ancestors were the first truly enlightened Europeans: an 1839 article in the popular illustrated weekly the Semanario Pintoresco Español, for example, asserts that Hispano-Arabic monuments “prove to the present generation the culture of their progenitors, the enlightenment and progress of those who, masters in all things, gave the first impetus to the civilization of a Europe whose face was clouded by the shadows of the Middle Ages” (Benavides). For their part Romantic authors, according to Labanyi, “[resort] to Spain’s Arab past to elaborate a modern notion of the nation on European lines; that is, one whose structures are based on individual merit and not on birthright” (“Love” 233; Labanyi’s emphasis). Spanish politicians, intellectuals, and writers thus attempted to valorize and mobilize their Andalusi legacy in order to gain a privileged place within the contemporary European community. ARABISM AND THE RECONSIDERATION OF SPANISH HISTORY AND IDENTITY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Even though the Spanish Arabists were largely an elite and isolated group, frequently repressed by censorship or forced to labor under conditions of severe deprivation, sometimes while in exile, over the course of the nineteenth century their work would have a seemingly disproportionate ripple effect throughout Spanish cultural discourse. Indeed, Aurora Rivière Gómez has asserted, quite

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correctly, that the rise in Arabic and Hebrew studies during these years was completely caught up in the construction of Spanish national identity. However, while Rivière Gómez views that identity as constructed against the Muslim and Jewish other, a reconsideration of the pertinent texts suggests that the process was considerably more ambivalent, leading to the formulation of hegemonic as well as alternative conceptualizations of the nation which recognized an incorporation of the other within the self. One of the founders of the Arabist tradition was Miguel Casiri, the Syrian Maronite priest who had been charged with translating the Alhambra inscriptions by the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and who had also been asked by Ferdinand VI to undertake a catalogue of the more than eighteen hundred Arabic manuscripts remaining in the library of the Escorial Palace outside Madrid (Monroe 32–33; López García, “Arabismo” 40; Manzanares 36). Since Casiri had decided to include in the catalogue excerpts from the Escorial texts in the Arabic original and in Latin translation, his work, which was published between 1760 and 1770, became an essential source of information concerning al-Andalus throughout Europe (Manzanares 36). Casiri came to know many Spanish scholars of the era, and he was also an important mentor for a number of younger Arabists, who later occupied university positions (Monroe 33–34). Within the field of Spanish Arabism, firm ideological positions were adopted quite early on. Faustino de Borbón’s history of medieval Spain, published in monthly installments in 1796, was riddled with errors and based on invented documents but managed to exalt the role of the Muslims and the Jews while almost completely ignoring the Christians (Monroe 30–31; Manzanares 46– 47). Of a different intellectual order entirely was José Antonio Conde’s Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España (History of the Dominion of the Arabs in Spain, 1820–21). The first complete history of al-Andalus, Conde’s work was quickly translated into several European languages. Although some later Arabists faulted the book’s scholarly apparatus, it was an admirable accomplishment, given the fact that as a French sympathizer Conde, who had once been director of the Escorial Library, was exiled after the French were expelled from Spain at the end of the Peninsular War and was later denied access to the Escorial’s collection (Monroe 50–53, 57). Even so, Conde’s was the first work to make significant use of Arabic source texts. Moreover, as Bernabé López García has observed, his history “implies a change in attitude within Hispanic historiography by siding with the Arabs through the repudiation of the historical triumphalism which had dominated in Spain for over three centuries” (“Arabismo” 41). Monroe also views Conde’s claim that the native population of the peninsula lived a better life after the Arab conquest as an attempt to justify the more recent

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French invasion that he himself had supported (54)—not the first or last time that the Spanish medieval past would be marshaled to comment on the present. Conde’s history was directed, crucially, toward a popular audience; re-edited throughout the nineteenth century, the work garnered a substantial readership both at home and abroad (Monroe 58). Although he never published on the subject, Conde was also the first to recognize the existence of aljamiada literature (Spanish works of the sixteenth century, written by Moriscos in Arabic script). The phenomenon would be introduced to the larger intellectual community by Conde’s successor, Pascual de Gayangos (Monroe 72). Gayangos studied in France and lived in England for significant periods of time; he would also become the first chaired professor of Arabic in Madrid’s Central University, and served as mentor to an entire generation of Arabists (Monroe 80). His translation of al-Maqqari’s History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (1840–43), which Conde had been unable to consult, is considered one of his most significant contributions to Spanish Arabism. Gayangos also labored to illuminate the complex intertwining of Christian and Muslim culture of the medieval period. His scholarly edition of the collection of early Spanish stories entitled Calila y Dimna, which appeared, significantly, in the Library of Spanish Authors collection, demonstrates that the text derives from an Arabic source (Monroe 74, 79). Gayangos also collaborated with the British architects Jules Goury and Owen Jones on their two-volume study of the Alhambra (1842), which, though it was richly produced and clearly a luxury item, was directed at both specialized and general audiences. Gayangos’s accompanying historical narrative (in English and French) was carefully documented with footnotes, but was written in an engagingly accessible style (Manzanares 93–95, 35; Monroe 68). Gayangos published numerous articles on Muslim Spain in a variety of high-circulation general cultural journals in England. Like Conde before him, he would have great success in reaching a large readership, inside and outside Spain, and did much to alter perspectives on Spanish history (Monroe 69, 71; Manzanares 91). By the second half of the nineteenth century, the work of Spanish Arabists had also penetrated a broad range of scholarly circles in Spain. This trend perhaps originates in 1848, when upon his admission into the Royal Academy of History José Amador de los Ríos delivered an address on Arabic influences on Spanish arts and letters (López García, “Enigmas” 36). A number of conservative academics and public figures subsequently attempted to counter valorization of the period of Muslim rule in Spain, and impassioned debates ensued. The discussions became most heated within the ostensibly “gentlemanly” context of academy induction speeches and responses, and here it is important to remem-

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ber that, as Labanyi has noted, “the role of such cultural institutions [. . .] was not to produce a single, monolithic version of national culture” but rather to delimit the field of “what constituted the nation” (Gender 11). In his 1853 Royal Academy of History admission speech, for example, Duke Evaristo San Miguel praised the work of Conde, which had contributed significantly to the advancement of Spanish historical research, demonstrating that the Arabs had brought civilization to Spain. As Monroe observes of Evaristo’s speech, “Behind all the rhetoric it may be discerned that the efforts of the early Arabists were beginning to broaden the basis of humanistic research so that European countries, and especially Spain, would look to Arabic culture as part of their national heritage” (65). Barón de la Joyosa’s response, however, fell back upon the usual derogatory stereotypes of Muslims as intolerant fanatics, in an attempt to discount any positive assessment of their impact on Spain (Monroe 65–66). Spanish history in the second half of the century, of course, also reflects the dramatic struggles between radically different conceptualizations of Spain’s past, present, and future. Those struggles were both intensified and, somewhat paradoxically, temporarily attenuated through the “distraction” of the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60, which provided an enormous boost to Arabic studies in Spain, and is discussed at greater length later in this chapter. The “Glorious” Revolution of 1868, which deposed and exiled Queen Isabella II to France, ushered in a six-year attempt at democracy, including the importation of a foreign parliamentary monarch and a first stab at forming a republic (1873–74). But the lack of unity among the vast array of political interests and the resulting public disorder condemned these projects to failure. By late 1874 military intervention led to the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the accession of Isabella’s son, Alfonso XII, to the throne. During these years, the (il)legitimacy of the expulsion of the Moriscos was a topic popular with members of the Madrid Atheneum and with new inductees in their academy speeches. As in the Romantic era, it allowed for the thinly veiled discussion of contemporary political controversies as well as a more historically oriented debate, and was all but guaranteed to provoke confrontation. In his 1878 speech of induction into the Spanish Royal Academy, for example, Eduardo Saavedra chose to adopt a relatively moderate pro-Morisco stance, arguing that the analysis of aljamiado texts revealed that the Moriscos were well on their way to assimilation into Christian society. Had they not been “amputated” from the Spanish body politic, “they would have ended up becoming completely incorporated into the mass of the other Spaniards; contributing their strength and vitality to the larger glory of the nation” (Discursos . . . Saavedra 55). However, in his response the conservative Antonio Cánovas del Castillo,

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prime minister during the first six years of the Restoration, insists that compassion for the Moriscos is foolish, for it overlooks “the disadvantages and dangers of their presence in Spain.” According to Cánovas, the Moriscos, who hated and were hated in turn by Christians, would never become integrated into the Spanish nation, and in fact their expulsion, rather than a despotic imposition, was a “democratic” act, responding to the popular will of Spaniards (Discursos . . . Saavedra 66, 74, 86). Although Saavedra’s arguments concerning the Moriscos hint that a full incorporation of liberals into Spain’s new Restoration government would also increase the “glories” of the nation (Perceval 58), Cánovas’s rebuke reveals his profound suspicion of “heterodox” tendencies—and serves as well to characterize his own political machinations as justified by democratic opinion.⁸ While the Restoration eventually brought about the so-called peaceful alternation of political power between Cánovas and the liberal Práxedes Sagasta, Spanish Arabists continued to exchange blows. From the 1860s to end of the century, two particularly colorful figures emerge within the field of Arabism: Francisco Fernández y González, and Francisco Javier Simonet. The former was associated with the liberal Krausist movement, which had a tremendous impact on Spanish intellectual and political life, promoting Spanish modernization through a combination of reason and spirituality, and advocating for educational reform and religious tolerance. Fernández y González labored tirelessly to bring the history and cultural accomplishments of al-Andalus to light, entering much more controversial terrain when he insisted that the “Semitic” inheritance was still palpable in Spain. Simonet, by contrast, was a devout Catholic and anti-Krausist, who dedicated his entire career to advancing the theory that the only notable achievements dating from the period of al-Andalus could be attributed to Christians, or to Muslim converts of strictly “Spanish” origin. The radically different positions of the two men were delimited as early as 1862, when Fernández y González was charged with responding to Simonet’s acceptance speech for a chaired professorship in Arabic at the University of Granada. In his lengthy diatribe Simonet heaps all manner of abuse on the “bloody,” “ferocious,” “fanatic,” and “intolerant” Arabs of al-Andalus (Discursos . . . Simonet 38). He returns on several occasions to fantastical descriptions of the pleasure dens of wealthy Muslims, observing that only Christians have managed to overcome the vices so characteristic of warm climates (Discursos . . . Simonet 40–43). Arabic literature of the period is sensual and superficial; moreover, the women of alAndalus achieved acclaim as poets strictly because poetry comes from nature, and because they were motivated by their desire to seduce men (Discursos . . . Simonet 44). As Semitic peoples are incapable of reflection and analysis, accord-

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ing to Simonet, few scientific discoveries were made. The most notable accomplishments of the era can be attributed to “Spaniards by race” (Discursos . . . Simonet 68, 72). Fernández y González’s response to these assertions can perhaps only be read as ironic when he briefly refers to Simonet’s zealous Christian faith and the “supremely benevolent charity” that he brings to his work (“Contestación” 134). Throughout the remainder of his reply he mostly chooses to ignore Simonet’s claims. Instead, on several occasions Fernández y González highlights the superiority of medieval Arabic civilization, even over modern-day European societies: “In the Middle Ages Arabism is the most notable political force and is as extensive as any other from earlier times. Modern history, concentrated in Europe, appears less brilliant” (“Contestación” 132). Yet Fernández y González argues that within Spain, Arabic studies are crucial not only for an understanding of the past but also so that present-day Spaniards might come to know themselves: “Circumscribed within Spain, [Arabism] is not an objective element that should be addressed, as in Europe, as a comparative aid; internalized even in the components of our blood, it is the nosce te ipsum of the examination of the vicissitudes of our race” (“Contestación” 133–34). Fernández y González would make similar claims elsewhere, asserting that the Hebrew and most especially the Arabic influence had left its faithful imprint on Spain’s “great history, on its customs, on its language, and even on its bloodline”; the blood of ancient sultans and Berber princes coursed through the veins of noble Spanish families, who were the scions of “Arab, Maghrebi, and African peoples” (Plan ix). That the author distinguishes each of these three groups in his enumeration is significant, for he recognizes the diversity of peoples who had emigrated from the African continent to the Iberian Peninsula during medieval times—including the many enslaved and free sub-Saharans who would come to live in both Christian- and Muslim-controlled regions—and he affirms as well the ongoing presence of their descendants in Spain. Fernández y González’s declarations must have either enraged or bemused Simonet, who had dedicated his life’s work to proving the endurance and overwhelming superiority of the “Spanish race” throughout the period of al-Andalus. Over the years, Simonet would gain some converts to his view that only “Spaniards” (as he understood that term) were responsible for al-Andalus’s contributions to world civilization. Many others on the peninsula, however, would prefer to adopt perspectives similar to those of Fernández y González. Alejandro Díez Torre has documented the Madrid Atheneum’s frequent sponsorship of talks concerning the legacy of al-Andalus, such as the 1884–85 conference cycle entitled “Influencia de la raza semítica en la civilización europea” (In-

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fluence of the Semitic Race on European Civilization). According to Díez Torre, Atheneum members carried their arguments in support of Spain’s racial and cultural ties to North Africa out into a larger public, even advocating for a common national identity on both sides of the strait (249–54). After his 1883 trip to Morocco, the anthropologist Manuel Antón y Ferrándiz, who occupied a chaired professorship in Madrid’s Museum of Natural History and Central University, and also taught in the Atheneum, where he served for a number of years as librarian, argued that Spaniards’ European inheritance was insignificant compared to the influence of the “Libyan-Iberian” and “Syrian-Arabic” race, culture, and character (which he did, however, distinguish from sub-Saharan races and describe as improved through a Christian tempering) (Goode 80–89, 155–58; Antón y Ferrándiz 5–6, 12–14). Even so, the immoderate Simonet is all too often characterized—incorrectly—as fully representative of nineteenthcentury discourses on national identity as well as of Spanish Arabism.⁹ Scholars who are most familiar with the intellectual milieu, such as Bernabé López García and James Monroe, suggest instead that he was considered something of a crank by many of his colleagues. After all, he was an Arabist who loathed Arabs. In fact, members of the Academy of History voted not to publish his major work on mozárabes (Christians in Muslim territory), which besides including the customary derision of Arabs also grossly inflated the importance of Mozarabic achievements (Monroe 87–88; the book only appeared posthumously, in 1897). By contrast, Fernández y González’s book on the mudéjares, the Muslim counterparts of the mozárabes, was awarded a prize and published by the same Academy (Manzanares 122; López García, “Arabismo” 42 n. 24). Simonet’s ideas reached a wider audience when he wrote for the popular presses—but so did the perspectives of considerably more liberal Arabists such as Fernández y González. López García has underlined the remarkable extent to which Spanish Arabists’ analyses of the medieval past were consumed by a large variety of reading publics from mid-century on (“Mundo” 433), and although there was sometimes a direct correlation between ideology of author and journal, such was not always the case. Indeed, the editors of relatively high circulation general cultural magazines such as the Ilustración Española y Americana, sought to expand their audience base (and thus their earnings) by providing a diversity of perspectives, and publication of articles by both Fernández y González and Simonet, as well as their disciples, effectively popularized the various scholarly academies’ promotion of debate. It is also important to note that the illustrated magazines, which contributed so much to the construction of Spanish identity during this time, included frontispiece engravings replete with national symbols (Riego Amézaga, Construcción 156–60), and Hispano-Arabic monuments such

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as the Alhambra and Seville’s Giralda tower enjoyed a prominent position alongside more hegemonic Christian and imperial structures and icons.¹⁰ By the last decades of the century, the questioning of the received wisdom of Spanish history had begun to filter out into a variety of other public spheres, inflecting the coding of particular cultural spaces and objects. For example, the national network of archaeology museums, affiliated with a central museum in Madrid, which was established by royal decree and with clearly articulated didactic goals in 1867 (Marcos Bous 25), facilitated the production of different narratives concerning the nation’s past. Margarita Díaz-Andreu has noted that artifacts uncovered in the 1840s in Madinat Ilbira in Granada, the first known archaeological excavation of an Islamic site in Spain, were apportioned between Madrid’s National Archaeology Museum and Granada’s own sister institution, an arrangement that “provides eloquent testimony to the significance attached to these finds and to the way they were incorporated into accounts of national history” (75). In 1870 an additional archaeological museum was added on the grounds of the Alhambra, which underwent its first systematic restoration as a result of being declared a national monument (Bolaños 245 n. 119). Granada had become a tourist destination not simply for an international elite but also for upper- and middle-class Spaniards, who enjoyed greater opportunities to travel due to the development of the national railway system, and who perhaps took to heart the sonorous popular expression, “Whoever hasn’t seen Granada, hasn’t seen anything” (“Quien no ha visto Graná, no ha visto ná”). Those who could not afford the trip might still experience Granada and the Alhambra virtually, through the panoramas (enormous 360-degree paintings displayed in special structures in the round) and other visual spectacles that flourished in urban centers in Spain at the time, capitalizing on the vogue for Islamic-era monuments (Pinedo Herrero 153, 167, 197). In Madrid, the first rooms of the central museum’s cramped temporary home on the city’s outskirts featured HispanoArabic architectural elements, such as the exquisite arches from the Aljafería in Zaragoza, ceramics, and other Andalusi objects (Marcos Bous 47, 64, 66), which were thus granted a certain primacy, if only unintentionally, thanks to spatial constraints. However, when in 1895 the collection was moved to its current home in the imposing new National Library-Museum complex on Recoletos, Hispano-Arabic antiquities were again assigned a privileged place around a beautiful iron-and-glass-roofed patio, with a working reproduction of the fountain from the Alhambra’s Court of Lions in the center. Contemporary magazine coverage of the museum’s inauguration was illustrated with a photograph of this hall (fig. 5; Cabrera Lafuente 130–31). The care that museum staff devoted to the study, display, and explanation of Andalusi pieces is evident from the ambi-

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5. Comba, “Madrid: Reapertura del Museo Arqueológico Nacional—‘El patio árabe’—Sala de antigüedades Hispano-Mahometanas.” Ilustración Española y Americana. 15 July 1895: 21. Widener Library, Harvard College Library.

tious Museo Español de Antigüedades (Spanish Museum of Antiquities) journal project. Coordinated by the museum’s curator and eventual director Juan de Dios de la Rada y Delgado and published in eleven volumes between 1872 and 1880, the Museo includes detailed analyses of a wide variety of archaeological treasures culled from museums throughout Spain; the articles are illustrated with engravings and full color lithographs produced by Spanish artists (fig. 6). Leading Arabists, archaeologists, and historians, such as Francisco Fernández y González, Eduardo Saavedra, Francisco Codera, and Rada y Delgado himself (Simonet was apparently not invited to participate), worked to bring the Islamicera artifacts and their creators to life, repeatedly emphasizing their significance for the understanding of national history and culture.¹¹ Even Spanish historical painting, which was heavily supported by the government through the establishment of official expositions and generous prizes and had functioned largely to promote a hegemonic view of national history, had begun to reflect the debates that raged within the various academies by century’s end. Dramatic paintings of the expulsions and other forms of religious intolerance, which were shown (and sometimes awarded prizes) at the national exhi-

6. (Above and right) Francisco Fernández y González, “Pinturas sobre materias textiles.” Museo Español de Antigüedades. Ed. Juan de Dios de la Rada y Delgado. 11 vols. Madrid: Fortanet, 1872–80. VI: 462–63. Marquand Library, Princeton University Library.

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7. Gabriel Puig y Roda, Expulsión de los moriscos (1894). Oil on canvas, 5.34 × 3.34 m. Museu de Belles Arts de Castelló.

bitions, and in many cases acquired by the Prado Museum, challenged viewers to reassess historical commonplaces. Gabriel Puig y Roda’s Expulsión de los moriscos (Expulsion of the Moriscos, 1894; fig. 7), for example, portrays the victims of the expulsion with great compassion, emphasizing the human tragedy of the scene, thus presenting “an interpretation slanted towards a negative, critical apprising of the event” (Pérez Sánchez 32). A similar condemnation of Spanish national “glories” is evident in Emilio Sala’s Expulsión de los judíos de España (Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, 1889), which underlines Torquemada’s crazed fanaticism, as well as in Vicente Cutanda’s gripping treatment of the massacre and decapitation of Jews before an open-air crucifix in Toledo, in ¡A los pies del Salvador! (At the Feet of the Savior!, 1887) (Reyero 97, 99; Díez 454–56, 418– 21). An event that in earlier decades would have inspired a triumphalist panegyric, the Reconquest battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, is, in Marceliano Santamaría’s 1892 rendition, a horrifying scene of xenophobic cruelty: as Carlos Reyero observes, the Christian “hero,” Álvar Núñez de Lara, “pounces with his steed upon a chain of defenseless black slaves, who perish, brutally crushed beneath the horse’s hooves” (99). Without a doubt, new perspectives on Spain’s past and, by extension, on the nation’s identity, had begun to seep into the public discourse. Those perspectives would have to be assimilated somehow—or rejected, usually with enough vehemence to betray an underlying anxiety.

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RACIAL PANIC IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

It is not difficult to understand why a fervent Catholic like Simonet would have adopted such an intransigent view of the medieval past. Liberal Arabism could be seen as launching yet another attack on a Spanish Catholic Church that had been beleaguered since the onset of Enlightenment ideals, most particularly over the course of the nineteenth century (as evidenced, for example, by disentailments of church property, convent burnings, and the massacre of priests in the 1830s). José María Perceval has also noted that the condemnation of the expulsion of the Moriscos voiced by some Arabists coincided with the heated debates concerning religious freedom in Spain (55), which were officially resolved, much to the dismay of conservatives, when the Constitution of 1869 guaranteed freedom of worship. In the first edition of his Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (History of Heterodox Spaniards, 1880–82), Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo lauded the “noble and salvational intolerance” that had produced the expulsion of Jews and Moors (xlvii). Although in this and subsequent editions he was forced to acknowledge that racial mixing had occurred in Spain, he always insisted that Catholicism had functioned to “cleanse” the nation of “the iniquitous law of races” (Goode 73–74). Indeed, there is much more than orthodoxy at stake in this controversy, and once again it is clear that ostensibly religious issues are intimately tied up with conceptualizations of race. Spanish Arabism provided ready support for the foreign emphasis on Spain’s African legacy, which in many cases may have functioned to valorize or at least romanticize the “Oriental nature” of Spaniards (as in the case of Irving), but just as often could fall into xenophobic condemnations of Spanish indolence and barbarism (as evident, for example, in the work of Ford and a host of others). In fact, it was the racial as much as the religious makeup of Spaniards that was of concern, and the controversy over Spain’s past history and present identity in the second half of the nineteenth century also coincided with the rise to dominance of pseudobiological notions of race and “scientific” racism throughout Europe. For this reason, Fernández y González’s racialized “baiting” of Simonet is particularly intriguing. Spaniards were hardly unfamiliar with racist derision, and the Orientalist disparagements that had emerged during the Romantic era harmonized well with centuries-old attacks on Spaniards via the Black Legend. A number of the operative stereotypes were shared by both discourses. The Black Legend, propagated through a plethora of literary works and political essays circulating throughout Europe and, later, the Americas, had been fed in large part by Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevíssima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Short Account of the

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Destruction of the Indies), which was published in Seville in 1552, translated into English and a number of other languages by the end of that century, and reedited time and again over the following centuries. Las Casas’s work catalogues Spanish atrocities in the New World, describing scenes of horrific massacres in vivid detail, as well as the avarice of the conquistadors. Moreover, other Spanish writers of the era, such as Hernán Cortés’s personal chaplain Francisco López de Gómara, also appeared to confirm Las Casas’s assertions (C. Gibson 17; Maltby 29). Given that England was eager to share in the riches of the New World, Las Casas provided a convenient moral justification for British intervention in the colonial project: the English, unlike the Spanish, would colonize with benevolence. Countless other tracts provided evidence that Spain’s treatment of the indigenous population in the Americas was not an isolated phenomenon: the Iberian nation’s persecution and expulsion of Muslims and Jews, and, even more to the point, the repression of Protestants in the Netherlands and within Spain itself by the Inquisition, all attested to the cruelly fanatic nature of Spaniards. Yet their apparent religious zeal masked infamy; priests themselves wallowed in sin, and Sir Francis Drake wrote of Spanish America that there was not a town or village “where (among other Spanish virtues) not only prostitution but also the filth of Sodom, which should not even be named among Christians, commonly remains uncensured” (qtd. in Maltby 42). Ultimately, however, Spain’s status as an internal rather than external other was particularly disturbing for those northern Europeans who aspired to create a global empire akin to Spain’s. They responded, as Bryan Scoular has so vividly explained, by characterizing Spain as “both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’—as the worst of all possible worlds” (46; Scoular’s emphasis). In the introduction to his anthology of anti-Spanish texts, Charles Gibson suggests that it is an anachronism to associate the word “black” in the phrase Black Legend (coined in 1912 by Julián Juderías) with questions of race (10). Yet already in 1907 the Africanist and geographer Gonzalo de Reparaz had asserted that the “legend” referred not simply to Spaniards’ cruelty, avarice, fanaticism, and stupidity but to their “ethnic inferiority, to call it once and for all by its true name” (Política 11). From the start the Black Legend was a racialized concept; it appropriated the Spaniards’ own obsession with pure bloodlines (Mariscal 19), which Etienne Balibar has bluntly characterized as “a product of the disavowal of the original interbreeding with the Moors and the Jews” (Balibar and Wallerstein 208). As Anthony Pagden has shown, Las Casas himself turned the tables on the efforts of the conquistadors to compare themselves with the “crusaders” of the Reconquest or even with the vaunted figure of the Cid, revealing instead that “far from being Christian knights, or the heroes of the ballads and chivalric

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romances which seem to have been their favourite reading, [the conquistadors] were themselves ‘Moorish barbarians’” (Pagden, “Introduction” xxxix; see also Todorov 166). Throughout his writings Las Casas employs terms more characteristically associated with racial and religious others—“savage,” “barbarian,” “wild,” “devil,” “infernal”—to describe the Spanish conquerors, who are also frequently animalized. If Las Casas casts the Spaniards as barbarous due to their brutally inhuman behavior, hinting that some Moorish legacy might be discernible, later writers would not hesitate to emphasize the “racial contagion” that Spaniards had suffered, both before and after 1492. For example, one of several letters in which Spain is discussed in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, mentioned above, hints at the role of the Inquisition in constructing a false illusion of racial purity and underlines the newest threats to that purity in the Americas. As the Frenchman who pens the missive observes of Spaniards, “They usually base their pride upon two entirely sufficient things. Those who live in continental Spain or Portugal feel extremely superior if they are what are called ‘Old Christians,’ that is, if they are not descended from those persuaded in the last centuries by the Inquisition to become Christians. Those who live in the Indies are no less flattered to consider that they have the sublime merit to be, as they say, white-skinned [. . .] Spaniards who are not burned seem so attached to the Inquisition that it would be spiteful to take it from them” (qtd. in C. Gibson 114–15). The Black Legend made it impossible for Spain to escape the association with uncivilized otherness. Spaniards’ obsession with blood purity was obvious proof of their impurity. Ironically, the “modern” effort to establish a uniformly white and Christian identity in the eyes of other European nations by expelling Jews and Muslims was itself deemed a barbaric act (Álvarez Junco, Mater 328). Furthermore, in the Americas, Spaniards were also considered barbarians for their inhumane treatment of indigenous peoples. If, however, Spaniards came to view those peoples as belonging to a common humanity and, as King Ferdinand’s law of 1514 had encouraged them to do (Kamen, Empire 354), they began to marry and form families with native women (not to mention with women of African descent), the Spanish would also be characterized as tainted with primitivism. In the Romantic era, even those foreign writers who adopted a relatively more positive outlook on Spaniards hastened to underline their racially mixed identity. In his chapter of The Alhambra entitled “Relics and Genealogies,” for example, Washington Irving included a detailed note which explained that because of extensive intermarriage in the medieval period a modern-day Spanish woman could claim to be the descendant of a Moorish princess (870). Spaniards had attempted to capitalize on Romanticism’s presumably greater open-

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ness to alterity, highlighting the nobility of their historical legacy by arguing that a number of the treasures of European culture, such as troubadour poetry and Gothic architecture, had originated in Muslim Spain. But by the second half of the nineteenth century, preexisting racist attitudes had been “legitimized” throughout Europe and the Americas by a host of new scientific discourses: biology, with its emphasis on graded changes between the animal kingdom and the human sphere; comparative anatomy, which keyed brain development to craniological measurements; anthropology, with its institutionalization of the correlation between skull dimensions and racial hierarchies; and Darwinism, which located the “races of man” along an evolutionary scale (Stepan, Idea). It is hardly surprising that elsewhere in Europe the so-called Arabist theory of troubadour poetry was thoroughly discredited at this time (Menocal, Arabic 82). Given the preponderance of scientific “evidence,” it was inconceivable that the splendid cultural achievements of the West had been bequeathed by the Arabs. Indeed, the racial connotations of the Black Legend carried a special force by the end of the nineteenth century. The Spanish-American War sparked a proliferation of Black Legend texts in the United States, and the New York Times published an article entitled “The Spanish Character” in April 1898 which observed that “Spain is situated between two continents, the most advanced and the most backward, the most illumed and the darkest—Europe and Africa. [. . .] There are, then, in the Spanish national character, dwelling side by side, and most of the time blended into one, these two forces—civilization and barbarism” (qtd. in Kagan, “From” 25). It would be considerably more difficult for Spaniards to gain a place of honor within the Western community by mobilizing their African inheritance, which was now viewed as simply immobilizing. Within Spanish cultural discourse, where the impact of the new scientific legitimization of race was no less dramatic than elsewhere in Europe and craniological study was particularly popular, a number of strategies were adopted to disavow the negative association with racial otherness. Many Spaniards, like Simonet, sought refuge in the notion of an ongoing Spanish racial stock that had successfully avoided mixing with the Muslim invaders, whose numbers were also often minimized. Three principal groups were assumed to make up that “white” inheritance: the original Iberians, the Romans (who invaded in the late third century B.C.E.), and the Visigoths (who conquered the peninsula in the fifth century C.E.). The anthropologist Federico Olóriz y Aguilera subtly discounted any Andalusi influence and insisted on the whiteness of the Spanish race, arguing that even though racial mixing had occurred in the past, the cranial measurements of Spaniards had remained largely unchanged since Roman times (Goode 65–68). Exaltation of the Visigothic legacy had begun in the late

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Middle Ages, when Christian writers attempted to legitimate the royal tradition that would reach its apogee in the reign of Isabella I by tracing a direct line of descent back to the Visigothic kings (Weissberger 96–97; Douglass 99). The “Neo-Gothic theory” was thus essential to what I have termed first-wave nation building in fifteenth-century Spain. It was also crucial for the establishment of blood purity for all those who hoped to prosper in Spanish society from the sixteenth century on, and families were particularly anxious to find a genealogist who could prove—or fabricate, for a price—their unsullied descent from the Goths. As the Spanish intellectual José Blanco White observed from his exile in England in 1822, even the most humble of Spaniards believed that “the least mix of African, Indian, Moorish or Hebrew blood taints an entire family through the most distant generation” (183). Although the statutes of blood purity were abolished in the nineteenth century, obviating the legal imperative to proclaim Gothic ancestry, traditional prejudices could not be so readily altered. Moreover, Neo-Gothicism received a fresh impetus from the rise of the “Aryan myth” throughout Europe, popularized through Gobineau’s notorious Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, which first appeared in French in 1853–55. How better to counter the derogatory association of Spaniards with Africans, which had become commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century, than by insisting that Spanish bloodlines were in fact Germanic? The notion of an “Aryan” Gothic inheritance was taken up with enthusiasm by Catalan nationalists late in the century. Here it is crucial to emphasize that the racialization of national identity during this period in fact entailed the racialization of national identities, as a multitude of competing identity claims emerged with the rise of peripheral national movements and even separatist agendas in Spain. Some intellectuals, such as the anthropologist Manuel Antón y Ferrándiz, viewed separatism itself as a racial trait linked to the North African/ Semitic inheritance (12). Ironically, however, in an effort to achieve discursive supremacy with respect to the question of race, many supporters of peripheral nationalist causes endeavored to distance themselves from—often while shifting other Spaniards closer toward—a more or less spatially and temporally remote African origin. In Catalonia, Pompeu Gener’s book Heregías: Estudios de crítica inductiva sobre asuntos españoles (Heresies: Studies of Inductive Criticism on Spanish Concerns, 1887) reminded readers that Catalans had quickly regained their territory from the Muslim invaders and had enjoyed close ties with northern Europe throughout the Middle Ages. The Catalan race, unlike the rest of the “Semitic” Spaniards, had thus managed to maintain its superior and essentially Aryan Gothic character. Gener’s ideas were seconded by Joachim CasasCarbó in his 1891 “Estudis d’etnografia catalana” (Studies in Catalan Ethnog-

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raphy) published in L’Avenç, and subsequently countless articles in the popular nationalist press characterized Castilians as “Semites,” “Moors,” “Bedouins,” or “Peninsular Berbers” (Marfany 186–201). Public talks by figures such as Joan Bardina were devoted to opposing a European Catalonia to an African Spain (Marfany 199). By century’s end, Barcelona’s mayor, the medical doctor Bartomeu Robert, entered the fray armed with “purely scientific” evidence, presenting the first of a series of lectures on the Catalan race at the city’s Atheneum in March 1899. Before a packed audience, Robert detailed his craniological analyses of skulls from diverse regions in Spain, explaining that three racial types could be found on the peninsula: the center of the country was populated by a mix of the round-headed brachycephalics, who inhabited the Atlantic area, and the long-headed dolichocephalics (considered farthest from African paradigms and associated with racial superiority by physical anthropologists of the time) characteristic of the Mediterranean coast. The Madrid press reacted with anger if not derision to Robert’s lecture, and the polemic became so heated that the remainder of the series had to be canceled (Santamaría). The pseudoscience of race had by now thoroughly infiltrated the politics of identity in Spain. The Basques, whose territory had never been conquered by the Muslims, had been particularly precocious in their articulation of a racialized and exclusivist form of national identity. Suspicious of all other Spaniards’ claims that they had not mixed with Muslims and Jews, since the sixteenth century Basques had engaged in both rhetorical and legislative forms of one-upmanship. Several Basque regions had limited immigration to those who could prove “blood purity,” and expelled from their territories any resident unable to do so. In the sixteenth century as well, the “Tubalist myth”—the idea that the Basques descended directly from Noah’s grandson Tubal, who had migrated to northern Spain—began to circulate, lending credence to the notion that Basques were not only the purest race on the peninsula but also the oldest Christian community (Stallaert 72–73; Douglass 99). Later, by the early nineteenth century, proponents of vascoiberismo (from Wilhelm von Humboldt on) would posit that Basque was actually the same language as that spoken by the Iberians before the Roman invasion. Once again, it was a theory that appeared to bolster the notion of the primacy and purity of the Basque language and people. Yet as Joseba Gabilondo has shown in his analysis of the Orientalization of Basques (“Imagining”), notions of otherness always subtend efforts to establish the Basques as premodern European “whites.” Humboldt’s initial suggestion that the Iberians had originated in North Africa and were related to modernday Berbers, for example, was further pursued later in the century by anthropologists and linguists, who identified numerous lexical similarities between the

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Basque and Berber languages, thus coming to favor “the thesis, considered very probable at the time, concerning the kinship of Iberians and Berbers, which was even supported by seeking out an affinity between Basque (that is to say, the descendant of the Iberian language, according to Vascoiberists), and the Hamitic [i.e., North African] languages” (Caro Baroja 132 n. 79). The Basque anthropologist Telesforo de Aranzadi y Unamuno summarized the current state of knowledge in his doctoral dissertation (published in 1889), concluding that the Basques were most likely a mix of Iberians and Berber-related groups, Finns and Laplanders, and Germanic peoples.¹² Although he condemned Gobineau and the racist appropriation of anthropological studies, Aranzadi later abandoned his own radical conceptualization of Basque hybridity in order to support the notion of an ages-old Basque uniqueness, which was more amenable to many nationalists (Zulaika 56–62). Later on, one long-favored theory of Basque primordialism would finally be “confirmed” thanks to Aranzadi and his disciple José Miguel de Barandiarán, who in the mid-1930s discovered several skulls in a Basque cave that seemed to indicate a direct line of evolution from Cro-Magnon Man to the Basques (Zulaika 25, 84–88). Interestingly however, this particular interpretive maneuver only managed to push back into the realm of prehistory the association between Basques and Africans, since both the scientific and the popular imaginary tended to assume that “primitive men” had originated in the neighboring continent. For his part, the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party, Sabino Arana, rejected vascoiberismo as well as any other theory that might posit a common ancestor for Basques and other Spaniards, and insisted that Basque racial origins remained a mystery (Zulaika 64). Arana advocated a program of strict “racial” segregation of the Basques and those he termed maketos (non-Basque Spaniards), who were immigrating to the Basque Country in record numbers at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet curiously, Arana would eventually propose a new version of Tubalism that again established an ancient link between Basques and Africans, as we shall see in chapter 2. Furthermore, as William Douglass has observed, Arana’s formulation of a radical Basque nationalism also “underscored the Basques’ shameful dilemma in being colonized by Spain” (104). By decrying internal colonialism, separatists risked equating their own avowed nations with other areas colonized by the Spanish government— namely, during this period, Africa. Ironically, then, several of the ongoing efforts to establish the purity of Basques during these years only worked to confirm the fundamental importance of the African connection. A number of Galician writers and intellectuals also labored to establish their own racial purity and superiority vis-à-vis other Spaniards, and the nationalists in particular, much like the Basques, found themselves inadvertently solidify-

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ing their negative association with Africans. The conservative-minded novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán rejected Galician nationalism, but her work was suffused with the racial (and racist) theories so in vogue among the scientists whose works she avidly consumed (Dendle), and she was particularly preoccupied with disassociating the inhabitants of her own homeland from the savage Spaniards of the south. For example, in her 1889 treatise on Spanish women, although she affirms the concept of Spanish national unity, she also distinguishes the “Celtic” Galicians and Asturians from the Basques, and all of the latter from the “African or Semitic” Andalusians and residents of Madrid, whose lascivious dances evoke “the barbaric Oriental legend of Salomé” (60–69). Although Galician nationalism never enjoyed the same degree of popular support and political clout as Basque and Catalan nationalisms, a number of impassioned activists did begin to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century. Two such figures are the poet Rosalía de Castro, who helped to transform Galician into a prestigious literary language and who exalted Galician peasants as “the immortal reserve of the patriotic essence” (Máiz 180), and her husband Manuel Murguía. Drawing upon previously existing but weakly expressed myths of national origin, Murguía characterized the Galician race as essentially Celtic in the “Discurso preliminar” (Preliminary Treatise, 1865) of his five-volume Historia de Galicia (History of Galicia), which would become the foundation for the ideological configuration of Galician nationalism well into the twentieth century. Much like Pardo Bazán, Murguía elevated the “Aryan” Celts of Galicia above the remainder of Spaniards, categorized as inferior “Semitic people.” His separatist discourse, however, moved well beyond Pardo Bazán’s comfort zone, for he condemned the central government’s imposition of a foreign, Semitic, culture on Galicians (Máiz 178–81; Beramendi 20, 22–23). The suggestion that Galicia had, in essence, been colonized by Madrid was, potentially, a politically potent argument for independence. Indeed, as is evident in several chapters in this book, metaphors of colonization would be strategically employed by a number of nationalist separatist movements in Spain throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, as I mentioned above, given the fact that the Spanish government did in fact embark upon colonization in Africa during these years, those metaphors also threatened to facilitate the identification of further similarities between Africans and Galicians (or Basques, or Catalans . . .). As Pío Moa (a present-day advocate of centralist nationalism) puts it, “They portrayed them as effectively inferior for having accepted ‘slavery’ for so long.” Moreover, throughout Europe the Celtic “race” was never so self-evidently “Aryan” as Murguía’s work might imply. The British anthropologist John Beddoe, for example, who wrote several

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influential books on European racial history, linked the Celts to “Africanoid” peoples in North Africa via Cro-Magnon Man, proposing a pattern of migration from Africa to Ireland (Stepan, Idea 89, 103). As Nancy Stepan has noted, “Beddoe was able to solve the racial history of Ireland, and at the same time suggest a ‘lowly’ origin for the Irish” (Idea 103). That within this racialized context the Irish were collapsed with the Spanish is made vividly clear in an illustration of the era (attributed by Liz Curtis to the highly influential American periodical Harper’s Weekly) that shows three male profiles: the “Anglo-Teutonic” man in the center, the “Negro” on the right, and the “Irish Iberian” on the left, with the latter two showing similar degrees of “prognathism,” the short forehead and extended jawbone that according to physical anthropologists marked those “races” as a “missing link” to the apes. The caption below indicates, “The Iberians are believed to have been originally an African race, who thousands of years ago spread themselves through Spain over Western Europe. Their remains are found in the barrows, or burying places, in sundry parts of these countries. The skulls are of low prognathous type. They came to Ireland, and mixed with the natives of the South and West, who themselves are supposed to have been of low type and descendants of savages of the Stone Age, who, in consequence of isolation from the rest of the world, had never been out-competed in the healthy struggle of life, and thus made way, according to the laws of nature, for superior races” (Curtis 55; also reproduced in Dyer 53). The Galicians, like the Basques, had banked upon their geographical isolation as guarantor of their racial purity and superiority over other Spaniards. But this illustration reveals that in a Darwinian context isolation could be considered irrefutable proof of atavism, and exaltation of a prehistoric lineage (such as the celebrated Basque–Cro-Magnon connection) might only function to underline one’s “savage” nature.¹³ Try as they might, it was difficult if not impossible for many Spaniards effectively to proclaim their whiteness during the era of “scientific” racism. In the always-marginalized Canary Islands two diametrically opposed constructions of national identity would emerge, as A. José Farrujía and María del Carmen del Arco Aguilar have explained. Although Manuel de Ossuna and Juan Bethencourt acknowledged that a number of races had passed through the archipelago, creating a population of mixed origins, they argued that, as on the Iberian Peninsula itself, the dominant strain was Celtiberian. Eager to reaffirm the unity between the islands and a centralized (i.e., Castilian) Spain, which would secure their native Tenerife’s privileged political and economic situation, they denied the significance of any African contribution. Furthermore, the Canarian bourgeoisie had fully absorbed European theories of evolution and race, and they had no desire to be associated with the neighboring continent to the

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south, particularly while Spain was initiating a number of colonial projects there. Later, however, a Franco-era archaeologist and anthropologist from Cádiz, José Pérez de Barradas, laid the foundation for the reconceptualization of Canarian identity as Saharan and sub-Saharan in origin, a shift that would eventually facilitate the development of a radical separatist movement on the archipelago (to which I turn in the final chapter). Barradas also viewed Andalusia as sharing a common ancient culture with the Canaries, but as we have seen he was certainly not the first person to underline the Andalusian-African connection. Indeed, Andalusians, unlike other Spaniards, were hard pressed to aspire to a European identity, since from the perspective of most other Spaniards, and Europeans as well, they were simply moros (Stallaert 71). It is not surprising, then, that as a politicized Andalusian nationalism began to cohere (significantly later than in other parts of Spain), it drew upon many of the ideas articulated in earlier decades by liberal Arabists, most of whom were themselves Andalusian. The central figure in this discourse is Blas Infante, considered the founder of Andalusian nationalism. By insisting that the Reconquest was actually a conquest, which supplanted a civilization that had been unrivaled throughout Europe, only to inflict centuries of misery on Andalusians, Infante provided an even more powerful historical argument for the characterization of Andalusia as colonized by Madrid (Stallaert 95; Egea Fernández-Montesinos 99–101). In his first work, Ideal andaluz (Andalusian Ideal, 1915), Infante struggled with the “African stigma,” noting that the CroMagnon remains so often linked to the “primitivism” of the neighboring continent had been found throughout all of Spain, while citing craniological analyses to affirm that Andalusians were Caucasians—though not, he insisted, Visigoths (Stallaert 91). Later, however, Infante preferred to accentuate the racial hybridity and religious heterodoxy that characterized Andalusia both before and after the 1492–1609 period, arguing that many Moriscos had managed to remain in Andalusia after the edict of expulsion (Stallaert 95–96). As Alberto Egea FernándezMontesinos has observed, Infante had emphasized decades earlier than his much better known compatriot Américo Castro the notion of convivencia: that within al-Andalus, diverse groups of people had managed to live side by side, often relatively peacefully, thanks to an essentially Andalusian practice of tolerance (Egea Fernández-Montesinos 81–82).¹⁴ Infante communicated these ideas through literary texts as well as political essays. Egea Fernández-Montesinos points out that in Infante’s play Motamid, último rey de Sevilla (Motamid, the Last King of Seville, 1920), the Andalusi protagonist is characterized as being opposed to religious fanaticism and tolerant of a wide range of different faiths and races, explaining that “the construction of an Andalusian imaginary itself

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is founded upon a pride in ethnic impurity and the fragmentary nature upon which the Andalusian community is based” (Egea Fernández-Montesinos 91, 93). The Andalusian nationalist project that was shaped in accordance with Infante’s inclusive vision differed radically from the policies of racist exclusions advocated by other nationalists in Spain, most notably Sabino Arana: the Andalusian electoral program of 1931 would go so far as to state that “in Andalusia there are no foreigners” (Stallaert 96). Although a number of nationalist movements in Spain accepted the dominant European association of “degeneration” with racial hybridity, and thus labored to confirm and maintain racial purity, other significant figures such as Infante would espouse more iconoclastic views, valorizing racial mixing as reinvigorating. As will become evident in the following section and later in the book, both perspectives would have an impact upon the regenerationalist and neocolonialist (Africanist) movements in Spain, which sought to respond to the loss of empire (the majority of the Spanish American colonies had gained their independence in the 1820s, and Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines would follow in 1898), and to related widespread perceptions of the Iberian nation’s decadence. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the anxieties provoked by the loss of empire were also assuaged through the alternative discourse of Hispanidad, which sought to “sublimate” the question of race even as it subsumed peripheral nationalisms. Spaniards, eager to reaffirm their role on the world stage, emphasized their “brotherhood” with all their ex-colonial subjects, grounded in a shared language and religion, while the grandiloquent phrase “spirit of the race”—all but an oxymoron, given the racial theories of the time—began to gain purchase. In this way, the concept of Hispanidad neatly elided the question of “biological” race while exalting the profound “family ties” that bound all inhabitants of the former overseas possessions to the Spanish nation. This was of particular importance given the ongoing anxieties over the racial makeup of the few remaining colonies, Cuba in particular. Even after the loss of those colonies in the Spanish-American War of 1898, a number of influential intellectual figures such as Miguel de Unamuno and Ramiro de Maeztu would continue to promote the discourse of Hispanidad. Unamuno, for example, declared in 1903 that “it seems to me that in South Americans Spanishness is transmitted not so much through blood as through language, the blood of the spirit, through which they potentially receive an entire form of thinking and conceptualizing, along with popular and traditional customs and habits” (qtd. in Sepúlveda Muñoz 334; see also Goode 328–29). Although Unamuno’s views on African “races” and their impact on the peninsula were extremely inconsistent (as we shall see later in this chapter, and again in chapter 2), throughout his life he did maintain a clear and

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ostensibly antiracist position on the question of Hispanicity, and continued to insist as late as 1933 that whites, Indians, mestizos, and mulattos all formed one “spiritual race” joined by a common language (qtd. in Sepúlveda Muñoz 335). The establishment in 1912 of the “Day of the Race,” celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world on October 12 (the date of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, as well as the day of the Virgen del Pilar, patron saint of Spain), attests to the widespread influence of this particular construction of identity. Moreover, the emphasis on the great unifying power of one language—Castilian—as well as the apparent effort to bypass pseudobiological conceptualizations of race, endeavored to delegitimize the peripheral national movements that threatened further to compromise the solvency of the nation during these years (Sepúlveda Muñoz 323).¹⁵ However, it is crucial to recognize that even when “spiritual” formulations of race appeared to dominate in Spain, they never managed to dislodge biological understandings; from the early modern era on, notions of blood legacies have always circulated throughout Spanish cultural discourse. AFRICAN COLONIZATION AND THE NEGOTIATION OF THE SPANISH RACE

While the events of 1898 are generally assumed to have provoked the intense crisis over the loss of empire, as well as the searching debates concerning the nation’s identity, in fact many Spanish intellectuals were acutely aware of their image as “decadent” well before the turn of the century. The Iberian nation was still reeling from the first massive wave of decolonizations in Latin America when France initiated a colonial campaign in Algeria in 1830, threatening Spanish interests in the region and ushering in a new era of European imperial expansion in Africa that seemed fated to seal Spain’s reputation as a nation in decline. Yet as Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, and Italy all came to compete for overseas possessions, Spanish politicians and intellectuals engaged in a decades-long polemic over the “regenerative” value of embarking on new colonial enterprises in Africa; the gesture was clearly considered compensatory. Moreover, nineteenth-century European colonial endeavors were routinely justified through reference to the responsibility of “superior races” to share the benefits of civilization with “inferior races”—what Rudyard Kipling would later infamously term the “White Man’s Burden.” Pro-colonialist Spanish discourse reveals a desire to shoulder some of that “burden” in order to affirm the nation’s “whiteness” and its membership in the larger European community. As the poet Gaspar Núñez de Arce would put it, “In order to ‘enter’ Europe with dignity [. . .]

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it was essential for us to pass through Africa” (qtd. in García Figueras, Recuerdos 42). At the same time, Spaniards often appealed to their geographical, historical, cultural, and even racial affinity to Africa and Africans in order to argue that Spain was far better suited than other European nations to colonize the neighboring continent. Thus, much as Spanish scholars of the Enlightenment era and beyond had attempted to secure a place of privilege within Europe through reference to the legacy of al-Andalus, Spaniards would now seek to legitimize their participation in the European colonial project by emphasizing their unique relationship to Africa. Given the racial politics of the era, however, it was a strategy that was not without significant risks. For as long as Spain had held enclaves along the North African coast (including Melilla, from 1497, and Ceuta, from 1688), ostensibly to protect the nation’s southern coastline and facilitate safe passage through the Strait of Gibraltar, these enclaves were almost constantly under attack by the local population surrounding them. Usually, the conflicts were resolved through small-scale military interventions and/or diplomatic means. But after France’s audacious invasion of Algeria, and particularly after Morocco briefly became involved in that colonial war in 1844, support for more aggressive incursions into the Moroccan terrain began to build in Spain, and attacks upon the enclaves as well as other acts of defiance could now be seen as warranting a full-fledged military response. Moreover, significant numbers of impoverished Spanish farmers had begun to immigrate to France’s new colony (by 1859 there would be fifty thousand Spaniards in Algeria), and many preferred to see this labor power recuperated through the establishment of a new Spanish-run “promised land” in Morocco (C. Alonso 65). For their part, however, the British wished to secure their own Gibraltar-based control of the strait and viewed Spain’s designs in North Africa with suspicion. Thus when a Spanish consular agent was assassinated in Morocco in 1844 and Prime Minister Narváez’s government was on the verge of declaring war, Great Britain intervened to pacify the two parties (Pedraz Marcos 45–46). In response to that situation, writer and Arabist Serafín Estébanez Calderón scrambled to publish his Manual del oficial en Marruecos (Text for the Officer in Morocco, 1844), with the explicit goal of instructing Spanish leaders as well as general readers about Spain’s history of involvement in Morocco and the current status of the country, so that well-informed decisions might be made concerning future military campaigns. Estébanez Calderón (who was Cánovas del Castillo’s uncle, and would later become Simonet’s teacher) drew upon the worst stereotypes of Moroccan barbarism, indolence, and lasciviousness in urging Spain to undertake the “saintly mission” of civilizing the neighboring country (52–53, 94–97). Notwithstanding its misleading title, Estébanez Calderón’s book was far from a

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reliable manual for Spanish military officials. Indeed, as the author himself indicates in the prologue, the work was based not on direct observation but rather on preexisting texts, a number of them centuries out of date and of doubtful veracity. But members of the Spanish army, cognizant of the opportunities for advancement that a successful war would afford, quickly realized the importance of gathering first-hand information on Morocco. A number of officers and scholars were commissioned to study the country’s topography, prepare maps, and report on social and military structures, as well as analyze French colonial war strategies in Algeria (Morales Lezcano, Africanismo 82–83; Morales Lezcano, “Pedro” 62; García Figueras, Recuerdos iv). On the floor of the Congress, too, support for imperial expansion into Morocco and other parts of Africa was gaining strength. The conservative politician Donoso Cortés is often considered the first “Africanist,” for he was an enthusiastic proponent of Spanish colonization in the neighboring continent, appealing to grandiloquent notions of the nation’s historical destiny. In an 1847 speech to the Congress, Cortés insisted that Spain’s survival depended upon decisive action in North Africa, not only to reaffirm its greatness but also to prevent France, which was working its way northward from Algeria, from closing in on the Iberian nation. Unlike Estébanez Calderón, who clearly wished to declare Spain’s superiority over savage Morocco, Cortés asserted in this same speech that Spaniards would be much more successful in colonizing Africa than the French had been, precisely because of their situation half-way between civilization and barbarism: “Between the barbaric and primitive customs of the African, are the Spaniard’s customs, at the same time primitive and cultured [. . .] between the fatalistic Islam of the African and the French philosophical Catholicism is Spanish Catholicism, with its fatalistic tendencies and oriental vestiges” (Cortés 35–36). As we shall see, Cortés’s characterization of Spain’s uniquely hybrid nature—and concomitantly unique capacity for the colonization of Africa—would be echoed by a number of Africanists in the second half of the century. During the 1840s tensions also arose over the future of the nation’s possessions in the Gulf of Guinea (modern-day Equatorial Guinea). Ceded to Spain by Portugal in the San Ildefonso and Pardo Treaties of 1777–78, the islands of Fernando Po and Annobón had still not been colonized by the Spanish. The British, meanwhile, actively seeking to abolish the slave trade, found Fernando Po’s geographical and climatic characteristics ideal for monitoring slavers’ ships, as well as for developing commerce in palm oil, and entered into a series of negotiations with Spain beginning in the 1820s. Finally, in 1841, Narváez agreed to sell the island, but when his political opponents vigorously objected to the plan, he was forced to withdraw the offer (F.-Fígares Romero de la Cruz 67–71; Carrasco

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González, “Guinea” 120). The episode makes clear that from early on, Spain’s colonial interests in Africa were not simply limited to the North. According to Henry Kamen, it was at the time of the Catholic Kings that “the African dream entered into the vocabulary of Spain’s empire” (Empire 33). Centuries later, in order to justify their cause, Spanish Africanists frequently cited the last will and testament of Isabella I, in which she enjoined her successors “that they never cease conquering Africa and fighting for the faith against the infidels” (Flores Morales 28). Isabella is often presumed by historians to be referring exclusively to North Africa, but it is important to remember that the queen had also had designs on the Guinean region. Already in the fourteenth century, the Castilian king had asserted to the Pope that “the Kingdoms of Africa are of our conquest,” and when in the following century Portugal began actively trading in slaves and gold all along the Atlantic coast of Africa, an intense rivalry ensued between the two Iberian powers. During the Castilian War of Succession (1474–79) Isabella sought to secure her status as legitimate heir to the Castilian throne (against her niece and the Portuguese king’s fiancée, Juana de Beltraneja), but she also insisted on Castile’s longstanding rights to “Africa and Guinea.” In the treaty of Alcáçovas which ended the conflict, however, Isabella was forced to trade her claim to Guinea for the Castilian throne and the Canaries (Harmon). It is significant, then, that once a Spanish expedition arrived in Fernando Po in 1843 to officially occupy the island, they changed the name of the capital city from Clarence to Santa Isabel, evidently in homage to both the soon-to-be crowned adolescent queen Isabella II and her illustrious antecedent. By the late 1850s, more ambitious colonial endeavors were undertaken in the Gulf of Guinea (F.-Fígares Romero de la Cruz 71–72; Carrasco González, “Guinea” 121), and for his part the prime minister, Leopoldo O’Donnell, would soon become directly involved in imperial action in Morocco as well. Journalists were by now openly promoting military intervention in North Africa to stave off the French threat—and to copy France’s imperialist designs. Here, too, we see how new ideas concerning Spain’s history and identity, first advanced by Spanish Arabists, inflected even more popular formulations of a neocolonial project in Africa. For example, in a series of articles published in El Diario Español in 1858, and republished in book form that same year, Ruperto de Aguirre acknowledges that after the expulsion, the Arab people “bequeathed to us their civilization, sciences and arts, and their chivalrous customs.” But he insists that they lost those qualities “upon mixing with the innumerable races that populated Mauritania [North Africa]” (qtd. in Sevilla Andrés 80). Aguirre thus distinguishes between the civilized Andalusis of Spain’s medieval past and the present-day North Africans; although many of the latter could trace their families back to al-

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Andalus, they had besmirched their lineage in the intervening centuries. Here Aguirre provides pseudobiological explanations for the idea, supported even by some of the Arabists who had exalted the legacy of al-Andalus (including, for example, the pioneering José Antonio Conde) that the Andalusis expelled to North Africa had fallen into a state of “deplorable ignorance” over the centuries (Monroe 52). For Aguirre, of course, it was necessary to highlight the clear “difference” of present-day Moroccans in order to validate their conquest by Spain. Once that difference was established, he could urge his government to invade the Moroccan Empire: “Let’s imitate France [. . .] in the conquest and colonization of Algeria [. . .] let’s not allow the French Empire to completely wall us in” (qtd. in Sevilla Andrés 80). The opportunity to undertake such a mission would soon present itself. In August 1859, local tribesmen near Ceuta destroyed a stone border marker bearing the Castilian arms, and sabotaged construction of a new Spanish guard post; skirmishes ensued. Not surprisingly, given the years of rhetorical buildup, Spanish sentiment in favor of a Moroccan campaign was now widespread. Shortly thereafter, the death of Sultan Muley Abd-er-Rahman was announced, and when negotiations for reparations consequently stalled, O’Donnell had little difficulty gaining approval for military action from the Congress, which declared war on October 22. Spanish troops were shipped to Ceuta, and over the next several months, under the command of O’Donnell and leadership of generals Prim, Zabala, Ros de Olano, and Echagüe, they successfully advanced toward Tetuán, although not without experiencing significant difficulties and losses (Serna 178–82). By March 23, Spaniards had occupied Tetuán and defeated the Moroccans in the Battle of Wad-Ras, the last stronghold remaining before Tangier. Great Britain, which reportedly had intervened on behalf of the Moroccans throughout the conflict, then pressured both parties into peace negotiations, which concluded with the Treaty of Tetuán on April 26, 1860. The war (which I discuss further in chapter 3) had been immensely successful in boosting national spirits among Spaniards, who felt confident that their country had regained a position of respect alongside other European powers (Pedraz Marcos 60). Even so, most Spanish sources on the subject insist that the costly conflict yielded relatively few material gains, despite the fact that, as Alfonso de la Serna observes, for Moroccans the terms of the treaty were both economically and psychologically devastating (183–86): occupation of Tetuán and authority over customs revenues until a war indemnity of 400 million reales could be paid off; expanded borders for Ceuta; control of the Atlantic coast enclave of Santa Cruz de Mar Pequeña (Ifni, which was not actually occupied until 1934); a commercial agreement allowing Spain access to Moroccan ports, fishing rights, and

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other advantages; and permission to establish a mission in Fez (Abun-Nasr 302; García Figueras, Marruecos 81–82). Although in their analyses of the war’s goals historians customarily cite the speech in which O’Donnell claimed he was pursuing the restoration of national honor and not conquest, it is evident that a wide range of Spaniards, from common citizens to the queen herself, had entered the conflict with much greater ambitions, namely, the colonization of some portion of Morocco beyond the enclaves. They could not help but feel disappointment at the end results. In the royal palace, Isabella II, who had pledged her jewels for the cause and had taken to heart her predecessor Isabella I’s last expressed wish that Spain continue the Reconquest into Africa, was dismayed by Great Britain’s insistence that Spain abandon Tetuán. Spanish troops finally left the city two years later, in May 1862, after Moroccans pledged their jewels, and a British loan enabled Morocco to cover a percentage of the indemnity, which would not be paid in full for another twenty-five years (Abun-Nasr 302–3; Serna 186; Sevilla Andrés 171). Meanwhile, on the streets of Spain the phrase “a great war and a measly peace” had begun to circulate (Pedraz Marcos 60–61). For many, the war had done much to incite, but little to satisfy, the desire for conquest in Africa. Indeed, the war would prove to be a foundational event for Spanish Africanism. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the Africanist movement functioned to unite a wide group of intellectuals, politicians, military figures, businessmen, and missionaries, often with divergent interests, in the colonial endeavor. Most, however, would come to reject the use of the term “conquest” in favor of a more “modern” rhetoric of economic and cultural development. Perhaps most surprising is the enthusiastic participation of liberal Arabists in this project. These included, for example, Eduardo Saavedra, who was an active member of the several pro-colonial organizations that were founded during these years (such as the Society of Africanists and Colonialists) and who in 1877 helped to write the statutes for the Spanish Association for the Exploration of Africa (López García, “Arabismo” 53; Goytisolo, Crónicas 192). Yet the Spanish government itself had demonstrated that the 1859–60 Spanish-Moroccan War (known in Spain as the “Guerra de África,” or African War) was in no way considered at odds with ongoing reconsiderations of the legacy of al-Andalus. In fact, by royal decree the Arabist Emilio Lafuente Alcántara—another fervent proponent of the profound influence of the Andalusi period on the Spanish character, customs, and language—was sent to Morocco during the conflict to track down any texts related to medieval Spain. Upon his return, Lafuente Alcántara published a catalogue documenting some one hundred volumes, a work that later earned him a seat in the Academy of History (López García, “Ara-

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bismo” 52, “Enigmas” 37–38). It is important to note here that after taking up his academic post in Granada in 1856, Fernández y González had complained in a letter to Pascual Gayangos of the dearth of Arabic manuscripts remaining in the city (López García, “Orígenes” 287). Presumably, he could not help but be pleased by the fact that the Spanish-Moroccan War might facilitate the study of al-Andalus among Spanish scholars. In fact, whether or not they shared the racist ideas that underlay much of the support for the war, Spanish Arabists recognized that their country’s colonialist involvement in North Africa would do much to advance their own professional interests. As Fernández y González himself exulted in his 1861 outline for a new book series of Hispano-Arabic authors, the war “has contributed in no small measure to awakening interest in these studies” (Plan xi). Decades later, Eduardo Saavedra would continue to emphasize the vital importance of well-trained Arabists in his speech at a major Africanist event at the Alhambra Theater in Madrid in 1884. Spanish colonizers and settlers in Morocco would need to be conversant in the language, and Moroccans who so desired should be provided a quality education in their native tongue (Pedraz Marcos 250). Fernández y González’s statements in favor of Spain’s colonization of North Africa reveal some of the ways in which many Spaniards managed to reconcile that project with more liberal interpretations of the nation’s past. Here we witness the emergence of the multivalent trope of “blood brotherhood,” which would be employed by many successive generations of Africanists. In his speech at the inauguration of the Spanish Anthropological Society in 1869, Fernández y González describes the vicissitudes of the Semitic race, which had enjoyed a precociously brilliant youth but was now “weak, exhausted, and almost mortally wounded,” suffering from a premature fall into decrepitude (Discurso . . . Sociedad 49). Fernández y González is clearly influenced by the theories of racial degeneration in vogue at the time,¹⁶ yet he views this decline not as an unavoidable natural process but as a tragedy that Spaniards, who had benefited from the tutelage of this onetime guiding light of civilization, had the obligation to remedy (Discurso . . . Sociedad 50). Fernández y González suggests that the Semitic race might be brought back to life through the very forms of mixing that, as he himself had argued on any number of occasions, had proven so fruitful for Spaniards in the Middle Ages: “Yes, in the commerce and communication of races, no less than in the precious grafts of the vegetable world, and in syntheses of all types, toward which both Art and Science tend in their development, is seen the true progress of the world” (Discurso . . . Sociedad 52). Unlike much of the racial “science” of the era that abhorred miscegenation (which was itself often associated with degeneration), or that only advocated the deliberate “whitening” of native

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populations, Fernández y González saw multifaceted racial and cultural mixing as regenerative, as a means not only to counteract the processes of degeneration but also to advance the cause of humanity. Indeed, in later decades, as Joshua Goode has shown, Spanish anthropologists from across the ideological spectrum would argue not only that Spaniards represented a “racial alloy” but also that “the power of admixtures actually superseded those of racial purity” (37). Thus, if it was impossible for Spanish scientists to maintain that they had preserved a vaunted “blood purity,” they would seek to shift the very terms of the larger European debates concerning degeneration and racial health. While many Spanish Africanists contributed to this project, some were more anxious than others to clarify the precise nature of the racial identity—the “blood brotherhood”—that Spaniards and (North) Africans shared. Such was the case with the prolific writer, politician, and “regenerationalist” Joaquín Costa, a central figure in the development of Spanish Africanism as it evolved into an increasingly more ambitious enterprise. By all accounts, Costa delivered an electrifying speech to an overflow crowd of fifteen hundred at (appropriately enough) the Alhambra Theater in Madrid in March 1884, an event sponsored by the newly formed Spanish Society of Africanists and Colonialists to mobilize support for the colonization of Morocco (Pedraz Marcos 242). Like Fernández y González, Costa argued that the Moroccans were not “abject” but rather “in decline,” a long-term consequence of Spain’s “criminal” act of “brutal fanaticism,” the edict of expulsion. The nation now had a moral duty to restore this population, which had once contributed so much to the glory of Spain, to its ancient splendor (“Intereses” 159–60, 162, 169, 182). (The transcript of this speech indicates that this latter point met with thunderous applause from the audience [“Intereses” 162].) Moreover, Costa argued explicitly that Spaniards and Moroccans were destined to live together like brothers, because they did indeed share a “blood brotherhood” (“Intereses” 144). Unlike Fernández y González, however, who apparently valorized past and present forms of broad racial diversity, or even Manuel Antón y Ferrándiz, who emphasized the dominance of the (white) “Libyan-Iberian” and “Syrian-Arabic” races in Spain, Costa evidenced discomfort with the characterization of Spaniards as akin to any of the “darker” races of Africa. Rather, he was very precise in his description of the common “Ibero-Berber” racial stock that was to be found on both sides of the strait: the primordial population, dating back to ten or fifteen centuries before the Christian era, was a blond-haired, blue-eyed race of northern invaders, and here Costa noted that a third of the population of Morocco was blond. In medieval times, according to Costa, the dominance of that race in Spain would only be strengthened, since the Berbers, not the Arabs, had always been the princi-

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pal conquerors and settlers of the Iberian Peninsula throughout the era of alAndalus (“Intereses” 145). Notwithstanding such pointed qualifications, Costa would later be criticized by another committed Africanist, Gonzalo de Reparaz, for carrying the idea of Spanish-African blood brotherhood too far. While Reparaz fully acknowledges that kinship, he also observes that the “civilizing mission” presupposes the ethnic superiority of the colonizers, and Costa’s claims of consanguinity “would disqualify us from the task of schoolmasters and regenerators of our African neighbors.” Astutely, Reparaz characterizes as a “doubleedged sword” the Africanist strategy of proclaiming that precisely because of its biological connections to Africa, Spain was ideally suited for the colonization of the neighboring continent (Política 271). For his part, Costa further contributed to that Africanist strategy by supplementing his pseudobiological arguments in favor of Spain’s promotion of modern development projects in North Africa—which he explicitly distinguished from outdated attempts at conquest, such as Domingo Badía/Ali Bey’s—with notions of geographical determinism that expanded upon Cánovas del Castillo’s famous claim that Spain’s natural frontier was the Atlas Mountains in Morocco (Costa, “Intereses” 163–65; Pedraz Marcos 145). Costa observed that Spain and Morocco each formed one-half of a larger geographical entity. They were mirror images of one another, with snow-capped mountains on either end (the Pyrenees and the Atlas), and a strait flowing in the middle, like a door that joins two rooms of one house (“Intereses” 143–44). Spain and Morocco shared the same climate, plant life, and agricultural seasons and products. Throughout the ages, Spaniards had been assimilated with no problem into Moroccan society, and for their part, Moroccans had desired to become Spaniards. Even the Cid, Spain’s national hero, had moved back and forth effortlessly between the two cultures (“Intereses” 150). Spaniards and Moroccans were joined by biological and ecological destiny. Costa’s remarkably vivid metaphors corporealize the geographical: We will not find a single fiber in our bodies, nor a sentiment in our souls, nor an idea in our minds, nor a cell in our brains, nor a puff of air in our atmosphere, nor a furrow in our soil, which doesn’t bear the mark of those Berber and Oriental races that made of the Peninsula a shining beacon in the middle of the Dark Ages, and whose immortal spirit still circulates like a subtle warmth, like an impalpable breath, through all of our nerves, and moves our arms and commands our will; and if it is true that Spain, because of its geology and its flora, is linked with Africa and not with Europe, the Spanish people, because of their psychology and culture, must seek out the birth of civilization

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and the elevation of their spirit on the other side of the Strait rather than on the other side of the Pyrenees. It could be said without exaggeration that just as for natural history Africa begins in the Pyrenees, in terms of human history, for all Spaniards, Africa begins in the soles of their feet and ends in the hairs of their head. (“Intereses” 160)

As we shall see throughout this book, similar notions of geographical determinism and blood brotherhood—as well as a similarly passionate discursive style— would permeate Africanist rhetoric well into the twentieth century. Although Costa was a master rhetorician, he soon grew impatient with the fact that few of the Africanists’ dramatically articulated ideas had become reality. Throughout the last several decades of the century, Costa worked tirelessly on detailed projects to establish a wide variety of commercial outposts in Morocco and the Saharan territory to the west (claimed for Spain as a result of Emilio Bonelli’s 1884 expedition). He promoted similar projects for Spain’s possessions in the Gulf of Guinea, which had grown in size thanks to the efforts of the Basque explorer Manuel Iradier and his collaborators. While it is true that for most Spaniards “Africa” meant “North Africa,” as I mentioned earlier, Spanish Africanists did not limit their sights to that more familiar terrain; they were as enthralled as other European and American scientists, adventurers, and businessmen were with the prospect of staking a significant claim in the heart of the “Dark Continent.” What is perhaps most surprising, however, is that Spaniards would also invoke the idea of Spain’s biological and geographical destiny in order to advocate for the colonization of sub-Saharan Africa, as I discuss in detail in chapter 2. For many Spanish Africanists, all of Africa was fated to be inscribed with Spain’s imprint. Yet Costa grew more and more disillusioned by the Spanish government’s (quite specifically, Cánovas del Castillo’s) failure to capitalize on seemingly viable opportunities in Africa. The situation in Cuba—the effort to retain the last vestiges of Spain’s original empire—had become a much more pressing priority. According to Costa, Spaniards slept soundly, dreaming of their beloved Antilles and Philippines, while Africa, and indeed the entire planet, was apportioned out among other nations (Reconstitución 36). After Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War, Costa effected a stunning about-face, arguing that the Cid should be locked up in his tomb, never again to sally forth on a mission of conquest, and abandoning completely the Africanist cause (Reconstitución 20). In a series of speeches presented at the end of 1898, published in book form in 1900, and characterized, as always, by an overblown rhetorical style, Costa condemned the very association between Spaniards and Africans that only a few

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years earlier he had exalted. Spaniards suffered from a “quasi-Moroccan backwardness” and had been treated “in the same way as Tagalogs, like an inferior race” (Reconstitución 11, 17). Deploring the “Africanization” of Spain, Costa emphasized the need for a new and more vigorous “expulsion”: “The Africa which has now invaded us and which now must be expelled, is no longer exterior but rather lives inside, within ourselves and our institutions, in our surroundings and in our way of being and living” (Reconstitución 219). A complete Europeanization of the nation must follow, for Spaniards were, in fact, white Europeans: “We are tired of suffering Equatorial African customs, laws and procedures, and we are ashamed of having suffered them for so long. The leaders seem to have forgotten that we are white and that we adjoin Europe” (Reconstitución 18). Costa’s explicit reference to Spaniards’ essential whiteness would appear to betray uneasiness, not simply over the nation’s definitive loss of empire and the failure during these years to establish its substitute in Africa but also over the increase in racist anti-Spanish tracts circulating as a result of the Spanish-American War. Costa suggests that championing Spain’s African character was no longer an effective means of promoting the Iberian nation’s unique capacity to participate in the modern colonization of Africa alongside other European nations. Now, it simply functioned to confirm that Spain was undeserving of a place at the European table. And in fact, Costa’s exhortation that Spaniards “shed their skin” (Reconstitución 261)—chilling when read literally—also reveals an awareness of the performative nature of national identity. Costa’s own chameleon-like rhetoric suggests that Spaniards could choose strategically to “color” themselves as more African or more European, in accordance with the ever-shifting backdrop of local and global contexts. RESTORING AMBIVALENCE

Costa’s dramatic ambivalence, which has remained unremarked by critics and historians, is in reality characteristic of many Spanish reflections upon the fraught relationship between Spain and Africa throughout the entire modern era. Those reflections have been “flattened out” by Hispanists, presented largely in one-note terms, so that even the complexities of Costa’s literary contemporaries, who were so obsessed with questions of national identity, have been elided. The “decadent” modernists who wax poetic on their “Moorish blood,” such as Manuel Machado and Francisco Villaespesa (with his preference for Arab-style clothing), are dismissed as dreamy escapists or faulted for their presumed complicity in the “foreign” manufacture of Andalusian clichés.¹⁷ On the other hand, the overwhelming critical emphasis on the so-called Generation

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of ’98’s elevation of Castile to the status of sublime distillation of the national essence generally fails to take into consideration the conflicted fear and loathing of the “African within” that sometimes subtend those formulations, and that emerge as well among subsequent proponents of Europeanization, such as José Ortega y Gasset. For example, Ortega y Gasset confessed in a letter to Miguel de Unamuno, “In some moments I feel ethnic shame, shame in thinking that for centuries my race has lived without contributing the slightest thing to the human project. We are Africans, Don Miguel” (qtd. in Bouzalmate 288). For his part, in some of his writings Unamuno seemed unduly anxious to denigrate or even deny the legacy of al-Andalus. In a published debate with Ángel Ganivet, for instance, he asserted, “I hardly believe in so-called Arabic civilization and I consider their passing through Spain the greatest calamity that we have suffered,” while in a later installment he insisted that Spain’s different invaders never “penetrated to the depths of the race” (Ganivet, Idearium 189, 211). But the Granadan Ganivet, who saw himself as literally embodying the rich mix of peoples who had populated the Iberian Peninsula, humorously suggested that by excising them Unamuno had effected a savage dismemberment, leaving him with little more than a pair of legs to stand on (Ganivet, Idearium 192). Ganivet is representative of the many writers of the era who preferred to acknowledge and even affirm the vital importance of Spain’s African-Islamic past (I return to Ganivet in chapter 2). In fact, a number of writers generally associated with traditionalist conceptualizations of national identity, including Unamuno himself, left behind an extraordinarily contradictory body of work. As Elena Delgado has observed, Unamuno’s famous essay on Europeanization promotes a conservative understanding of the Spanish “essence,” even as it prompts readers to question the hierarchical opposition of “modern Europe” to “old Africa” (“Nación deseada” 210, 217). Moreover, in this same essay, the author of the eminently canonical poem “Castilla” also characterizes Spaniards as Berbers (Monroe 248), an idea he takes up again in a poem entitled “Salutación a los Rifeños” (Greeting to the Riffians), which asks, “Are we Moors in the mist? / Exiled Riffians?” before affirming again the brotherhood of North Africans and Spaniards (or perhaps in this case, Basques): “You are my brothers, yes, you are my brothers!” (qtd. in Djbilou, “Marruecos” 125–26). (Is Unamuno, like the early Costa, simply distinguishing between the Arabs he disparages and his “brothers” the Berbers?) Similarly, Azorín, whom Inman Fox characterizes as “perhaps the most persistent of all the Castilian-centric interpreters of Spanish reality” (132), in fact published several considerably more “ex-centric” works, such as his essay “España y África” (Spain and Africa, 1917), in which he insists, “We cannot think of Africa

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without thinking of Spain. [. . .] Inversely, we cannot think of Spain without thinking of Africa” (Azorín 446). Azorín observes that as far north as Burgos the Spanish landscape is African, and he repeats Cánovas del Castillo’s and Joaquín Costa’s assertion that Spain’s natural frontier is the Atlas Mountains. He also notes the ongoing presence of Arabic customs throughout southeastern Spain. And he, too, plays Spain’s European identity off the nation’s African inheritance, concluding that “the future of Europe is in Africa; Spaniards’ closest brothers are across the Strait, on this side of the Atlas” (Azorín 451). Mary Lee Bretz’s recent and encyclopedic reconsideration of the Spanish modernist movement has been the first to document the extent to which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors recognize the complexity of the nation’s ties to the neighboring continent (112–234). Her book provides a long-overdue shift away from the traditionally monolithic treatment of literary production of the era. Bretz’s work, however, is relatively exceptional. Although over the past decade there has been a notable surge of interest in the relationship between Spain and Africa, the tremendous ambivalence that characterizes so many of the relevant cultural texts has yet to be fully acknowledged. Rather, a number of recent critical works on the subject may also be read “symptomatically,” for by ignoring or discounting that ambivalence they, too, reveal ongoing anxieties concerning Spanish identity. Eloy Martín Corrales’s beautifully produced book La imagen del magrebí en España: Una perspectiva histórica siglos XVI–XX (The Image of the Maghrebian in Spain: A Historical Perspective, Sixteenth–Twentieth Centuries), is a fascinating case in point. Drawing upon his extensive personal collection of Spanish representations of Moroccans, from chocolate boxes to political cartoons, Martín Corrales reproduces a wealth of visual material—nearly 850 images, out of several hundred thousand that he claims to have viewed (27). Given the high quality of the reproductions and the wide variety of cultural ephemera included, the book is an essential resource for scholars working in this area. But the author’s project is clear: to demonstrate that Spaniards are unquestionably European, since they have also produced predominantly derogatory representations of Moroccan others.¹⁸ Martín Corrales insists that the illustrations he studies be situated squarely within a larger European tradition (23), arguing that “the Spanish case has transpired and transpires in close parallel with what is observed on a European and Western scale. It couldn’t be otherwise, given the vanguard role in European expansion played by Spain in the sixteenth century, culminating in the ‘discovery’ of America” (25). Curiously, however, Martín Corrales fails to acknowledge those moments in which the Spanish trajectory departed from that of Europe. For example, when he describes the nineteenth century as signaling “the definitive triumph of Europe, whose supremacy

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was concretized, in the second half of the century, by the sweeping imperialist expansion that was preceded and supported by the triumph of Orientalism” (24; see also 53), he makes no mention of the fact that Spain did not quite participate in that “triumph,” much as many Africanists may have aspired to do so. Throughout his study, Martín Corrales prefers not to consider, or not to emphasize, texts that he views as iconoclastic. Although he is frequently forced to admit that “sympathetic views” of Moroccans were produced in different historical moments in Spain, he usually dismisses them as exceptional. Many other drawings, paintings, and photographs—some reproduced in the text, others not—are simply categorized as negative, even though they may not be self-evidently so.¹⁹ No in-depth textual analyses are provided, and the illustrations are largely presumed to “speak” for themselves. Indeed, the author’s failure to engage with the theoretical considerations now deemed essential to the interpretation of images is somewhat troubling. For example, on several occasions he suggests that photographs have a direct indexical relationship to reality (28, 81), a notion that is no longer taken “at face value” in current scholarship. Antonio-Miguel Bernal’s foreword to Martín Corrales’s text evidences the need for so much insistence on Spain’s European status, underlining “one of the most surprising and fanciful errors in Spanish history: the ‘discovery’ of Spain, of a country and its people, which the Romantic travelers’ writings and travel books transmit, offers Europeans the image that Africa begins in the Pyrenees” (20). While Azorín had argued in his essay “España y África” that Spaniards should not be offended by the well-known saying (reworked so interestingly by Costa) “Africa begins in the Pyrenees” (447), Martín Corrales’s book categorically rejects that particular othering of Spain. Rather, because Spaniards themselves have participated in the creation of Orientalist and other forms of derogatory discourses, it is clear to Martín Corrales that they are more properly allied with the West.²⁰ The ideological orientation of some of the scholarship that has emerged in recent years on Spain’s ties to Africa is indicative of ongoing tensions concerning the construction of Spanish national identities. It reveals an urgently felt need to affirm Spain’s membership within the larger European community today, at a time that is marked, as Jacques Lezra has so astutely described it, by the “opening wound” resulting from “the concurrent Europeization and re-Maghrebization of the economy and society” (7). Although I do not address this contemporary situation at length until chapter 6, the next chapter begins with a brief consideration of one such recent “wound,” before moving back into the nineteenth century to explore the fraught practices of “mimicry” that have characterized Spanish colonial discourse on sub-Saharan Africa.

2

T “S” A  M  S’ C  S-S A

In the fall of 2000, even as Spanish authorities moved to expedite the expulsion of the thousands of African would-be immigrants who routinely arrive on Spain’s southern shores, the inhabitants of the Catalan town of Banyoles lamented their inability to retain their own African, the stuffed man known as “El Negro” who had stood, loincloth-clad and spear in hand, in an exposition at the local natural history museum since 1916.¹ Generations of schoolchildren had gawked at this reputed tribal chief, whose remains had been stolen from a fresh grave in southern Africa sometime around 1830 and prepared for display by the French taxidermists Edouard and Jules Verreaux. In 1831, the body was exhibited in Paris alongside animals also stuffed by the Verreaux brothers. By the 1880s, El Negro had been purchased by the Catalan naturalist Francesc Darder, a veterinarian and director of the Barcelona Zoo, and had been shown at the 1888 Barcelona World’s Fair, before becoming the star attraction in the museum that Darder later founded. It was a Haitian-born black Spanish resident, the medical doctor Alphonse Arcelin, who first expressed his outrage to the Banyoles town council after viewing the taxidermied body at the Darder Museum of Natural History in 1991. Arcelin also informed the International Olympic Committee, which insisted that the museum close down for the duration of the 1992 Barcelona Games. Soon thereafter, protests flooded in from other international organizations, such as the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity, as well as from individual African nations. But the Banyoles town council refused to discontinue the exhibit, arguing that it still had scientific merit, since it reflected the worldview of nineteenth-century science. An extensive story published in the Madrid edition of the El País Sunday magazine highlighted instead the pecu-

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liarly “irrational” relationship that had developed between residents of Banyoles and El Negro, and the fantastical legends that circulated concerning the African man’s provenance, despite explanations to the contrary found in the museum’s informational brochures. Nor could the paper resist implicating all Catalans in the travesty: “It couldn’t be bad to have something that had been there in Banyoles so long. Curiously, this sentiment impregnated, unconsciously, the entire Catalan society” (“‘El bechuana’”). The more the central government insisted that the figure be removed, however, the more the town resisted. Residents of Banyoles turned El Negro “into a symbol of their independence, sporting t-shirts reading ‘Banyoles loves you black man’ and even producing chocolates in his likeness” (“Diplomacy”). If Madrid’s officials insisted that El Negro was not really theirs, the Catalan town’s residents would make him their own through the pseudo-cannibalistic incorporation of his effigy, aping a practice traditionally associated with “savage” Africans. Thus, the apparently innocuous consumption of chocolates becomes a cypher for brutal colonial mastery, which according to the anthropologist Michael Taussig’s brilliant formulation involves “mimicry by the colonizer of the savagery imputed to the savage” (66). But despite its affectation of greater civilization, Spain’s central government would find itself guilty of “savage” behavior as well. After years of negotiation, the Banyoles town council finally agreed to an exchange: El Negro for a generous state-funded renovation of the Darder Museum. In September 2000, the body was smuggled out of Banyoles at night—in an operation evocative of the Verreaux brothers’ initial midnight grave robbery—and transported to the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid. At the museum, a team of anthropologists under the direction of Consuelo Mora undertook to dismantle the taxidermied body, discarding the vegetable fiber stuffing and support wires after removing what remained of the skin, which had been boot-blacked to make El Negro appear more “authentically” negro; only the skull and some bones were left. It was deemed more “politically correct” to return the body in that form, since a developed, Western nation simply couldn’t repatriate a stuffed human (Antón). The lugubrious scientific procedure, however, while reprising the Verreaux brothers’ original taxidermic task, was also oddly reminiscent of the Aztec rituals of flaying described by Spanish conquerors of the Americas: restoring a veneer of civilization required the Spanish government to engage in eminently “uncivilized” practices. In this sense, the details of the affair resembled those Spanish colonial-era accounts that, according to Joseph Roach, had portrayed “the horrors of human sacrifice to establish not only the uncanny otherness of the Indians but also their uncanny familiarity” (148). Although the destabilization of notions of civilization and barbarism is often

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a byproduct of Western colonial endeavors, the Spanish case is particularly complex due to the mise-en-abŷme structures of internal and external colonization. Spanish peripheral communities may mimic the power of the nation-state by indulging in colonial brutality against Africans (in Taussig’s terms, by mimicking the savagery ascribed to colonial subjects). They may also ascribe savagery, which in modern times is almost always characterized as peculiarly African, to other national groups within the larger nation-state. The central government, in turn, may impute savagery to all of its peripheral subjects—but once it mimics that savagery in order to regain mastery, it simply reconfirms the primitive qualities that the Black Legend, so popular throughout Europe, had long attributed to Spain and to Spaniards. Spanish presumptions of civilization, furthermore, are also disparaged by once-colonized subjects themselves. As Joseph Ki-Zerbo, a historian from Burkina Faso, has observed of the Negro de Banyoles scandal, “obscene cases arise like the Spanish one, which one could only imagine would happen in savage countries” (Espinosa). Ki-Zerbo’s words exemplify Taussig’s argument that when former colonial subjects begin to represent the West, “‘us’ and ‘them’ lose their polarity and swim in and out of focus” (246). For Taussig, this occurs during the postcolonial era of “second contact,” sometime after the middle of the twentieth century, when old forms of colonial mastery no longer function (251, 237). But in Spain it might be possible to posit an earlier era of second contact: the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the loss of colonial power in the Americas was first confronted, and the nation struggled to reconsolidate its identity. I would argue that something similar to the phenomenon described by Taussig as predominant in more recent decades was actually experienced by a small but significant number of Spaniards some hundred years earlier, before the sequelae of neocolonial fervor had distracted national attention from postcolonial disorientation: the discovery that in fact “the self is inscribed in the Alter that the self needs to define itself against” (252). This chapter focuses on a number of figures who are central to the articulation of this recognition of the alterity of the self, including several pioneering anthropologists, the precocious African explorer Manuel Iradier, and a famous member of the so-called Generation of ’98, Ángel Ganivet. RACE IN THE SPANISH ANTHROPOLOGY MUSEUM

It is now well understood that the Western museums of anthropology and natural history that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries functioned in part to delineate the boundaries of the “modern” nationstate by opposing its citizens to denigrated and/or exoticized colonized “others,”

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whose material goods and even bodies and body parts were placed on display (Zimmerman; Coombes). By 1916, when El Negro was given a long-term home in Banyoles, Spain had already undertaken neocolonialist enterprises in Africa. Both the Darder and the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid (where El Negro would eventually be dismantled) had begun to reflect European anthropology’s commiseration with imperialist ideology and the pursuit of absolute cultural and racial alterity. Darder’s museum, like the Verreaux brothers’ earlier display in Paris, featured stuffed animals, thus situating El Negro within the “wild kingdom”; it also included a collection of crania matched up with thirty-six racial busts. These “scientific” sculptures, which were sometimes taken from plaster castings of living or dead models, and which sought to fossilize as meaningfully distinctive the features of ethnic groups from around the world, could be viewed throughout Europe in popular entertainment venues, such as panopticons, as well as museums (Zimmerman 16–17; 164–68). For his part, the director of Madrid’s anthropology museum, Manuel Antón y Ferrándiz, whose interest in the racial affinity between Spaniards and (white) Moroccans was discussed in the previous chapter, had also worked to intensify the institution’s focus on racial difference within other colonial contexts during the early part of the century. Antón purchased a unique collection of Peruvian paintings illustrating racial mixing. He also commissioned copies of racial busts from the Natural History Museum and the forerunner of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (including a statue of the infamous “Hottentot Venus”), and of racialized death masks from Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde (Romero de Tejada 64, 50). The allegorical frescoes that flanked the museum’s entryway were reworked during Antón’s tenure, so that the drapery-adorned women would bear the accouterments of Paleontology (a skull) and Ethnology (the “book of the four races,” arranged from lightest to darkest) (Romero de Tejada 30), thus lending visible authority to the larger European trend to divide humankind into hierarchical racial groups, with the light-skinned Caucasians considered superior (Coombes 141). Objects gathered from the overseas colonies and from Africa by Spanish commercial expeditions and explorers were incorporated into the collection, and by 1903 Antón would state of the parameters of the museum that “all those savage and barbarous peoples who at the present time are unable to record their own deeds fall under our complete historical jurisdiction” (qtd. in Romero de Tejada 15–17). In earlier decades, however, before the neocolonialist movement had gained a permanent place on the national stage, the museum’s focus on race had been more solipsistic. Founded in 1875 by the famed anatomist Pedro González y Velasco, the museum represented the hybrid nature of the nascent fields of an-

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thropology and included specimens of human pathology together with normal and abnormal embryology, hundreds of crania and other skeletal remains, and an eclectic range of cultural artifacts. The inscription carved over the door— nosce te ipsum, or “know thyself,” from the temple of Apollo at Delphi—implied that the museum would enable Spaniards to contemplate their own nature, and not just that of the “exotic others” who might serve as identificatory foils. This idea was reflected as well in the published goals of the Sociedad Antropológica Española (Spanish Anthropological Society), which had also been founded by Velasco in 1865 and which was housed in the museum, together with several affiliated academic and scientific journals, such as the Revista de Antropología. The society sought to discuss Darwin’s ideas, degeneration theory, and the concomitant controversy over the relative merits of “civilization,” and, most especially, to scrutinize the varied racial makeup of Spaniards together with other human groups: 1st. Classification of the races and varieties of the human species, and discussion concerning their origin. 2nd. Determine as far as possible if the advances of civilization have an advantageous or disadvantageous influence on the physical, moral and intellectual condition of man. 3rd. Examine the results of the crossing of races and varieties of the human species. 4th. The progress of individual freedom in modern literature and art. 5th. The indigenous races of the Peninsula and of the Balearic and Canary Islands, and their crossing with all of the other races that have populated them up to our time. 6th. Physical-chemical study of man. (qtd. in Ronzón 267; Puig-Samper and Galera 36)

A number of the earliest articles featured in the Revista de Antropología, as well as many of the discussions and other publications undertaken by the society’s members, centered on topics related to the fifth point, the racial makeup of Spaniards. Velasco’s museum and the anthropologists’ meeting place were located directly across the street from the oldest train station in Spain’s centralized railway system, the Embarcadero (site of the later Atocha station), which, as Jo Labanyi has so astutely observed, enabled residents of Madrid to “discover” the strange peoples and customs of the provinces even as they attempted to “construct an integrated image of the nation” (Labanyi, Gender 8, 173). Members of the anthropological society who sought to account for Spanish regional differences turned preferentially to the question of race. They requested that associates re-

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siding outside the capital send in photographs of “exotic types and indigenous individuals,” and asked provincial governors to supply them with skulls or full skeletons from their jurisdictions (“Sociedad . . . sesiones” 77; Ronzón 273–74). The use of photographs and crania and other skeletal remains—which would be measured and categorized—was consistent with other European anthropologists’ examination of the racial characteristics of colonial subjects (Coombes 134–40). Velasco was an enthusiastic proponent of craniometric study (Ronzón 279), which involved comparisons of cranial breadth to length and of brain capacity, and he published an introduction to the subject in the Revista de Antropología, advocating a more precise understanding of the word “race,” through examination of cranial calculations and careful cross-checking against skin and eye color charts (González de Velasco). While craniological displays in the museum facilitated comparative analyses of racial characteristics, together with the criminological approaches that would be favored by the Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and his followers, the diverse makeup of Spaniards was a central focus. As Velasco’s protégé, Ángel Pulido, describes the cranial specimens, “there are ones of different races, from different Spanish and foreign provinces; of wise men, idiots, criminals, eccentrics, etc., so that one may conduct a complete phrenological study of the human head” (qtd. in Arquiola 10). Velasco expressed particular enthusiasm for the study of Cantabria and Galicia, which “from an ethnographic standpoint, reveals riches that have been completely abandoned”; he also noted the tremendous interest in Basques among European scholars (González de Velasco 37). Velasco had befriended the eminent French scientist Paul Broca (who would later be considered one of the more sophisticated proponents of “scientific” racism and sexism [Gould 73– 112]), and contributed to his craniometric analyses of Basque racial characteristics. He bought land for a summer home in Zarauz, in northern Spain, that included a Basque cemetery, which he subsequently dug up, reportedly with the help of Broca. He then donated seventy-eight of the skulls to the French scientist, the raw material upon which Broca would base his study (Schiller 150– 51). Broca’s findings challenged the notion (promoted by the Swedish scientist Anders Retzius, among others) that the Basques had descended directly from less-advanced Stone Age peoples, unlike the presumably superior Aryan race that later overran Europe. Comparison with Parisian skulls in his collection showed that the Basques had larger cranial capacities. However, even though Broca felt that brain growth “was coincident with progress in civilization, material ease, and the educational standard within any given ‘race,’” he did not argue that Basques were more intelligent, for separate measurements of distinct brain regions showed that it was the occipital, not the anterior, region that was larger in

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the Basques (Schiller 161–63). Given that Velasco himself had affirmed that the occipital region predominated in blacks from Africa and Oceania (González de Velasco 36), it is difficult to know how he may have reacted to Broca’s findings concerning the Basques. I noted in the previous chapter that clarifying Basque racial identity was also of great concern to many Basques, some of whom, including for example Telesforo de Aranzadi y Unamuno, were disciples of Broca. As we shall see, others would begin to embroider considerably upon the possible connections between Africans and Basques. Velasco and his fellow members of Spain’s Anthropological Society were not only interested in defining the characteristics of the various “indigenous races” on the peninsula and in the archipelagos; together, the third and fifth points in the group’s working plan also indicate that the society promoted the stillcontroversial idea that native groups had in fact mixed with the many other communities that had invaded and/or resided in those territories over the millennia. Some members of the society also contributed to the phenomenon discussed at greater length in chapter 1: the dramatic upsurge in Arabic and Hebraic studies, which had begun to register the impact that eight hundred years of medieval convivencia had exerted on Spanish customs, language, and even race. The Arabist Francisco Fernández y González was a founding member of the Anthropological Society and an active participant in its meetings and publications (Ronzón 265), and it is important to remember that he had employed the same Dephic phrase inscribed over the museum’s entrance to insist upon the vital importance for Spaniards of “arabismo,” which, “circumscribed within Spain, is not an objective element that should be addressed, as in Europe, as a comparative aid; internalized even in the components of our blood, it is the nosce te ipsum of the examination of the vicissitudes of our race” (133–34). For a number of Spanish scholars of the final decades of the nineteenth century the study of “exotic others” did not function, as it had elsewhere in Europe, to highlight the radical difference of presumably more advanced Spaniards. Rather, it was viewed as absolutely essential to the complete apprehension of the Spanish self. MANUEL IRADIER’S HISPANOTROPICALIST JOURNEY FROM BASQUE TO BANTU COUNTRY

This perspective regarding the profound significance of past—and future— encounters between Spaniards and Africans may have been shared by some Spanish explorers of the era, who contributed both their published observations and the material culture they gathered on their journeys to Spain’s anthropological societies and museums. The precocious Basque scientist Manuel Iradier

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is a particularly fascinating case in point. In 1868, at the age of fourteen, and evidently intoxicated by the chronicles of African adventures so popular at the time, Iradier founded Vitoria’s Sociedad Viajera (Traveling Society; later dubbed La Exploradora, The Explorers’ Association). Over the next six years, Iradier and the members of his organization assembled a library of travel narratives, subscribed to scientific and exploration journals, and prepared detailed reports concerning equipment needs and possible African itineraries. Iradier, brimming with youthful hubris, began to formulate a plan to traverse the entire continent, from the Cape of Good Hope to Tripoli, and a memorandum for the excursion was sent off to the 1873 World Exposition in Vienna. La Exploradora also consulted with the African explorer Henry Stanley (by then famous for his published account of his search for David Livingstone), who was in the Basque Country to cover the Carlist Wars for the New York Herald. Stanley tactfully convinced the group to scale down its initial plans, and Iradier was persuaded to undertake a preliminary journey to Spain’s possessions along the Guinean coast in order to gain the practical experience and knowledge requisite for more ambitious expeditions.² Iradier subsequently completed two expeditions to what is now known as Equatorial Guinea, acquiring large tracts of territory for the Spanish government through pacts with scores of tribal leaders. The first volume of África: Viajes y trabajos de la Asociación Eúskara La Exploradora (Africa: Travels and Works of the Basque Explorers’ Association) published in 1887, contains Iradier’s chronological narrative of his two journeys (one undertaken from 1875 to 1877, and the other in 1884), while the second tome is organized into chapters representing major scientific fields of the day, and includes Iradier’s observations of, for example, the Guinean climate, physical anthropology, and language. Artifacts gathered from the second expedition would also come to form the basis of the African collection in Madrid’s anthropology museum (Romero de Tejada 55). Iradier’s account of the immediate context of his first departure for Africa is particularly intriguing. With the Carlist Wars raging about them—chillingly, Iradier notes that “human blood ran” in the countryside—members of La Exploradora “saw themselves hemmed in, besieged, and casting aside the Linnean boxes, the wind socks, the pincers, the compass and the map, they brandished Remingtons to defend themselves” (I: 254). Iradier establishes a significant relationship between La Exploradora’s Africanist calling and the Basque nationalist sentiment so crucial to the Carlist Wars, an issue I return to later in the chapter. His vivid description also evokes those moments in which intrepid scientistexplorers lament that their efforts at conducting observations are constantly hindered by the natives and the drama of their daily life, a tendency discussed by Mary Louise Pratt: “Paradoxically enough, the conditions of fieldwork are

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expressed as an impediment to the task of doing fieldwork, rather than as part of what is to be accounted for in fieldwork” (“Fieldwork” 41). By adopting this rhetorical strategy, typically used “in the field,” to characterize the situation in northern Spain, Iradier begins to link the space of his homeland with that of Africa. The effect is underlined when Iradier announces his plans to self-finance his first expedition and unfurls a map of Africa, annotated by Stanley himself, upon the natural science museum’s central table, “upon which the map of the province had been spread out hundreds of times” (I: 253). As we shall see, this superimposition of African and Basque geocultural representations reappears in much more explicit fashion in Iradier’s second volume. In the early pages of his narrative, however, Iradier levels harsh criticism against another more recently predominant European colonial power. The British, who nearly monopolize shipping routes to the western coast of Africa, transport Iradier (and on the first trip, his wife and her sister)³ in a vessel that is overrun with cockroaches, and Iradier quips that in his cabin “slept three . . . hundred or four hundred of us live beings” (I: 42–43). Redirecting the European obsession with hygiene, deemed essential for survival in Africa (Fabian 59), Iradier deplores the noxious quality of the British food that is served on board: “For us Spaniards it is in wretched taste and even repulsive and unhygienic” (II: 212). Iradier also claims that British ships tend to dock in malaria-infested ports (II: 213). Moreover, unhealthy practices are accompanied by uncivilized manners. The captain on his ship, “a pure-blooded Englishman,” is incapable of speaking any language other than his own, and since Iradier, though multilingual, does not know English, the captain will simply treat him as an object, on a par with other exotic cargo, such as palm oil and caged tropical birds (I: 41–42). For his part, Iradier underlines the captain’s lack of civility by animalizing him: “He came up in shirt sleeves with his suspenders dangling behind him like a tail” (I: 41). Iradier’s implicit comparison here of the British with Africans, in which the former are represented as more “primitive” than the latter, could be viewed as a not-so-subtle contribution to what Kipling termed the “Great Game.” Etienne Balibar has commented upon this imperialist superiority contest, most specifically upon the propensity of colonialist nations to pride themselves, “in competition with one another, on their particular humaneness, by projecting the image of racism onto the colonial practices of their rivals. French colonization proclaimed itself ‘assimilatory,’ while British colonization saw itself as ‘respectful of cultures.’ The other White is also the bad White. Each White nation is spiritually ‘the whitest’” (Balibar and Wallerstein 43). Some scholars have termed Spanish variations on this theme the “White Legend,” a discourse that was designed to counter the Black Legend that had besmirched Spain’s colonial history, while

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projecting alternative black legends onto the newest imperial powers (Feros). However, the Catalan anthropologist Gustau Nerín is one of the few scholars to have recognized the degree to which the White Legend functioned not simply to defend the Iberian past but also to legitimate the modern project of African colonization. In his analysis of this discourse, Nerín employs the term “Hispanotropicalism,” an adaptation of the more familiar “Lusotropicalism,” coined in the 1930s by the widely influential anthropologist Gilberto Freyre. Freyre’s vindication of the complex racial and cultural fusions of his native Brazil was founded upon the notion that the Portuguese were more likely than other European colonizers to mix with the indigenous and black populations because of their earlier contact with the Moors. According to Nerín, alongside Spain’s own historical ties to Africa, Hispanotropicalism tends to emphasize the peculiarly Catholic mission of Spanish colonialism, characterized as unconcerned with economic exploitation. Spaniards, unlike their northern European imperialist counterparts, are not racist because they believe that the souls of blacks and whites are equal before their Creator. As a result, the Christian bent of Spanish colonialism promotes the egalitarian treatment of natives, clearly evidenced by the large mestizo population in the Americas (Guinea 11).⁴ Although Nerín argues that Hispanotropicalism did not emerge until the Franco era (Guinea 16), in fact this discourse had circulated among Spaniards since the prior century, as is evident from Iradier’s text. Moreover, Hispanotropicalist ideas have survived largely intact throughout the colonial period and into the postcolonial period. When the performance artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña dressed as “authentic Guatinaui Indians” (in kitschy getups as evocative of modern S&M gear as of dime-store “native costumes”) and displayed themselves in a cage in Madrid’s Columbus Plaza in 1992, many members of their Spanish audience may have perceived the incisive critical tone of the piece, but Hispanotropicalist rhetoric enabled them to mount a defense. As Fusco reports, “One Spanish businessman waited for me after the performance was over to congratulate me . . . and then insisted that I had to agree that the Spaniards had been less brutal with the Indians than the English” (162). Similarly, with respect to the Negro de Banyoles scandal, Spanish ambassador Eduardo Garrigues’s speech at the ceremony marking the “repatriation” of the African’s remains to Botswana failed to include any apology, and Foreign Ministry officials emphasized instead that the men who had originally indulged in grave robbery and preserved the body for display were French: “Spaniards weren’t the ones who collected the body in Africa and the responsibility is very diluted” (Antón). Iradier’s efforts to reconcile Hispanotropicalism with the tenets of modern anthropology are particularly fascinating. Like Velasco and others associated

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with Madrid’s anthropology museum, the Basque explorer is enamored of the latest “scientific” advances in the study of human variation, and he has brought with him the proper instruments for craniometric analysis, as well as skin, hair, and eye color charts (I: 33). However, Iradier’s observations of the peoples he encounters are sometimes conflicted to the point of iconoclasm. His casual reference to the fact that the brains of Canarian women, like those of all women of northern races, are better organized than men’s (I: 37), would certainly raise a few eyebrows among Broca’s followers. With respect to racial questions, Iradier seems to have insisted to native Guineans that both blacks and whites are rational beings, yet privately he puzzles over the great discrepancies in physical and mental capacity that he observes among blacks from the same general region, which he is unable to attribute to either genetic or environmental factors (I: 178–79). Iradier’s companion Elombuangani, who alone had nursed the explorer through three months of feverish delirium (I: 197–98), is singled out as both physically beautiful and intellectually gifted, even though Iradier remarks upon his small skull and makes fun of the ways in which the African confuses some of the scientific lessons with his own fetishistic beliefs (I: 138, 178–79). Yet at another moment Elombuangani demonstrates both mastery of the Hispanotropicalist discourse that, one assumes, Iradier has also taught him and a keen ability to meld that discourse with native beliefs in order to procure the cooperation of villagers upon their arrival at a new location: “The white man that you have before you is neither inglis (English) nor poto (Portuguese), nor fala (French), nor cupini (German). He is better than all these; he is pañole (Spanish). The inglis robs; the poto is easily captured; the fala deceives; the cupini hits; but the pañole neither robs, nor deceives, nor hits, nor does he fear dying. If you give him a hut, goats, chickens, and eggs, he will pay you well and you will be his friend; if you want to do him evil he may burn the village in a flash and leave all of you dead in the forest” (I: 138–39). The fact that Iradier is so taken with this speech that he endeavors to record it in his diary reveals his admiration for Elombuangani’s astute deployment of Hispanotropicalist rhetoric, and suggests that, notwithstanding the explorer’s occasional derogatory characterizations of the African, the two men enjoyed a sort of intellectual partnership. Hispanotropicalism also underlined Spaniards’ presumed “African sensibility” (Nerín, Guinea 14), a notion that, as we saw in the Introduction, also emerged in the nineteenth century. Because of Spain’s physical proximity to Africa, the early history of migrations back and forth across the Strait of Gibraltar, and the legacy of eight centuries of Moorish presence on the Iberian Peninsula, Spaniards were deemed to be much more attuned to African culture, and thus ideally suited to colonize Africans. As noted earlier, impassioned Africanists had also marshaled

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a curiously “essentialist” geography—arguing for instance that Spain’s “natural” frontier was the Atlas Mountains (Cánovas del Castillo 77), or that the Moroccan topography perfectly mirrored that of Spain (Costa, “Intereses” 143)—in order to bolster the notion of a shared Hispano-African destiny. While the spatially removed Equatorial Guinea would seem to be exempt from such fanciful musings, Iradier manages to contribute to this form of imperialist justification by describing the island of Elobey Grande as a “half-full wine skin” (I: 133) and Corisco as a “stretched-out skin” (I: 123), thus evoking the age-old cartographic image of Spain as a “piel de toro,” or stretched-out bull’s skin. Human skin, too, is of fundamental importance here, for the anxious polemic concerning the racial makeup of Spaniards also subtends Hispanotropicalism. Hispanotropicalist discourse certainly doesn’t preclude the mobilization of racist invective, but that invective sometimes functions as a sort of rhetorical boomerang. Though it may be launched out toward the (in this case) African other, it may return to strike against some groups of Spaniards themselves, who are consequently othered and, potentially, debased in turn. Iradier’s text, for example, is replete with stereotypically derogatory characterizations of the Africans he encounters, including the repeated description of natives as, in essence, “tricksters” (for instance, I: 127, 151, 235). In his second tome Iradier addresses this quality in the chapter dedicated to mental and emotional faculties, and he contrasts the white man’s use of intelligence to dominate nature with the African’s deception of nature through sagacity and malice (II: 163). Yet at another point in his narrative Iradier would appear to sympathize with a Liberian who insists that it is the white man who has taught the African to do evil (II: 63). In his record of Elombuangani’s “Hispanotropicalist” speech, Europeans are associated with specific vices, and it is the French in particular who are characterized as deceitful. Moreover, when Iradier himself asserts that Africans are natural lawyers, politicians, and diplomats (II: 162), it is not completely clear that whites are not in fact the main target of his venom. Indeed, at first glance Africans are not the only people that Iradier explicitly links to deceit. The diary of his journey includes a preliminary chapter detailing his trip overland through Spain before setting out for Africa by boat. In the port of Cádiz, Iradier notes that although all sailors are similar, “the loquaciousness and great imagination of the Andalusian type make him better suited for deceit” (I: 13). Yet that Andalusian character is, according to Iradier, “inherited from the invaders of our peninsula, and later formed beneath the always serene skies of a temperate climate” (I: 14). Iradier’s identification of an African inheritance in Andalusia follows the by now familiar pattern of the time; although sometimes, as in the work of Francisco Fernández y González, the association serves to exalt

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the culture, nobility, and virility of Spaniards, more frequently the opposite obtains. As discussed in chapter 1, the prolific essayist and politician Joaquín Costa was initially one of the most ardent proponents of the theory that Moroccans and Spaniards shared a “blood brotherhood,” but the blood they had in common, he insisted, was of the Ibero-Berbers, “a race of blonde hair and blue eyes” (144). Costa can only vindicate the African inheritance by whitening it, in rather ludicrous fashion. More customarily, as in Iradier’s passage, the African legacy is linked to specific peripheral national groups in Spain—and pointedly disassociated from others—and condemned as a hereditary defect in need of eradication. In this schema, Andalusians are typically considered the most African, while the Basques, whose territory was never inhabited by the “Moors,” are presumed to be racially “untainted” (indeed, historically Basques were the only Spaniards exempt from the requirement to prove “blood purity” before receiving titles of nobility [Kurlansky 170–71]). Iradier’s fellow Basque Miguel de Unamuno’s articulation of this idea, infused with imperialist rhetoric, is particularly astounding. In a letter to a friend dated 1900, after declaring himself “one of the most representative men of our Basque race” (“Cartas” pt. 2, 58), Unamuno asserts: “This Catalanism business seems petty to me, lowly, characteristic of an egotistical people. We’ll save ourselves with or without Spain! No, no, no! ‘We will save Spain, whether or not Spain wants it.’ We Basques should say something else; not that they should let us govern ourselves, but that we want to govern everyone else, since we are the most capable of doing so. [. . .] Yes, we need to proclaim the inferiority of the Andalusians and their ilk, and our brotherly duty to govern them. Málaga should be a colony, and we need to sweep away the Bedouinism” (“Cartas” pt. 2, 59). Although on occasion (as in the description of Andalusians cited above) Iradier appears to espouse a hierarchical classification of Spaniards similar to Unamuno’s, his treatment of the connections between Africans, Basques, and other Spanish peripheral (and centralist) identities, as we shall see, is much more nuanced. Iradier’s model tends to allow for a greater fluidity of identity, and ultimately he will put a radically new spin on Costa’s conceptualization of the relationship between Spain and “white” Africa. Iradier’s efforts to grapple with the complexity of historical migrations and encounters between different groups of people is evident when he describes his lengthy stopover in the Canary Islands. The mythology concerning the archipelago is particularly rich, and Iradier alludes to some of it in several near-surreal and somewhat inscrutable chapters; one is entitled “Santa Cruz de Tenerife— Un sueño” (Santa Cruz de Tenerife—A Dream) (I: 17).⁵ After implying that the islands were produced out of the catastrophe that plunged Atlantis into the sea, Iradier fantasizes about the connections between that legendary civilization, the

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Canarians, the inhabitants of North Africa, and the Basques. First, he imagines the arrival of members of a “primitive race,” dressed in skins, to an archipelago (Atlantis?), where they established their home. Later, as a result of “horrible cataclysms” that submerged the islands, members of this community made their way to the north of a neighboring continent (Africa?), where they “took up the customs offered to them by a superior race” (the Berbers?). But eventually, when “new populations” (the Romans?) began to push westward, the group, as if attached to the remnants of its homeland by a stretched-out rubber band, was propelled back to the now re-formed archipelago; there, they reestablished their civilization (I: 25). And one day, the Basques arrived,⁶ and “the law of humanity was upheld, the invaders absorbed the invaded; the primitive race disappeared from the face of the earth, and I only saw, in a solitary cave, the parchmentlike cadaver of a frightened mother who, after losing her husband on the battlefield, fled to the depths of the earth to save her children” (I: 26). Iradier’s visualization of the mother’s body is undoubtedly inspired in a viewing of the Canarian mummies that have traditionally been displayed for tourists in the archipelago, and that were displayed in anthropological collections in museums on the peninsula as well (including collections in the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid). On several occasions, Iradier refers to the search for inscriptions that the Atlantans or Canarians might have left behind as proof of their civilization (I: 18, 25)—and he does insist upon the relatively “civilized” status of this “primitive race”—before being conquered by the Basques. Here, his description of the mummy’s parchmentlike skin likens her body to a text, but it is a text that refuses inscription. Hers does not represent the Canarian bodies that, in Iradier’s words, were “absorbed” by the Basque race; rather, it represents the resistant body: the body of a woman who embraces death for herself and for her children rather than accept that absorption. And indeed, Canarians attained notoriety for their suicidal acts—customarily flinging themselves from precipices—to avoid various and sundry forms of incorporation into the European sexual and political economy: concubinage, marriage, or slavery. Such spectacular forms of resistance, however, failed to prevent the colonization of the islands. Iradier’s exaltation of the mummified mother, significantly, is interrupted by what he terms the “triumphant song of civilization”: the musical salute that the Spaniards dedicate to their new Restoration king Alfonso XII, which startles Iradier from his reverie (I: 26). The mummy’s mute testimony to the Canarian cultural legacy is thoroughly drowned out by the heralding of the (now reborn) Spanish monarchy. At the time of the conquest, that monarchy had in fact sought to illustrate its power through the display of other Canarian bodies. As part of their 1992 perfor-

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mance piece staged in Columbus Plaza in Madrid, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña included a history of the exhibition of indigenous peoples. Their chronology begins with the several Arawak Indians Columbus brought back to Spain, one of whom was shown at the Spanish court for two years, “until he die[d] of sadness” (Fusco 156). Some fifteen years earlier, though, Canary Island natives had also been placed on display. In detailing the conquest of Gran Canaria, John Mercer notes that once the nobleman Adargoma was captured by the Spaniards, he “became just another of the many recorded examples of the exhibition of Canary ‘savages,’ often still in their skins, in S. Europe. Preferably they were encouraged to show off their great agility and dexterity or, like Adargoma, their famous strength; his name meant ‘shoulders of rock’” (189). While another group of captured Gran Canaria noblemen in native garb was also shown publicly in southern Spain, one of them, Semidan, was baptized in Toledo after being relieved of his skins and adorned in silk and scarlet cloth; he was then enlisted into the Spanish cause (193). Attired in his European finery, Semidan returned to Gran Canaria, where, perhaps drawing upon the Canarian aptitude for highly theatrical military tactics,⁷ he attempted to persuade his countrymen to cooperate with the Spaniards, regaling them with tales of the splendor of the Castilian court and promises of freedom. When his cajoling failed, Semidan led a number of battles against his people in Gran Canaria and, later, in Palma and Tenerife. All of the campaigns eventually resulted in the surrender of the Canarians. Canarian bodies on display thus served to figure both the ongoing integrity of an autochthonous, pre-Hispanicized race and the often violent process of assimilation. In Cities of the Dead, performance theorist Joseph Roach has explained how what he terms “surrogation” may preserve an illusion of cultural continuity even as traditions are transformed, sometimes quite radically. When social actors disappear, along with their cultural practices, surrogation involves the “doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins” (3). The surrogate, at once recognizable and unfamiliar, may function as a form of uncanny effigy— living or dead: as Roach observes, even corpses may play this role (36). Roach devotes particular attention to the notion of the multiple “bodies” of the king in various European nations, whereby regardless of the monarch’s real physical status, cultural memory may hold open an ever-shifting space for the insertion of a “body politic” imagined as everlastingly enduring (38–39). In this sense, Semidan’s baptismal name, Fernando Guanarteme, signals his “rebirth” into the Christian community while also establishing him as a remarkably syncretic surrogate. His given name characterizes him as a sort of “stunt double” for the Catholic King, who backs the conquest of the Canaries at a peninsular remove,

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while his surname (“guanarteme” was the moniker reserved for the principal leaders of Gran Canaria) seeks—albeit in this case rather fruitlessly—to preserve his monarchical role before his own people. In Equatorial Guinea, Spanish expeditions of the mid-nineteenth century had already begun the process of negotiating with local tribal chiefs (or cooperative natives who were then conveniently identified as tribal chiefs by the Spaniards), who were placed on the governmental payroll in exchange for ceding territorial sovereignty to Spain. Thus, upon his arrival Iradier encountered a number of kingly surrogates, who maintained, even as they extended and altered irrevocably, Spanish and African royal power and traditions. One of the more spectacular such figures, once again, was a preserved corpse. When, accompanied by his retinue, Iradier reached the capital of Cape San Juan, he was greeted by Manuel, the younger son of the deceased king Boncoro II, who had ruled as an official delegate of the Spanish government. The following day, the group trekked to the king’s tomb, which was made of meticulously woven reeds and featured a small wooden door with European hinges. The site was marked by an impressive sign, with the king’s name, title, and date of death (December 23, 1874) painted in black letters on a white background, and elevated on a post. While it was reported to Iradier that the king’s body “is perfectly preserved, without having given the least sign of decomposition” (thanks, Iradier remarks, not to protective spirits, as the natives claim, but rather to the aromatic plants in which the body had been wrapped), Iradier observes that next to the tomb, on a twelve-meter flagpole, “are waving some shredded rags, which from their color one could deduce used to belong to a Spanish flag, ripped and destroyed by wind and rain” (I: 153). As the traditional symbol of a centralized, homogeneous Spanish body politic falls to pieces, the body of the Afro-Spanish king endures. The African monarchical surrogate also endures in Boncoro III, the dead king’s elder son. If, as Roach argues, the liminal condition of the effigies of cultural surrogation tends to inspire a mixture of fascination and loathing (82), the former usually dominates the latter in Iradier’s writings. In fact, in his sometimes bemused narrative concerning the Boncoro dynasty, Iradier seems only mildly concerned with preserving a shred or two of traditional notions of royal dignity. When Manuel Boncoro is ashamed to admit that his brother the new king is away fishing, Iradier assures him that in Europe kings also indulge in the practice. Later, on an official visit, Iradier finds Boncoro III at home working on a fishing net. Boncoro’s palace-hut has a European-manufactured stained-glass window and a front door marked WC, evidently looted from a recent British shipwreck. The detritus of European civilization is incorporated into the construction of a creole kingdom in Africa. Upon leaving, Iradier discreetly advises

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Manuel Boncoro to erase the incriminating and now indecorous letters on the door (I: 160). Iradier insists that excellent Spaniards can and do emerge from this bricolage. While this idea is implicit in a number of the passages featuring Elombuangani (recall, for example, his expeditious melding of native beliefs with Hispanotropicalist rhetoric), it becomes explicit in characterizations of the royal surrogates. The local king of Elobey, Combenyamango, and his successor Inyenye are both described as “very Spanish,” and Iradier is inspired to creolize his own narrative when he refers to Inyenye as “always a Spaniard” (“¡egumbe pañole! siempre español”; II: 352, 353). Iradier closes his section on the history of Equatorial Guinea by exalting “these people who so love Spain, who are much more civilized than is generally believed, and whom I respect and love deeply” (II: 354). Of crucial importance to Iradier’s argument is his emphasis on the Africans’ capacity for heartfelt religious sentiment. And here the Basque explorer furthers the Hispanotropicalist cause, even as he betrays its racist underpinnings. Although he clearly believes that all souls are equal before God, his articulation of that “equality” tends to preserve color hierarchies. When worthy of salvation, the soul can only be conceived of as white; as Iradier exclaims, “How many white souls I have known inside black bodies!” (II: 179). Later in his life, once back in the metropolis, and bitterly disillusioned by the disrespectful treatment he has been accorded by some Spanish Africanists, Iradier will again insist, “I found among black-bodied savages whiter souls than among civilized whites” (qtd. in Martínez Salazar 128). Iradier’s paradigm of black outside/white inside is so essential to his fervent defense of a “Spanish” Africa that in his text African geography itself becomes embodied in this way.⁸ Iradier draws upon his own experiences in Equatorial Guinea as well as upon his extensive knowledge of the writings of other explorers to do so. Hermann Wittenberg has shown how by the turn of the century the snowy peaks of the Rwenzori (associated with the mythical “Mountains of the Moon”), a mountain chain in modern-day western Uganda, were appropriated as “a white, European landscape” by other explorers, such as the Italian Duke of Abruzzi (son of Spain’s imported king Amadeo I), who undertook his famous expedition there in 1906 (66). Wittenberg argues that “in a continent that was discursively figured as a place of blackness and darkness, the paradoxical idea of white, virginal snow in the midst of tropical heat assumed a racially loaded symbolic significance” (77). Finding inspiration in Henry Stanley, Iradier anticipates this discursive tendency even as he literalizes the racial connotations identified by Wittenberg. In fact, one detail of Stanley’s account of his journey to central Africa, undertaken at the same time as Iradier’s own first expedition,

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proved so compelling to Iradier that he decided to modify his plans for a second trip, in an attempt to confirm his own theories. In Through the Dark Continent (first published in 1878), Stanley mentions, almost in passing, that between Usongora and Unyoro (in the Rwenzori region) live the “light complexioned, regular-featured people” of Gambaragara, similar in skin tone to “dark-faced Europeans.” They are mountain dwellers, accustomed to cold and snowy conditions, who raise milch cows (I: 427, 425). Stanley’s information was gathered mostly from secondhand sources. Although he claims to have met a number of Gambaragaran men and women—whose relatively pale complexion and “regular features” he confirms—he did not undertake an exploration of the district himself. More than intrigued, Iradier decided to pursue Stanley’s lead. In the official plan for his second expedition, dated October 1879, Iradier proclaims: “If the expedition arrives at the banks of the Nyanza-Mvutan in good condition and at a good time, it will take a S.E. direction through Rwanda and Ankole into the Gambaragara mountains and visit the race of white men who inhabit them” (I: 260; Iradier’s emphasis). In fact, Iradier never made it to Gambaragara. His plans for a second trip to Africa had generated much enthusiasm but little financing, and he spent several years struggling to gather sufficient resources. Eventually, Iradier’s expedition would receive the backing of Joaquín Costa and the newly formed Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonistas (Spanish Society of Africanists and Colonialists), but only on the condition that it be political and commercial rather than exploratory or scientific in nature. Indeed, by the late summer of 1884, when Iradier and his team finally set off again, the European “scramble for Africa” was well under way, and Spain had delayed far too long in staking a definitive claim. Much of the desired territory along the Guinean coast and in the neighboring interior had already fallen into British, German, or French hands, and even the islands and coastal enclaves whose possession Spain considered beyond dispute were under threat. After some initial hesitation, Iradier seemed to adapt well to his new mission. Although upon his arrival in the Bay of Corisco the German flag was flying over the island of Elobey Pequeño and the English flag at the mouth of the Muni River, both were replaced by the Spanish flag within the hour (I: 316–17). The important connections that Iradier had made on his first trip enabled him successfully to convince many more tribal leaders in the interior (who ruled over fourteen thousand square kilometers) to ally themselves with the Spanish crown. Although terrible bouts of fever compelled Iradier to return home much sooner than expected, his fellow explorer Amado Osorio Zabala remained behind to continue the work, and a total of fifty thousand square kilometers were eventually annexed. Incensed by the ongoing incursions

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of other European powers, particularly France, Iradier devoted the final pages of África to a passionate defense of Spain’s sovereignty in the region.⁹ However, Iradier’s more political mission on this second expedition had not distracted him completely from his scientific calling, nor had his inability to study Gambaragara directly prevented him from indulging in speculation concerning the significance of the “white men” of central Africa. In the middle of his second volume, toward the end of the chapter on language, he shares with his reader “a scientific confidence” (II: 294). Iradier’s excitement is palpable. He has obtained permission from his Basque friend Pedro Oar to transcribe their conversation about Benga, one of the Bantu-family languages spoken in the area. Oar, who has read Iradier’s recently published grammar and vocabulary, notes that he has found Benga to be so remarkably similar to Basque “that it sounds to my ear as if this African language were a derivation, with very few alterations, of the Basque language” (II: 291). For his part, Iradier confirms that Benga has always sounded to him like a dialect of Basque, “or vice versa” (a crucial addendum), and that furthermore on his excursions through the Basque Country with members of La Exploradora after his return from Africa, he repeatedly found himself exclaiming of local place names, “This name is African” (II: 291). If the Basque Country is suffused with African toponyms, Africa also features Basque geographical markers. According to Iradier, in Basque “gambaragara” refers to the grain that is stored in the highest part of the house, just as their mountain top served as a granary for the Gambaragarans. Moreover, the Basque equivalent of the Gambaragaran king Umdi-ika’s name (Andikua) refers to a man who has a noble origin and titles—appropriate, since the king is believed to be the descendent of the first whites who founded the nation (II: 292). Perhaps most remarkably, Iradier suggests that the similarities between Basques and the Africans he has encountered who speak Bantu-family languages extend well beyond the linguistic: “And I won’t get down to a comparison of certain habits, customs, racial tendencies and physiological details because I don’t yet have all the facts that I need, but you will understand that if I am working on this issue I must be convinced that I am pursuing a truth” (II: 291).¹⁰ Iradier here offers an intriguing variation on the now discredited “Hamitic hypothesis,” which posited that “Negro-Hamitic” pastoralists migrated from the north and/or east into a number of African territories, including the interlacustrine area of east central Africa (which includes parts of modern Uganda and Rwanda), a region previously occupied by “less refined” and “less intelligent” Negro agriculturalists, with whom they intermarried (Roscoe 13). Local mythmaking concerning the mysterious Bacwezi, a tall and light-skinned people of demigod status, who were said to have arrived in the region in the fourteenth or

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fifteenth century only to vanish several generations later, as well as the historical and sometimes horrifically violent conflicts between the Bahima/Bahuma/Batutsi (modern-day descendents of the Bacwezi, according to some oral traditions) and other ethnic groups, such as the Bairu/Bahutu, undoubtedly facilitated the formulation of the Hamitic hypothesis. But it was Anglo-European racism that fueled the idea that the more elaborate centralized forms of government found in the area must have been imported from elsewhere. Indeed, some historians speculated that the Bacwezi came from Ethiopia but were of Greek or Portuguese stock (“Peoples and Cultures”).¹¹ Although Iradier doesn’t exactly dismantle the established racial hierarchies, by implying that Basque could form a part of the Bantu family of languages, he does allow for the possibility that a more “advanced” civilization (i.e., the Basques) might have originated in the heart of Africa itself, rather than migrating there from the north or east. And in this sense, the African continent reduplicates the African body as described by Iradier—black on the outside, but white on the inside. Iradier’s tentative but provocative association of Basques with sub-Saharan African geographies and peoples might seem to challenge traditional notions of Basque exclusivity/superiority (as expressed, for example, by Unamuno), which are so often dependent upon a presumed absolute “blood purity.” Astonishingly, however, several decades later Iradier’s theories, most particularly his creative toponymic etymologies, would be reinfused with racial distinctions and carried to an even more outrageous extreme by the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), Sabino Arana. Infamous for his racist diatribes against all nonBasque Spaniards—whom he terms “maketos”—Arana would appear to be the least likely candidate to further any idea of a connection between Basques and Africans. Yet within Basque nationalist thought, racial superiority is also often linked to racial primacy—and how better to prove that the Basques constitute one of the oldest and most venerable races on earth, than to claim that Africa itself is actually Basque? Arana does just that in a series of articles, entitled “El baskuence en toda el África” (Basque in All of Africa), published in 1902 in the Bilbao newspaper La Patria. Here he argues that the Basques are “the true Spaniards, as they are also consequently the true Africans” (431). In the first article in the series, Arana explains that Noah’s grandson Tubal, the legendary founder of the Basque nation, had initially led his people westward to North Africa. Once there, the perspicacious Tubal took in the destiny of the great continent at a single glance: he realized that Africa “would remain in the most deplorable state of backwardness for centuries on end.” Tubal feared that his people, naturally hospitable, “very quickly would allow into their homes the strange abject races, white and brown, red and black, incapable of culture, who, taking control of all

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the territory, would quickly cause the almost complete extinction of his beloved progeny and descendents” (429). Tubal was thus forced to make a strategic decision. He divided his people into two groups; the darker-complexioned he sent to the south, into the African continent, while he himself led the whiter group northward, into the territory of what is now known as Spain, to which Arana refers insistently as northern Africa (430). By defining Spain as part of Africa, delimited by the Pyrenees Mountains, Arana provides another curious rewriting of the Hamitic hypothesis. In this version, the superior invaders are most definitely Basques, but they find “abject” races on the Iberian Peninsula as well as in Africa proper. And indeed, Arana’s characterization of other national groups in Spain echoes racist Anglo-European descriptions of indigenous Africans, such as Iradier’s own observations concerning the dexterity of the Equatorial Guineans’ feet, and the “monkeylike” hand positions of the elders and posture of the children (II: 159, 157). Arana notes, for instance, that the first inhabitants of Galicia were quadrumanous, and this simian quality serves to explain Galician spinning skills (440–41, n. 1) (so much for Velasco’s notion of Galician ethnographic “riches”).¹² In such treatments of the more “primordial” connections between Spaniards and Africans, Andalusians are no more likely to suffer denigration (or celebration, for that matter) than are other peripheral communities. Both Iradier and Arana, then, posit that the Basques came “out of Africa” but left behind traces (in the form of language, culture, or even people) in the neighboring continent. Neither theory quite dislodges the notion of Basque “whiteness” or racial purity, and indeed both project a disparaged racial alterity onto other groups within Spain. Nevertheless, Iradier’s musings demonstrate a more fluid conceptualization of identity, and he frequently affirms the value of cultural and even racial mixing. He expresses none of Arana’s horror at the consequences of “hospitality,” for example, when different collectivities come into contact with one another. Moreover, portions of his work deploy a nascent Hispanotropicalist rhetoric, which seeks to counter the Black Legend that casts Spain as “savage” with respect to modern European nation-states, asserting instead the (moral) superiority of Spanish colonialism. In the final pages of his first volume, Iradier notes with pride that although many of the Spanish flags flying throughout the Gulf of Guinea had been torn by inclement weather, not a single one had been stained by blood—and this in an area where the waters ran red due to the ravages of German, French, and British colonialism (I: 366). Ultimately, then, Iradier’s work resonates strongly with the many other quasi-mystical conceptualizations of Spain’s preordained ties to Africa that were circulating in the final decades of the nineteenth century, all of which served to justify and exalt the Iberian na-

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tion’s neocolonialist interventions in the neighboring continent, thus securing a place of privilege within the new European imperialism. ÁNGEL GANIVET AND THE SAVAGERY OF SPANISH COLONIALISM

Manuel Iradier would not be the only Spaniard to produce an exploration narrative that addressed the significance of Africa and Africans to the formation of Spanish identities, and that relied extensively upon Henry Stanley’s writings. Clearly inspired by Stanley—and quite possibly by Iradier as well—Pío Cid managed to penetrate the very territory (now known as Rwanda) that his two predecessors were unable to reach, and he spent many years living there among the natives, in an effort to understand their way of life and introduce them to certain aspects of modern civilization. In his own narrative, La conquista del reino de Maya por el último conquistador español Pío Cid (The Conquest of the Kingdon of Maya by the Last Spanish Conquerer Pío Cid, 1897), Cid expands upon Iradier’s formulation of Hispanotropicalist arguments concerning the superiority of his brand of colonization. He also occasionally demonstrates sympathies similar to Iradier’s, describing the Mayas as his “brothers,” and he details the many ways in which they are, and are not, like Spaniards. Pío Cid’s narrative, however, is wholly fake—as is Cid himself. Ángel Ganivet wrote most of La conquista del reino de Maya in 1893, after reading numerous works penned by African explorers, and he clearly delighted in creating a convincing spoof. Ganivet even included two maps of the Kingdom of Maya—preand post-Cid—at the end of the text, and he wrote to his friend Navarro Ledesma of the strategy: “[The manuscript] is composed of 384 pages and 2 maps, since even Cartography’s leg is pulled” (qtd. in Ventura Agudiez 57, n. 31). Ganivet’s maps—both are printed “sideways” with respect to cartographic conventions, and the second appears upside down with respect to the first—graphically represent what any careful reading of the narrative also makes clear: that La conquista works to turn the African exploration genre on its head. Yet only at the end of Ganivet’s text is the illusion broken, when in the epilogue, entitled “El sueño de Pío Cid” (Pío Cid’s Dream), it is suggested that the narrator-protagonist may simply have dreamt his African adventures. While Iradier and even Arana suggested that traces of the earliest Spaniards (i.e., the Basques) could be found in the very center of Africa, Ganivet’s text also chooses to “locate” Spaniards in the same region, at least in symbolic fashion. Ganivet indicates in another letter to Navarro Ledesma that he initially planned

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to write a narrative that would critique the political situation of contemporary Spain, to be entitled Cánovas-sive-De restauratione (Obras II: 916). Later, however, he preferred to disguise that critique by having Africans “play” Spaniards: “I exchanged Spaniards for Mayas, I studied a bit about African things . . . and out came that nonsense, in which the symbolism is so hidden that there’s no way to discover it, for which I congratulate myself, since that way no one will say that I’ve wished to insult the institutions” (qtd. in Ventura Agudiez 70). Initially the Mayas would appear to resemble Andalusians, so frequently considered the most “African” of Spaniards. Although Pío Cid, who like the Granadan Ganivet was born in “a great Andalusian city” (Obras I: 313), is predisposed to discover reminders of home among the Mayas, he learns early on that seemingly familiar sights may be misleading. Of the peculiar decorations outside Maya abodes he notes: “From the eaves of the slate roof down to the ground were hanging long strings of objects, which I first took to be strings of fruit, remembering that thousands of times I had seen strings of peppers and tomatoes put out to dry in the white little houses of my Andalusian land; but then I saw that they were strings of human heads, all now perfectly mummified” (Obras I: 329). Nevertheless, Cid still finds similarities: the architecture of the Maya royal residence evokes “the rural manors of my homeland,” while official dancers move their arms and legs “as in the classical Andalusian fandango” (Obras I: 343, 361). Moreover, Cid cannot avoid the European colonialist cliché which compares the sensual beauty of African women to that of Spanish Gypsies (Coombes 79). The first Maya woman that Cid finds attractive has “large, sad and bewitching eyes, like those of a Gypsy” (Obras I: 377). The children that he will eventually sire with his numerous wives will also be “of a mulatto type, very similar to the pureblooded Gypsy” (Obras I: 499). Despite their occasionally remarked similarities to Andalusians, however, the Mayas represent all Spaniards, and the histories of the Maya and Spanish kingdoms coincide in large measure. While there are obvious references to contemporary events on the peninsula, other aspects of the African nation’s struggles are more evocative of earlier periods in Spain (Ginsberg 54). At the moment that Pío Cid arrives, the Mayas—like the Spaniards until the mid-nineteenth century—are governed by an absolute monarchy. The Uaganga Congress and the Corps of Educators have been established to attenuate the principal threat to absolutism: the presence of other capable men in the kingdom who might conspire against the government if not allowed to participate in it (Obras I: 398–99). The army—“a sure sign of the existence of an ordinary and sovereign nation,” according to Cid—is charged with quelling any internal revolts that might arise, and as a consequence the people have come to loathe the military and would

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themselves take up arms to put down any attempt at a coup (Obras I: 400). In this way, the Mayas have managed to avoid the ongoing military interventions suffered by Spaniards throughout the nineteenth century. However, this government, whose stability would normally be the envy of all Europe (Obras I: 398), soon finds itself rocked by a liberal revolution, much as was Spain in 1868 (Shaw 51), and Cid will subsequently become more centrally involved in Maya politics. Since by pure serendipity Cid had arrived in Maya riding a ceremonial hippopotamus, he had been mistaken for a long-lost religious leader, the Igana Iguru. Cid could thus be described as a “surrogate,” in Joseph Roach’s formulation, and indeed in his new role as Igana Iguru the Spaniard draws upon all his powers of invention to create the illusion of cultural continuity among the Mayas, even as he institutes radical changes in their way of life. During the revolution the king is assassinated and Cid is forced into exile, and the rebels, who advocate a more egalitarian government, depopulate the cities and redistribute the land. Counterrevolution quickly ensues, and Cid himself aids in the restoration of the monarchy, which recalls Spain’s Restoration of late 1874 (Shaw 51). Reinstated as Igana Iguru, Cid initiates a bold plan for “national regeneration” (Obras I: 433) by beginning to “mint” leather coins, thus bringing the economy into the modern era. He also greatly expands the number of Mayas on the government payroll, and as Judith Ginsberg notes, “the result of these reforms is rampant bribery and corruption and a bureaucracy akin to the one that so burdened nineteenth-century Spain” (59). While in his youth Cid had failed to remedy his own nation’s “deficiencies in industry and in the cultivation of land” (Obras I: 317), now he is able to foment the development of Maya agriculture and industry. As a result, industrial centers, specializing (as would Spanish cities such as Bilbao and Barcelona) in metallurgy, textiles, and shipbuilding, emerge on the kingdom’s periphery and begin to rival the capital city in wealth (Obras I: 572; Ginsberg 59). Cid’s ultimate goal for Maya is to establish “civilization,” which he defines quite specifically as the rapid development of a capitalist economy: “‘Man is essentially savage as long as he tends to simplify his life and do without artificial necessities [. . .] unlike what many believe, civilization is not about a greater degree of culture, but rather about the greater demands of our organism, in the willing servitude to which superfluous things subject us” (Obras I: 557). By introducing new products and fashions into the market Cid hopes to stimulate the endless series of ultimately unfulfillable needs that are so necessary to the capitalist system (Obras I: 511). The final step required for a nation to prosper—the complete brutalization of the populace (Obras I: 565)—is realized when Cid begins to manufacture and sell alcohol. In order further to strengthen their government, Cid works to augment the

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Mayas’ sense of national identity and patriotism. On numerous occasions, Cid remarks upon the oral poetry and songs that abound in Maya and that exalt heroes great and small, from the head of the nation to the head of the household (for example, Obras I: 345–46, 375). Alongside their own romancero, the Mayas also employ a forerunner of the periodical press, a sort of town crier system—which due to low literacy levels continued to be used at the time in Spain as well—for the dissemination of news, and the assimilation of national values (Obras I: 405). Cid notes that history, which is recited by Maya scholars, is the only science deemed necessary, “because it serves to encourage the common people and to make them forget present misery by remembering past greatness” (Obras I: 344)—a characterization that would certainly hold for nineteenthcentury Spain as well. For his part, Cid provides visual support for these aural forms of hero glorification by unveiling statues of great Maya leaders. He then introduces a plethora of other national symbols in quick succession. Ironically, Riego’s Hymn (dedicated to the famous Spanish liberal and supporter of the constitutional monarchy who led an uprising against Ferdinand VII) is converted into the Maya national anthem,¹³ while the traditional green tunic worn by the king who was martyred during the Revolution is transformed into the national flag (Obras I: 577, 581). A natural history museum and national maps also help channel the energies of nascent scientists into patriotic endeavors (Obras I: 579–80). Finally, Cid decides to wage war against a neighboring “enemy” (the “real-life” Ankoles) in order to divert attention from internal conflicts and further strengthen the Mayas’ sense of “national solidarity.” There are notable similarities here to the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60, which produced a tremendous surge in patriotism among the Spaniards and distracted them from more pressing national problems.¹⁴ In sum, in La conquista del reino de Maya Ganivet “savages” contemporary politics in Spain even as he analyzes with great lucidity the many ways in which notions of national identity are constructed, maintained, and amplified, and in this sense his text might be said to anticipate the work of more recent theorists of the nation. Why, though, does Ganivet invent an imaginary African kingdom to represent Spanish history and Spain’s ongoing efforts at nation building? If La conquista is to be read simply as a satire of the lamentable state of decadence into which Spain has fallen, then Ganivet may well have been banking on the racial prejudices of many of his readers, who would only view the comparison with Africans as denigrating (Agawu-Kakrabra, “Symptoms” 154–55). When Ganivet writes to his friend Navarro Ledesma, for example, that “this nation is Maya; it is populated by brown people, on the verge of blackness, and it could almost lord it over Spain before the restoration” (Obras II: 919), he appears to imply that Span-

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iards, too, might be described as “brown people, on the verge of blackness.” Circumventing the more customary rhetoric of civilized metropolis versus barbaric provinces, which serves to justify “internal colonization,” Ganivet here converts the entire Spanish nation into a savage kingdom, which might perhaps benefit from a firm “colonial” hand. Yet given Ganivet’s clearly stated abhorrence of the larger European emphasis on material consumption, and given his particular characterization of Pío Cid and the results of his reforms among the Mayas (which will be further detailed in a moment), it seems equally likely that the comparison between Spain and Africa is not meant to condemn Spanish backwardness and barbarism. That is to say, if (as Ganivet would later argue in his Idearium español) Spain, like Africa, is essentially different from Europe, then the events of La conquista demonstrate the potentially nefarious consequences of the “Europeanization” that some of Ganivet’s fellow regenerationists were promoting as Spain’s salvation. This is the theory advanced by Miguel Olmedo Moreno, who argues that the novel presents “the description of the future which would open up for Spain if the Europeanists, those in favor of dragging Spain out of her ‘backwardness’ in order to make her another Belgium, triumphed; as we know, Ganivet preferred collective suicide over this perspective” (159). For this reason, the novel’s allegorical treatment of Spain’s national identity, history, and future prospects cannot be considered apart from its even more pointed satire of the “modern” colonization of Africa, undertaken by Belgium as well as by other European nations. As is now well documented (Osborne; Ventura Agudiez), Ganivet relied extensively upon the exploration narratives of Henry Stanley (who later in his career had been under contract to the Belgian king) for the form, initial content, and even language of his novel, and these borrowings contribute substantially to the verisimilitude of his text. Chapters are headed with telegraphic summaries of their content, just as in Stanley’s works. Initially in his journey Pío Cid covers much of the terrain traversed by Stanley during portions of his three major expeditions of 1871–72, 1874–77, and 1879– 84 (as described in How I Found Livingstone, Through the Dark Continent, and In Darkest Africa): from the island of Zanzibar, across the interior to Tabora, and along the eastern coast of Lake Tanganyika; and then northward to the western shores of Lake Victoria and into the Ankole region of modern-day Uganda. Along the way, Pío Cid mentions figures included in Stanley’s narratives, such as the sultan Mirambo, whom he dubs the “African Napoleon.” He also enlists the aid of a Muslim caravan leader, Uledi-Hamed, whose name combines those of two similar figures in Stanley’s texts (Ventura Agudiez 61; Osborne). But although from Uganda Stanley avoids entering into Rwanda—fearing the natives, famed for their ferocity (In Darkest Africa II: 358–60)—Pío Cid heads directly there,

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for he is aware that all other territories are “well-beaten by European travelers and described by numerous imitators of Livingstone” (Obras I: 321). He desires to go where no Western explorer has gone before. From this point on, of course, Ganivet departs almost completely from Stanley, though he does draw extensively on the latter’s Bantu-dialect glossary to formulate Maya proper names and place names, as several critics have demonstrated (Osborne; Ventura Agudiez). While Ganivet takes much from Stanley, he does so to condemn his colonialist project, which he views as thoroughly imbricated with material exploitation. A number of Ganivet’s letters attest to his strong antipathy for the famous explorer, whom he characterizes as a “charlatan” (Obras II: 1004). Of his works, Ganivet writes that “I have read Stanley’s travels, and they have struck me as brutal, for Stanley is a cruel and uncultured man” (Obras II: 869). In 1878 Stanley had been hired by the Belgian king, Leopold II, to further explore central Africa and to arrange treaties on his behalf with local rulers. By 1885 the king, acting as a private citizen, had acquired enough territory through Stanley to found the Congo Free State, with himself as absolute ruler. Although Leopold had always sought to characterize his efforts in Africa as philanthropic—with the complete abolition of slavery a stated goal—it would eventually become clear that his ruthless “development” of the Congo had decimated the native population. Ganivet’s diplomatic post in Belgium (where he lived from 1892 to 1895) enabled him to witness firsthand Leopold’s colonialist machinations and some of their consequences. One night he was called to a Belgian hospital to provide companionship to a dying Nicaraguan mercenary, who had contracted a fatal disease in the Congo, and Ganivet later described the unfortunate man as yet another victim exploited by “the slavers of civilization” (Obras II: 834). Of the Belgian soldiers who had been to the Congo, Ganivet wrote in the same letter that “those that return fancy themselves as having contributed to a civilizing work. At bottom there is no such civilizing work, and instead only a massive commercial enterprise, disguised by philanthropic labels” (Obras II: 834). In La conquista, although Pío Cid continually insists that his own civilizing mission stems from selfless humanitarian, spiritual, and scientific motivations, these claims are constantly undermined by his clear self-interest, as well as by the disastrous consequences of the various “reforms” he introduces among the Mayas, taking advantage of his power as Igana Iguru. Ganivet had read Jonathan Swift shortly before beginning the novel, and he employs all the techniques of ironic satire, which, as Jean Franco has noted in her analysis of La conquista, typically involves a “betrayal of the reader” by the protagonist-narrator, to reveal Cid’s equivocal nature (35). A notable example, cited by several critics, including Franco (41–42), is Pío Cid’s alteration of the practice of human sacrifice among

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the Mayas (from automatic decapitation of criminals after a brief trial to public games with wild buffalo), which he insists is motivated by a desire to attenuate human suffering while still satisfying the popular need to witness bloodshed. Yet Pío Cid also lets slip that he wishes to avoid the onerous and time-consuming hippo rides required of the Igana Iguru by the old sacrificial custom, and that he desires, furthermore, to enjoy a spectacle akin to the bullfight, in the comfort of his home city. Far from accomplishing the presumed goals, the new sacrifice results in much greater suffering on the part of the victims, most of whom are torn to pieces by the animals, and also moves the masses to a bloodthirsty frenzy. Indeed, a great deal of the changes that Cid institutes within the society benefit him personally, even as they prove destructive to the Mayas. When he introduces money, for example, he makes sure that he holds the monopoly on its manufacture. The same is true for the alcohol whose tragic impact on the Maya people Cid dismisses as outweighed by the benefits accruing to the nation’s agriculture, industry, and commerce (Obras I: 566). (Ganivet, like many Europeans at the time, condemned the liquor trade in Africa, noting with alarm in an essay that “if governments don’t intervene we will be left without a black race. The slave trade will have been prohibited so that four industrialists may have blacks more or less to destroy them” [Obras I: 991–92; Coombes 176].) It is no surprise, then, that as the Mayas “advance,” Cid ends up a wealthy man, with a large haremful of pleasing wives to serve him. Through this characterization of his narrator-protagonist Pío Cid, then, Ganivet encourages the reader to distrust any colonialist claims to humanitarian selflessness, for they are revealed as masking a brutally commercial self-interest. Besides Stanley and other key participants in the colonization of central Africa, another target of Ganivet’s satire might also have been his compatriot Manuel Iradier. It is unclear whether the Basque explorer’s writings were among the many African travel narratives that Ganivet sought out and consumed before composing La conquista. However, both Iradier’s two-volume África (published in Vitoria in 1887) and an earlier and more concise single volume devoted to his first trip (published in Madrid in 1878) were certainly circulating in Spain well before Ganivet left for Belgium, and some aspects of La conquista suggest that he was indeed familiar with this work.¹⁵ In his characterization of the shape of the Maya territory Pío Cid seems to mimic Iradier’s vividly symbolic descriptions of Equatorial Guinean geography, discussed earlier. While to Iradier the island of Corisco recalled a stretched-out skin (like the “piel de toro” of Spain), and Elobey Grande resembled a half-filled wineskin, according to Cid “the Kingdom of Maya is roughly the same size as Portugal, and its shape is that of a salt cod that has been prepared for sale” (Obras I: 397). In both narratives the colonized ter-

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ritories are made to resemble specifically Iberian consumer goods and national symbols. Ganivet perhaps recognizes that this peculiar form of geographical determinism serves to justify the conversion of the African territory into yet another “national product” writ large. Ganivet would also appear to capitalize on Iradier’s obsession with Stanley’s references to white tribes in the Uganda-Rwanda area by locating the Mayas there and initially highlighting their lighter skin tone (Obras I: 327).¹⁶ In fact, when Cid first encounters the Mayas, he goes so far as to speculate that they might be “my brothers in race” (Obras I: 326), a claim that, together with the emphasis on the Mayas’ “more advanced” form of centralized government, would ostensibly facilitate their comparison with Spaniards. Again the Hamitic hypothesis concerning the arrival of a superior white race is reworked, but now in brilliantly satirical fashion as it is melded with Christian doctrine and Darwinian theory. In the Maya version of the Bacwezi myth, which Cid attributes to the influence of Portuguese navigators, a valiant Maya leader who has ascended to heaven unites with the divine white slave monkeys he finds there, thus forming the Cabiri race, who will one day return to live among the Maya and establish a paradise on earth (Obras I: 381–82). Ganivet also seems to parody Iradier’s “scientific confidence”—the climactic moment in which Iradier suggests a linguistic connection between Africans and Basques—when Pío Cid, following his usual custom of translating the meaning of Maya names, pauses to ponder the larger significance of his own servant Enchúa’s name: “This name means the same thing as our word ‘anchovy,’ and given the close phonetic and morphological relationship that exists between them, it’s not superfluous to note it down here and recommend that our modern and astute philologists study it” (Obras I: 375). And finally, the reverie concerning racial encounters and absorptions along the Spanish-African border that appears at the beginning of Iradier’s narrative is perhaps matched by the equally curious “Sueño de Pío Cid” (Pío Cid’s Dream) which ends La conquista and which will be discussed in more detail later. All of these passages function to call into question mytho-scientific notions of a “natural” link between Spaniards and Africans, an essential component of the Hispanotropicalist rhetoric that would serve to justify Spanish colonization in Africa. Indeed, those notions would still subtend the pro-colonization movement in Spain, even after emphasis had shifted toward a more practical preoccupation with the commercial exploitation of Africa. Here it is important to recall that Manuel Iradier had been compelled to set aside purely academic concerns on his second expedition to Equatorial Guinea, in exchange for funding from the Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonistas, a new organization intent upon “modernizing” Spain’s colonial aspirations in Africa by employing strategies simi-

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lar to those of other European nations.¹⁷ Joaquín Costa, one of the society’s most tireless members, was hardly averse to waxing poetic on Africa’s privileged place in Spain’s “destiny as a nation and as a race” (qtd. in Pedraz Marcos 166), yet he had little patience for words that were not matched by deeds. By the mid-1880s, he had drafted detailed plans for the commercial development of the Gulf of Guinea, which, had they been fully implemented, might have positioned Spain on a par with other European powers in Africa (Pedraz Marcos 332–36). Since it seems unlikely that Ganivet would have been unaware of the efforts of Costa and other Spanish Africanists to lobby for greater political and economic involvement in Africa—indeed, the Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonistas had labored intensively to bring the issue to public attention—La conquista’s scathing portrayal of a specifically Spanish conqueror can hardly be deemed coincidental. Much as it condemns Stanley, then, the novel also singles out for reprisal all those Spanish Africanists who might secretly aspire to Cid-style enterprises. Many Spanish Africanists may have prided themselves on their iconoclastic views concerning race—from the widely varied conceptualizations of a “blood brotherhood” between Africans and Spaniards, espoused by such figures as Iradier and Costa, to the ostensibly antiracist stance of the impassioned abolitionist Rafael María de Labra—but in La conquista Ganivet reminds his readers of Spain’s less-than-exemplary behavior toward racial others over the centuries. The protagonist’s resonant name, of course, invokes the epic hero of the Reconquest, whose complex historical alliances with Muslim leaders during the medieval period are typically suppressed in a mythologization that casts him as the eminently “Pío” (pious) Moor Killer. Surprisingly, however, the single most notable example of Pío Cid’s moral abjection, involving his violently racist treatment of the Acca Pygmies—and the remarkable resonance of that treatment with other crucial moments in Spain’s past—has been completely neglected in the critical literature.¹⁸ Here Ganivet’s allegory of Spanish history meets up with his satire of colonialist practices, and the implication would seem to be that Spain is no better equipped to colonize Africa than are the newer European empires. As with the Maya war against the Ankoles, here Ganivet portrays the Mayas as interacting with real-life African tribes. The Accas are clearly the same Aka Pygmies of the Congo region that had been studied by the Spanish Anthropological Society in 1874 (“Sociedad . . . actas” 562, 564). In La conquista, the Accas begin to invade Maya territory, together with the Uamyeras, members of another tribe more racially similar to the Mayas, as a consequence of persecution in their own lands. Through his position as Igana Iguru, Cid addresses the problem of this

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influx of immigrants, which he also characterizes as “a felicitous event, which will usher in a new era in national history” (Obras I: 440–41). He formulates a “vast plan” which sets aside land on which the Uamyeras may settle—and which calls for the enslavement of the Accas, so that the native Maya serfs may at last be set free. Racist hierarchies play a crucial role here, for even though Cid denies that the Pygmies are as different as other explorers claim (Obras I: 441), noting on several occasions their singular intelligence, he clearly chooses to enslave them instead of the Uamyeras (or the Mayas) for racial reasons. Yet in his usual astonishingly hypocritical fashion, Cid claims that the Maya serfs will be liberated “without injury to anyone, until the complete abolition of a custom that is offensive to the decorum of man is achieved. With respect to the Pygmies, it was in their manifest interest not to die of starvation, and they would resign themselves to servitude, finding themselves in a country of greater numbers of taller, stronger men, and unfamiliar with the language that was spoken to them” (Obras I: 444). Cid continues to describe himself as an abolitionist, rather than as a promoter of slavery, by heading the chapter in which he narrates these events with the phrase, “Pacification of the country and abolition of servitude.” Here it is impossible not to recall the passionate debates, instigated by Bartolomé de las Casas, concerning the nefarious consequences of the enslavement of the indigenous population in the Americas—and the “humanistic” solution offered (much to his later regret) by Las Casas and implemented on an even larger scale than it had been previously by Spain: the enslavement of Africans. Cid’s initial treatment of the Accas thus mirrors Spain’s institutionalization of the African slave trade. Cid’s later policies concerning the Accas are reminiscent of other lamentable aspects of Spain’s historical dealings with presumed African others. Though he again presents himself as attempting to elevate the downtrodden Acca race and overcome native Maya prejudices—as when he recounts his insistence that the Acca queen Muvi sit at a common table together with his other forty-nine wives (Obras I: 500)—it is difficult not to assume that those prejudices are the result of his own enslavement of the Accas. Racial tensions are of necessity amplified when Cid changes the laws concerning adultery—a crime that was not always punished among the Mayas—so that only Acca men who have sex with Maya women will be executed. According to Cid, “Said decree was put into effect to protect the purity of the indigenous race” (Obras I: 529). Of course, “racial purity” is only deemed of concern when Maya women are threatened with “contamination” by Acca men. According to Cid’s law, Maya men are still free to cavort with subaltern Acca women, regardless of their marital status (and indeed, Cid himself will secretly conspire to have the mixed-race baby he sires

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with Muvi—a child whose genetic makeup, he notes, has been much improved by the “good crossing of races” [Obras I: 499]—swapped with the legitimate heir to the throne). Cid’s legislation of racism against the Accas will eventually lead to an explosion of racist violence, and here the narrator-protagonist begins temporarily to suppress clues concerning his crucial role in this denouement. At the end of the novel, when Cid decides to step down as Igana Iguru, he claims that he is horrified to witness his successor Asato propose that all Acca men be castrated. Cid then launches into a lengthy “scientific” digression on the genetics and psychology of racial crossing and the increasing popularity of Acca men among Maya women—including among his own wives. Only then does he mention that as Igana Iguru it had been his duty to enforce the law (here he neglects to remind the reader that the law was of his own making), but that out of a desire to show leniency toward the adulterous Acca men and not lose their labor power he had decided to subject them to castration instead of execution. Hence Asato’s shocking proposal, as we eventually come to learn, is in reality only an extension of Cid’s own policy of self-interest. Cid again attempts to present himself as savior of the Acca race by devising a purportedly more humane solution to their plight: expulsion. Conveniently, however, according to Cid’s plan the Acca men will be spared castration or execution by helping him to carry large quantities of loot (in the form of elephant tusks) out of the Kingdom of Maya, so that the Spaniard may return to his homeland a wealthy man. There are strong echoes here of the tremendous controversy that had arisen in Europe by the early 1890s once it became known that Stanley had enslaved six hundred Zanzibaris to serve as carriers for his own expedition (Coombes 81). Though for his part Cid has the audacity to compare himself on several occasions with Moses (Obras I: 628, 631), the ill-fated exodus that he leads is only another form of selfish exploitation; Cid might be likened to the present-day smugglers who make their fortune delivering African immigrants to the promised land across the Strait of Gibraltar—if not to their deaths—in overcrowded and poorly equipped pateras. It is interesting that the evident parallels with earlier Spanish history are explicitly drawn by Cid himself: “It is amazing how the wits of a nation moved by hatred are sharpened, and how resolutions are found for the most complicated situations. Examining the history of religious persecutions in civilized countries, of the expulsions of which Jews, Spanish Moriscos, and so many other peoples have been victims, one may find analogies to this one experienced by the Maya nation” (Obras I: 618). In fact the entire Acca episode can be read as an extended allegory of Spain’s treatment of the Moriscos.¹⁹ Both groups are converted into a “race apart” and labeled as threatening to the purity of the nation’s blood. Through the promulgation of

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a series of laws over an extended period of time, racist views are legislated and gradually take hold among the general population. As tensions come to a head, extreme solutions are proposed, including the castration of Acca/Morisco men. Expulsion is then deemed a lesser evil and hailed as a more “humanitarian” solution. Moreover, attempts are made to “save” those children who are not considered wholly Acca (i.e., those of mixed race) or wholly Muslim, and they are retained by the Maya/Spanish nation even as their parents are expelled. Thus while the early part of the Acca saga recalls Spain’s establishment of the Atlantic slave trade, later developments mirror the gradual exclusion and final expulsion of the Moriscos. It would seem that Spanish history, particularly as it relates to Africa, is doomed to repeat itself in Pío Cid’s conquest of the Maya kingdom. Thus, by brilliantly managing the techniques of satire, and most particularly through his characterization of the narrator Pío Cid, Ganivet engages in a pitiless exposé of the ways in which racist views are propagated, while reminding readers of Spain’s own unfortunate history of violent racism directed against those identified as African others. La conquista is not just a condemnation of the colonization/exploitation of Africa undertaken by Belgium and other foreign powers. Pío Cid, after all, is a Spaniard, and his behavior belies any claims for the moral superiority of Spanish colonialism, for his treatment of Africans only supersedes Henry Stanley’s in hypocrisy and cruelty.²⁰ GANIVET’S CONVERSION TO HISPANOTROPICALISM

Why, then, does the only critic to have seriously considered the ideological ramifications of Ganivet’s representation of Africans condemn the novel as racist? In an eloquent article, Yaw Agawu-Kakraba has asserted that “what passes for Ganivet and his critics as satire is nothing more than a literary creation that exhibits in the most tasteless form, bigotry and slurs from which a section of humankind has endured unimaginable anguish and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many forms and many places this very moment” (“Recasting” 49). Agawu-Kakraba’s claim that the novel fails to afford any frame of reference outside Pío Cid’s that would enable us to judge his actions (“Recasting” 56) is, I believe, somewhat problematic: as we have seen, La conquista provides many “textbook” examples of ironic satire which function to de-authorize Cid. However, the critic’s assertion that La conquista cannot be considered a satire because Ganivet employs Pío Cid to convey some of the same ideas that he himself espouses elsewhere (as in his Idearium español) is much more compelling (Agawu-Kakraba “Recasting” 56; “Symptoms” 165, n. 12). In his now classic study A Rhetoric of Irony Wayne Booth argues that as readers we draw on both

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intra- and extratextual clues to judge whether a work is satirical (80–82), and in the case of La conquista the extratextual clues may in fact contradict the intratextual. For that reason, a reconsideration of this issue is in order, and it will require further scrutiny of the intratextual clues to be found in the final two chapters of the novel, as well as of the pertinent extratextual clues present in later works by Ganivet. In the final chapter before the epilogue, in which he recounts his and the Accas’ “exodus” from the Maya kingdom, Pío Cid is saved from a near-fatal bout with fever by a Protestant missionary. He is forced to trade away half of his precious elephant tusks for some quinine, a few bottles of cognac, some colorful fabric, and a used suit, and once this exchange is made he sarcastically begins to refer to his rescuer as “the missionary or merchant” (Obras I: 645). Pío Cid is clearly interested in distinguishing himself from this man, whose exploitative nature is masked by a thin veneer of benevolence, and once the quinine takes effect he attempts to do so by boasting of his own contribution to Spain’s illustrious colonial legacy: “Though undeserving, I am a descendent of those Spanish conquistadors who never looked back to examine the dangers they had overcome, nor guarded against the impossibility of overcoming those that might still present themselves, nor contemplated securing an escape route, since their sole idea was always to advance, if death did not oblige them to fall. It’s reasonable that merchants, who only seek material gain, take care to leave with their lives, without which wealth would be of little appeal; but the ideal hero should flee from those prosaic solutions, should only look straight ahead, conceive of an enterprise so tied to his life that both are either glorified in victory or perish in defeat” (Obras I: 646). Because Cid has demonstrated as much preoccupation with material gain in Africa as has the Protestant, this overblown speech might only move the reader to sardonic laughter. However, the notion that Spanish colonization is fundamentally different from the modern European variant reappears in the epilogue, “El sueño de Pío Cid,” in which the narrator dreams that he encounters Hernán Cortés in the Escorial Monastery, and that Cortés urges him to publish his narrative. The introduction of a new (and seemingly authoritative) voice at such a late point in the novel presents some challenges for the understanding of La conquista’s satirical structure. Cortés heaps praise upon Cid’s efforts in Maya—“Your conquest seems more admirable to me”; “your work is more beautiful” (Obras I: 656, 659)—and the comparative grammatical structure that he employs to do so again serves to contrast Cid’s more “noble” form of colonization with the crass materialism of other European endeavors in Africa. In essence, Cortés attempts to “rewrite” Cid’s conquest of Maya, classifying it now as eminently admirable and on a par with his own “disinterested”

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doings in Mexico (Obras I: 658). Yet, as Natalia Milszyn implies (101), any reader familiar with the true character of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico (as described, for example, in the work of Bernal Díaz del Castillo) would be tempted to read this passage as simply another example of Ganivet’s masterful deployment of ironic reversal. Furthermore, even a reader inclined to view Cortés as heroic would have to recognize that the figure who speaks here is not the “real” Cortés but rather a Cortés that Cid himself has dreamed up. He is another ghostly “surrogate,” in Joseph Roach’s terms, designed to preserve the illusion of continuity between Spain’s preternaturally glorious colonial past and its present. As always, the apparition only serves to satisfy Cid’s need to justify and magnify the historical significance of his otherwise execrable conduct in Maya. In fact, the problem with the ending of La conquista del reino de Maya only emerges in full force when the novel is read alongside later texts by Ganivet. For example, in his Idearium español (which is a serious essay evidently devoid of irony, if not of ambiguities and contradictions, written in 1896), Ganivet puts forward the very same ideas that he would appear to satirize in “El sueño de Pío Cid.” Once again we find the notion that Spain’s conquest of the Americas may be distinguished from more contemporary forms of European colonization, but here it is not contradicted in any way. Rather, Ganivet argues that there are “two methods of colonization employed by the old conquistadors and modern merchants. This is not the place to discuss the relative value of one system or the other: I will only say that I prefer the old system, because it was more noble and disinterested. But this doesn’t subtract from the recognition that modern colonization is useful to the nations that practice it, while the old colonization means a loss of forces for the metropolis which at first glance doesn’t offer a beneficial result but which in the long run flourishes where it is meant to flourish, that is, in the colonies” (147–48). Although Ganivet still criticizes the material bent of other European colonizations, he softens his general attitude toward their behavior, and even terms the Belgian king Leopold’s policies “noble” (79). Moreover, while in the Idearium Ganivet would appear to discount the wisdom of Spanish colonization in Africa (140), or anywhere else on earth (as evidenced by his famous and forceful image, “all the doors through which the Spanish spirit escaped must be closed, locked and bolted” [155]), in a later published exchange with Miguel de Unamuno, “El porvenir de España,” he qualifies that assertion considerably. In this series of open letters, which first appeared between July and September 1898 in El Defensor de Granada, Ganivet argues that after a period of national regeneration, Spain, like Don Quijote, will again feel the urge to journey out, and that the preferred direction will be southward, to Africa:²¹ “I also said that it would be best to close all the doors so that Spain doesn’t escape;

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however, against my wishes, I am leaving one open, the African one, thinking about the future. [. . .] I’m not thinking about Morocco here; I am thinking about all of Africa, and not about conquests or protectorates, which are too old and well known, but rather about something original, which is certainly not within reach of our current politicians. And on this new series of adventures we will have a squire, and that squire will be the Arab. [. . .] If Spain had the force to work in Africa, I, a nobody, would commit myself to inventing half a dozen new theories so that we could legally keep whatever pleased us” (Ganivet, Idearium 205–6). Similarly, in a letter to Navarro Ledesma dated May 1898, Ganivet asserts that losing Cuba and the Philippines would simply enable the Spanish nation to move into Africa: “Without her present colonies Spain would very quickly become the owner of Gibraltar and North Africa” (“Epistolario” 312). It is astonishing that the same Ganivet who in La conquista del reino de Maya had exposed the hypocrisy of the European colonization of Africa would later advocate, as he does here, that Spain should one day attempt to make off with as much as possible in the neighboring continent. Certainly, his views on the subject appear to have shifted. Some of the critics who admit to having been “perplexed” (Ginsberg 62) by the ending of La conquista speculate that Ganivet may have suffered a “change of mood” (J. Franco 44), citing the fact that the final pages of the novel were written in late 1895, some two years after all the earlier chapters were completed (and, it is important to add, just before he began to compose the Idearium). It is most curious, too, that by 1897 Ganivet would write to Navarro Ledesma that he viewed the “Sueño” as the only worthwhile chapter of the novel (qtd. in Ventura Agudiez 77), apparently disavowing the marked anticolonialism so evident in the majority of pages of the work. As we have seen, some of the more lucid passages of La conquista reveal the ways in which leaders recirculate myths and even engage in mythmaking themselves in order to raise national spirits. It would seem that as 1898, the year of “national crisis” (and of his own suicide) approached, Ganivet decided that a dose of “pleasing and innocent lies” (Obras I: 349) was in order. In an “idealistic” effort to contribute to the spiritual regeneration of his homeland, in his Idearium Ganivet labors to make over the entire history of Spanish colonization (much as Pío Cid varnishes his own conquest of the Mayas), whitewashing the nation’s treatment of indigenous peoples and exalting the intrepid “spirit” of the Spanish “race.” Ganivet expands considerably upon the usual Hispanotropicalist discourse to argue that as an imperial entity Spain is not only morally superior but also more evolved than other European nations, which will inevitably experience a similar loss of colonial power in the future: “We are superior, more advanced with respect to the point that we’ve reached in our natural evolution;

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having lost its force of domination (and all nations will eventually lose that force), our nation has entered into a new phase of its historical life” (157). As Herbert Ramsden has noted, “It is difficult to imagine a more dexterous plucking of victory from defeat” (182). In his effort to explain the immense popularity of the Idearium among successive generations of Spaniards, Ramsden has likened the text to an “opiate” (149, 190), and in this sense the intoxicating rhetoric Ganivet employs here resembles Cid’s introduction of alcohol among the Mayas. Ganivet thus comes to exemplify Michael Taussig’s formulation, by mimicking the very savagery he ascribes to Pío Cid. While Ganivet characterized himself on several occasions as a savage for having written La conquista,²² I would claim that he was a savage for having sought to convert his own brilliant satire of colonization into a fraudulent action plan for national regeneration. Not even Miguel de Unamuno, who apparently had few qualms about prescribing opiates to the masses, would buy into Ganivet’s refurbished colonialist mythology.²³ In his responses, published in “El porvenir de España,” Unamuno vigorously protests Ganivet’s characterization of the American conquest, insisting, for example, that the principal motivation of the endeavor was not God but gold (Ganivet, Idearium 215). However, well into the twentieth century, countless Spanish Africanists would not only buy into the Ganivetian mythology, they would invest a great deal of energy in selling it to future generations of Spaniards as well. It is difficult to overstate the impact that Ganivet’s exaltation of Spanish imperialism would have on Spain’s later involvement in Africa. As Ramsden has argued, the “door to Africa” that Ganivet had decided to leave ajar was kicked wide open in later years by Spanish proponents of involvement in the neighboring continent (190). Ramsden cites several specific examples, from Eduardo Ibarra’s speech at the Catholic Student Residence in Madrid in 1925, which claimed that Ganivet advocated a religiously motivated form of colonialism in Morocco (23, 187), to the Falangist Demetrio Castro Villacañas’s 1965 assertion—ironically, just two years before Equatorial Guinea would finally be granted independence—that the era for increased Spanish involvement in Africa had at last arrived (192). The title of a 1954 documentary film that sought to demonstrate that the urban centers Spanish colonizers had developed in the equatorial African colony were identical to cities on the peninsula even borrowed Ganivet’s famous phrase: La puerta entornada (The Open Door). Although Ganivet didn’t invent Hispanotropicalism, as we shall see in later chapters he did infuse it with enough emotional appeal and intellectual caché to guarantee it tremendous longevity and popularity among many Spaniards.

3

S  O’ C   S-M W (–)

The profound ambivalence of Ángel Ganivet’s Africanism, discussed in the previous chapter, is anticipated several decades earlier in Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s wildly popular writings of the Spanish-Moroccan War era. Ganivet’s reverie of African conquest follows upon his scathing critique of Spanish imperialism. But in Alarcón’s case, the dream of colonial action in Morocco that appears in his story “Una conversación en la Alhambra” (A Conversation in the Alhambra) precedes his more contradictory war correspondence as a journalist and enlisted soldier, gathered in his Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de África (Diary of an Eyewitness to the African War, 1859–60). The war of 1859–60 would in fact inspire countless and conflicted meditations on the nature of Spanish national identity, which reflected nascent as well as ongoing anxieties over questions of religion, race, and gender. During this period the increasing secularization of Spanish society prompted the Neo-Catholic movement to reaffirm the nation’s essentially Christian character. While the Neo-Catholics attributed moral decline to a loss of faith, however, liberal thinkers were compelled to engage with the parallel European discourses of racial degeneration and the crisis in gender roles, first associated with the emergence of modern feminism. Moreover, the ongoing negotiations of identity undertaken at the time were impacted by the growing visibility of peripheral nationalisms. The literary and artistic depictions of the Spanish-Moroccan War that are the primary focus of this chapter—by the Andalusian Alarcón, the Catalan Marià Fortuny, and the Canarian Benito Pérez Galdós—are also inflected by their creators’ “location” within the larger Spanish nation. In Alarcón’s “Una conversación en la Alhambra,” published in June 1859, just months before Spain declared war on Morocco, the narrator (clearly an autho-

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rial alter ego) meets a mysteriously exotic man while journeying by coach to Granada. Although the man is dressed in European style, his “Semitic” beard and velvety-black eyes are reminiscent of a Romantic crusade novel’s hero (Obras 166), but the curious narrator is loath to breach the social convention barring conversation with strangers on public transport. He glimpses his fellow traveler again the following morning at a Corpus Christi procession, casting a severe glance in his direction when he initially neglects to kneel along with all of the other faithful. The two coincide once more that afternoon when they find themselves the only visitors to the Alhambra on a day of Christian celebration, and finally the man shares his secret: he is the last of the Zegríes, the legendary Andalusi family that had assassinated the rival Abencerrajes in that very palace. Here Alarcón eschews the popular literary preference for the tragic figure of the “Last Abencerraje,” suffused with nostalgia for past greatness, offering instead a surprising new version of the story: the “Last Zegrí,” unlike his Abencerraje cousin, desires not to recuperate the glories of the past but rather to enter into modernity. Aben-Adul explains that although he was raised in the Riffian countryside, he was fortunate to meet a generous Christian who persuaded him to convert and taught him Spanish, enabling him to read the history of alAndalus. But after doing so, Aben-Adul felt shame for the decline of his people and fled Africa, vowing never to return. Now, however, he hopes one day to marshal his faith in Christ, his wealth, and his valor to bring civilization back to his brothers. To that end, he enjoins the narrator to return the favor his people had once bestowed upon Spain: “My race has fulfilled its mission on earth. . . . But yours has not. When we passed through Spain, we improved it, civilized it, rescued it from barbarity [. . .] there are my compatriots, mired in misery, in ignorance, in ignominiousness, and you are here, happy, wealthy, powerful, enlightened. Now, then; Christians, philanthropists, propagandists, Negrophiles, what have you done for my parents and my brothers? When is the time for arms? When the time for eloquence? When the time for martyrdom? [. . .] You Spaniards will respond before God for the crimes that the Moors commit in this life, and for their condemnation in the next! Yes, you, for having forgotten your destiny, for having abdicated your rights, for having disobeyed the providential law of civilization” (Obras 169). Much as Ganivet would “dream up” his influential apology of Spanish colonization in Africa, Alarcón also acknowledges that he is willing to place “pure fantasy” (as he elsewhere characterizes this story [Obras 10]) at the cornerstone of his own Africanist agenda. Indeed, after Aben-Adul takes his leave, the narrator ends his story by musing, “Had I been dreaming? Was I awake? Why should I tell you? Is there, by chance, so much difference between dream and reality?” (Obras 170).

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Aben-Adul’s successful conversion to Christianity and longing for modernity function to “prove” Alarcón’s theory that had the Moriscos not been expelled from Spain, they would eventually have been assimilated into the dominant religion and society. Together with any number of liberal intellectuals of the time, Alarcón views the expulsion as a historical error and characterizes the Moriscos as Spaniards. As Aben-Adul insists to the narrator, “I am as Spanish as you,” reminding him that upon their arrival in North Africa his ancestors were, naturally, treated like foreigners (Obras 168).¹ Unlike many of his liberal counterparts, however, here Alarcón appears less preoccupied with the material and cultural losses suffered by Spaniards as a result of the expulsion than with the spiritual consequences: How many souls have been sacrificed as a result? Much like Ganivet’s ghostly Hernán Cortés, Aben-Adul functions as a sort of “surrogate,” in Joseph Roach’s terms: he is an effigy that Alarcón bodies forth in order to suture troubling historical discontinuities. As he “dreams up” the figure of Aben-Adul, Alarcón imagines a Spain in which the Moriscos remain and provide an ostensibly seamless link with both the glorious Andalusi past and the nation’s Catholic tradition, disavowing the dramatic cultural transformation—and cultural violence—inevitably associated with religious conversion. By producing the Aben-Adul of “Conversación en la Alhambra,” Alarcón hopes that any number of real-life Aben-Aduls might soon come to occupy the position that has been held open by his fictional surrogate, as a result of Spain’s newly rediscovered interest in the colonization of Africa. While critics who have discussed this story and linked it to Alarcón’s procolonial stance inexplicably omit any reference to Aben-Adul’s religious conversion (see for example González Alcantud, “Poética” 24; Viñes Millet 57), I believe that it is central to the understanding of the author’s unusual brand of Africanism, which has yet to be analyzed. Indeed, as a soon-to-be-avowed NeoCatholic sympathizer (Diario 381) who rejects the revolutionary excesses and irreligious tendencies of his youth, Alarcón offers a different perspective on the neocolonial project from other, more secular-minded Spanish Africanists.² His work thus manages to resonate with a larger sector of the nation’s devout population. Moreover, Aben-Adul’s pointed association of enlightenment and Christianity, cited above, also betrays Alarcón’s now fervent belief that modernity is only accessible to those who have accepted Christ. Thus, although al-Andalus, as represented by the Alhambra in which they converse, is a source of fascination for both Aden-Adul and the narrator of Alarcón’s story, it must ultimately be left behind. Aben-Adul does so immediately, by fleeing to the north. For his part, however, Alarcón must first indulge and exorcise his fascination with the Muslim past by traveling to Morocco and adopting, if only temporarily, the role he

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has denied to Aben-Adul: that of nostalgic “Last Abencerraje.” Once he has done so, however, he must also confront the reality of contemporary Morocco, and it is at this point that his attempts at a neocolonial surrogation will fail. Indeed, I argue here that although over the course of his career Alarcón fashions several Morisco surrogates, and will himself even come briefly to occupy the position that they function to hold open, he will ultimately be forced to recognize that those surrogates are in fact nothing more than effigies, ghostly remnants of an opportunity that expired long ago, rather than symbols of an ongoing and vibrant possibility. ALARCÓN’S NEO-CATHOLIC NEOCOLONIALISM

Although Alarcón had sought for a number of years to travel to Morocco— two trips had already fallen through (Diario 24)—a unique opportunity to do so would present itself just months after the publication of “Conversación en la Alhambra.” As I outlined in the Introduction, in August 1859, after tribesmen repeatedly foiled the construction of a new guard post in Ceuta and knocked down a border marker carved with the Castilian coat of arms, provoking several skirmishes, the Spanish government demanded reparations. Negotiations stalled, however, when Morocco’s sultan Muley Abd-ar-Rahman died and his elder son and successor Sidi Mohamed scrambled to legitimize his power. Since there was widespread enthusiasm among Spaniards for intervention in Africa, Prime Minister O’Donnell had little trouble convincing Congress to declare war on October 22. Alarcón initially decided to accompany his friend and fellow writer General Antonio Ros de Olano on the campaign in a civilian capacity, which would allow him to write of his experiences with some measure of security. Alarcón would thus join the extensive corps of Spanish and foreign journalists and visual artists covering what has been termed, quite significantly, Spain’s first modern “media war” (García-Felguera 262; Riego Amézaga, “Campaña”). But as he was awaiting departure in Málaga, the arrival of wounded soldiers from the front and the patriotic fervor of the moment inspired him to enlist as well. As a result of his dual status as soldier-journalist, Alarcón admits that he enjoyed a number of privileges, including freedom of movement and better lodging and rations, adding that he also faced increased responsibilities. He fought in several battles, suffered a wound in the foot, and was awarded two medals for bravery in action. A selection of Alarcón’s near-daily missives detailing his impressions of Morocco and the vicissitudes of the war was published in the illustrated Museo Universal, while the complete text was offered as a subscription series that ac-

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cording to the writer himself sold an unprecedented fifty thousand copies, leading him to claim that “all of Spain” was reading his work (Obras 834–37, 14). A number of critics have emphasized that in his Diario Alarcón envisions himself as journeying not simply to Morocco but to al-Andalus as well (for example, Morales Lezcano, “Pedro” 76; Lécuyer and Serrano 202). In this respect, the author would appear to adopt the typical Orientalist perspective, according to which travel through space is also conceived of as travel through time. In the prologue to the Diario Alarcón himself notes that his upbringing in the Andalusian city of Guadix, where he played amid Hispano-Arabic ruins and was nourished with chronicles, legends, and poetry about and by the Moors, had provoked his earliest desire to visit Morocco “in order to touch, in a manner of speaking, the vivid reality of the past in that marvelous continent” (Diario 24). José Antonio González Alcantud adds that Alarcón’s family legacy—one of the writer’s ancestors had served as captain in the Reconquest of Granada and was reputed to have guarded the last Nasrid king, Boabdil—must also have inspired his imaginative obsession with the past (“Pedro” 31, 34–35). In his prologue, however, Alarcón indicates that his more “poetic” and youthful motivations for crossing the Strait of Gibraltar were later superseded by his preoccupation with Spain’s decline after the expulsions, and with the possibility that the nation’s true destiny might lie precisely in Africa (Diario 24). In the text itself, Alarcón will need to work through his longstanding desire for “time travel” in order to present a revisionist view of Spain’s past, present, and future. In fact, once he arrives in Morocco, Alarcón is disappointed by the harsh, sparsely inhabited terrain traversed by the army in its arduous march from Ceuta to Tetuán, which affords few opportunities to experience the Andalusi past. Only a lone palace abandoned after an early battle enables him to note parallels to structures in Córdoba, Granada, and Seville (Diario 49). In marked contrast to the many Africanists who insist on the similarities in climate, flora, and fauna, mobilizing the trope of North Africa as Spain’s geographical mirror, Alarcón describes the Moroccan landscape as eminently foreign: “The acrid or narcotic emanations from the plants excite your senses [. . .] they create who knows what kind of unhealthy state, who knows what feverish excitement that fatigues and invigorates you at the same time [. . .] don’t doubt it, it’s because this is another world [. . .] I, at least, never experienced outside Spain what I am now experiencing outside Europe” (Diario 212). This description clearly identifies the new setting for Spain’s past as a non-European space, which contrasts with the European identity he so insistently attributes to contemporary Spain (see also Diario 25, 30–31, 38).

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This tendency is confirmed in Alarcón’s characterizations of Tetuán. The first part of the Diario is suffused with the author’s intense desire to see and enter this city, where he hopes to step into the past of his childhood musings. It is not surprising that once the troops scale the last mountain bordering upon the Valley of Tetuán and the city comes into view, Alarcón perceives it as identical to Granada. He begins this passage with a quote from Chateaubriand’s novella Adventures of the Last Abencerrage, with Alarcón comparing himself to the legendary descendent of the exiled Morisco family who glimpses Granada for the first time, insisting, “Ah, the illusion is complete! Why not? And even if it is a delirium, don’t deliver me from it” (Diario 193, 202). Alarcón thus extends the reverie of his story “Conversación en la Alhambra,” now adopting for himself the role of nostalgic Abencerraje. As the army advances toward Tetuán, Alarcón maintains his belief that the Moroccan city slumbers on, “as Granada lay four hundred years ago” (Diario 224). Once he has entered and lived within the city walls, he expands his Andalusi points of reference, asserting, “Visiting Tetuán today is equivalent to seeing Córdoba in the XIIIth century,” while noting that finally his desire to touch the “vivid reality of the past” has been fulfilled (Diario 367). But Alarcón again insists that Spain’s Andalusi past has nothing whatsoever to do with its European present. Although he observes that some buildings within the city are similar or identical to those in his native Andalusia (Diario 225, 367), he also avows that “the houses and streets were nothing like European ones” (Diario 355).³ Describing a meal in the home of wealthy Algerians residing in Tetuán, he declares: “The scene that I witnessed last night seemed a dream to me, an inspiration or the like. I thought I had been born in the Middle Ages and found myself in the Granada of Muley-Hassen or in the Córdoba of the Abd-er-Rahmans.” But after recalling many pleasurable soirees in Madrid, he concludes: “Muslim life has nothing to compare to one of our parties, not even in the palaces of emperors” (Diario 458–59). In sum, “Tetuán is what it should be, what I desired it to be: a completely Arab city, a town utterly dissimilar to all those of Europe, a nest of Moors, a resurrection of the ruined Albaicín of Granada” (Diario 363). Thus Alarcón discovers Spain’s past not among the Andalusi monuments of the peninsula, as so many European and American Orientalists had done—and as his own childhood experiences might have inspired him to do as well—but rather in Africa. This “geographical displacement” of the past enables Alarcón even more completely to disassociate contemporary Spaniards—including Andalusians like himself—from what he terms “the Moorish masses who sleep in their historical death” (“la morisma [que] duerme su muerte histórica”; Diario 23). Spaniards, by contrast, must be viewed as living in a constantly re-

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newed history: carrying on their glorious imperial traditions, without, however, rejecting modern progress. Of the more than forty-five thousand men who would fight in the war. Alarcón asserts in his very first Diario entry: “They are our soldiers of always; the heroes of our history; the ones who provided the stories for those Castilian ballads that eclipse the marvels of fables. [. . .] In sum, it is the Iberian race, which subsists without having degenerated, active and potent, just as when it spread through unknown worlds” (Diario 30–31). Alarcón’s emphasis on the continuing potency of the “Iberian race” is tinged from the very beginning with a Christian rhetoric that casts the Spaniards as redeemers. In this same passage, for example, he maintains that the inhabitants of the globe had heard “united the names of the Redeemer and of Spain” (Diario 31). Later, when describing his fellow soldiers’ Christmas celebration in the Rif, his reference to the “coming of the Messiah” blurs the birth of Jesus with the Spaniards’ arrival on Moroccan soil (Diario 96). The author’s equation of the Iberian nation with the Redeemer, however, is tempered by his understanding that contemporary Spain is also sorely in need of redemption in the eyes of the Western world. The remainder of his text is marbled with references to Spain’s “rebirth,” resuscitation,” and “resurrection”: “All is reborn”; “our name is resuscitated in Europe” (Diario 31); “I believe the hour of our resurrection has arrived [. . .] the race of Laurias, Bazanes, Ulloas and Gravinas has not been extinguished” (Diario 108); “this resurrection of our beautiful days, this reparation of our past greatness, this new dawning of our glory, has returned confidence to all of our hearts, it has revealed to the nation its own force, spoken to it of the future, of redemption” (Diario 429). Alarcón’s lexical choices function to assure his readers that the nation’s reentry onto the colonial stage is nothing less than a sacred act. Yet, for Alarcón, Spain’s redemption does not simply entail a reprisal of the imperial victories of the past. Woven into his pro-colonialist discourse is a remarkable acknowledgment of the verities of the Black Legend that had so besmirched Spain’s reputation in the world, effectively functioning to bar the nation’s admission into the modern European club. Alarcón’s revelation, which has remained strangely unexamined by critics, occurs while he is in the hospital in Ceuta, recovering from his wound, cut off from the remainder of the troops at the front. Fearing that his fellow soldiers are starving, because days of fierce storms have prevented Spanish ships from delivering their provisions, Alarcón wonders why God has made the nation’s “regeneration” so difficult, musing that perhaps Spain is being punished for its intolerance (Diario 157). Rather than speaking directly to the reader, as he usually does, here Alarcón employs apostrophe to direct his plea to God:

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If you return us to your grace, call us to life again, we will not abuse our power, we will not use it for iniquity as in times past! No, we will not return to afflicting humanity, to defending error, to allowing ourselves to be carried away by pride. The bonfires of cruel intolerance are inert cinders that the winds of liberty have already swept away. Here you see us with the sword in one hand and the cross in the other, in this land of infidels, without ever abusing our victory, without forcing others’ conscience, persuading and advising as you have prescribed to us, treating those who live in error not as ferocious beasts but rather as depraved brothers who may better themselves and serve your holy cause. Oh no, Lord! Our mission is no longer one of ire, nor of terror, nor of tribulation and scandal, it is of civilization, of progress, of liberty for our fellow men. (Diario 158)

Alarcón works to support his claim that modern-day Spanish soldiers are carrying on their mission in an equally glorious but more Christian manner than their forebears by highlighting the moments in which they treat the Moroccans with kindness and charity. Wounded prisoners of war receive quality medical care, and one hospitalized enemy soldier expresses admiration for the generosity of the Spaniards, comparing their mercy favorably to that of the French in the Algerian colonial wars (Diario 145). General O’Donnell demonstrates clemency by releasing many other prisoners of war, thus revealing the true spirit of Christianity to the Muslims (Diario 440). After one battle, weary Spanish troops share their crackers with a Moroccan mother and her children, allowing her astonished and remorseful warrior-husband to gather up his family and guide them to safety (Diario 175). Similarly, after entering Tetuán the Spanish officers distribute coins to the Jewish population while the soldiers share with them their rations, as the Muslims look on, “amazed by such noble behavior” (Diario 359). Alarcón pulls out all of the rhetorical stops when describing “that saintly and blessed scene at which the angels in heaven must have cried with pleasure, in which Christian charity bathed the faces of the victors with an angelical delight” (although the sight of the young Jewish women’s exposed flesh also bathes some of the soldiers’ faces with less laudable expressions; Diario 359). During the occupation of Tetuán, Alarcón pauses to reflect upon the troops who work to protect the religious freedom of all of the city’s citizens on their respective holy days, pointedly contrasting their comportment to that of the soldiers in Philip II’s notorious Flanders campaigns of the late sixteenth century, who “burned down temples and beheaded Huguenots in the name of the God of peace and love, who had said via the Holy Fathers: ‘Persuade, but do not force’” (Diario 433). That Alarcón believes tolerance to be a fundamentally Catholic virtue is evident from his story “Conversación en la Alhambra,” when the narrator describes

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Aben-Adul as “tolerant and human like the best Catholic” (Obras 168). But here his faith in that virtue leads him to an oddly contradictory form of circular reasoning. By showing tolerance, the Spanish soldiers demonstrate their moral superiority as Catholics; since Catholicism is morally superior, however, those of other faiths must eventually recognize the necessity of conversion. Thus Alarcón does not view his exaltation of tolerance as at odds with the enthusiastic assistance he lends the army’s priest to expropriate Tetuán’s main mosque and turn it into a church (Diario 437). His actions are only the logical consequence of early statements of delight that “Ave María Purísima” is now heard every night on African soil thanks to the presence of Spanish troops (Diario 44), or that indeed the Rif “is already Spanish territory, Christian soil, Jesus Christ’s patrimony” (Diario 96). Moreover, Alarcón’s first extended contact with both Jews and Muslims in the city of Tetuán only solidifies his belief in the superiority of Christianity, leading him to conclude that “human dignity, whether it be deemed individual or societal, may only be reached through the Gospels” (Diario 369). Alarcón is convinced that as Spain redeems itself by undertaking a genuinely Christian conquest it will also redeem Morocco, and here the crucial connection between modernity and faith in Jesus Christ is most apparent. He sees that connection on the faces of the Spanish soldiers who participate in a mass before the occupation of Tetuán, through whose features “the soft light of an evangelical spirit, of an enlightened intelligence, of a merciful and affable heart, was shining” (Diario 296). When he is not helping the army priest appoint the altar of Tetuán’s new church, Alarcón devotes his free time during the occupation of the city to installing what he claims is the first printing press in Morocco. He publishes a newspaper that he dubs El Eco de Tetuán, and proclaims in the first issue: “May it be under the triumphant flag of Jesus Christ that the first newspaper in the Empire of Morocco is born unto public light [. . .] some day it will be the bright sun of truth, scattering rays of love and justice to the shadowy minds of Africans!” (484). Alarcón marries Christian with post-Enlightenment metaphors of lightness and dark, equating spiritual salvation with the progress of civilization. The first issue of the newspaper (reprinted in the Diario) also records that the Spaniards literally have brought illumination to Tetuán’s streets, which like the doors to the walled city have been baptized with Spanish names, such as “Reyes Católicos” (Catholic Kings), and lined with hospitals, restaurants, cafés, and a market for the occupiers (Diario 485–86; García Figueras details other projects undertaken during Spain’s two-year control of the city, including the demolition of homes in order to construct a more European streetscape and facilitate the movement of troops [Recuerdos 124–25]). Although according to Alarcón the technological advances, including the printing press,

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steam engine, railroad, and telegraph, as well as the “regenerative” ideas that Spain has brought to Morocco might not take hold immediately, eventually they will bring about the conversion of the country into a modern Christian nation. He anticipates the day, which he is certain will arrive within a century, when the country awakens from its “mortal lethargy” to become “a cultured, civilized, Christian nation, friend of humanity” (Diario 483, 484). Because he so clearly links modernity to Christianity, then, Alarcón creates a bridge between old-style religious (re)conquest and the newest conceptualization of colonization as a “civilizing mission.” Ultimately, however, Alarcón’s mission is hindered by his profound ambivalence concerning the Moroccan inhabitants’ capacity for conversion. While the fictional Aben-Adul of his “Conversación en la Alhambra” readily embraces Christianity and is considered to be as “Spanish” as the narrator, the Jews and Muslims Alarcón meets in Morocco would appear to be less interested in or perhaps even beyond salvation; they cannot, in other words, be surrogated by AbenAdul. Here the longstanding confusion between racial and religious identities in Spain comes into play. Unlike other Africanists who believe in an Andalusi racial inheritance and are thus willing to acknowledge that some Moroccans might be Spaniards’ “blood brothers,” Alarcón draws on fraternal rhetoric only when expressing, implicitly, the hope that they might become “brothers in Christ.” One rare instance occurs when the author describes a mass celebrated for the army and expresses compassion for the Riffian inhabitants, “our miserable brothers who ignore all the sweetness of the Crucified’s religion” (Diario 85). At the same time, Alarcon’s text is crisscrossed by the racialist discourses so prevalent during this era, emphasizing the presumably inherent immorality (and thus “unconvertibility”) of the “race of Sem”: “What variety of our species is this, which differs so from us in its inclinations, its instincts, its moral sense, in its passions and its intelligence?” (Diario 54). Alarcón sometimes describes the Muslim and Jewish “races” as equally degenerate (exclaiming at one point, for example, “What wickedness, what ignorance, what ignominiousness, what grief and what dejection in one race and the other!” [Diario 369]). Yet his perspective concerning the Jews is more consistently negative, and his text is replete with anti-Semitic passages. Alarcón repeatedly highlights the sinful avarice of the Jews, whom he terms a “parasitic race” (Diario 356; 374, 406–7, etc.), and he ridicules the “small beings” who bear “great names” such as Abraham (Diario 373). One such “small being” is his own servant Jacob, described as “the descendent of those who crucified Jesus” (Diario 487). Arguing with Jacob over his inability to work on the Sabbath, the “pro-tolerance” Alarcón calls him a “savage God-killer” (Diario 488). Alarcón

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briefly spares Jewish women his invective when describing the lovely daughters of the Tetuani Moisés—particularly an enticingly virginal eleven-year-old girl (Diario 379)—advancing the idea that the inclination to avarice is at odds with their natural destiny to be mothers. Qualities that are repulsive in Jewish men are the opposite in the women, for “in women, weakness is always enchanting and cowardice is attractive” (Diario 376). But later, in his description of the beautiful and richly dressed teenage wife and mother Tamo, married to a wealthy sixty-year-old jeweler, Alarcón abandons such distinctions. Although he waxes poetic on the pallor of her perfect features and form, Alarcón insists that her melancholy expression springs not from spiritual but rather from purely material causes. Unlike a Spanish woman, who might regret the loss of her dignity or of her adolescent illusions of love, Tamo is only capable of suffering over the physical demands of nursing, a secret vice, or a decline in fortune (Diario 435). Indeed, after picking a bouquet of violets and jasmine Alarcón complains that he has no one to give the flowers to, for while a Jewish woman would prefer silver, a Muslim woman would long instead for an embrace (Diario 442). Alarcón finds the daughters of Islam as soulless as Jewish women, as is evident from his description of a young woman to whom he throws sweets from a neighboring rooftop. Comparing her to “wise monkeys,” Alarcón concludes, “From far away she seemed to me a graceful animal. Close up she seemed to me a charming female. In neither case could she seem a ‘woman’ to me” (Diario 495, 494). Alarcón’s cruel description evokes the most racist of the illustrations of Moroccans that circulated in Spain during the war, particularly the caricatures published in the satirical magazine El Cañón Rayado, several issues of which depicted the enemy as monkeys (M. Ortega 377, 385; Martín Corrales 62–63). At the same time, however, the author suggests that the Muslim woman’s debasement is perhaps not innate but rather the consequence of her treatment by Muslim men: if she is presumed to be a strictly sensual being, then she will of course behave accordingly (Diario 494). Notwithstanding this criticism, for Alarcón Muslim men may be possessed of a nobility he denies to their Jewish counterparts. Remarking on an elderly Moor, he notes, “I quickly calculated the profound difference between one race and the other. How much dignity in the Agarene! What miserable abjection in the Israelite!” (Diario 354). Alarcón also expresses confusion regarding the nature of the Muslims’ God and the legitimacy of their spirituality. After entering a mosque, he wonders why Mohammed has failed to strike him down, proclaiming, “Prophet: I deny you with all the force of my reason and sentiment. I would die proclaiming that you are not God! I firmly believe in your falseness!” (Diario 415). But when he subsequently meets a grimy dervish, he insists that “under-

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neath that filth hides a soul, and in that soul resides the author of worlds and suns; the great God, the only, the eternal, the omnipotent, dwells there” (Diario 427). Alarcón is impressed by the Moors’ nobility in defeat, finding their behavior eminently civilized rather than savage, a demonstration that they have triumphed over the flesh and are in full possession of their immortal spirit (Diario 408). In short, they are unconquerable, for “not even the lively and expansive Catholic civilization would be able to assimilate them, modify them or influence their intense and solid convictions” (Diario 408). Critics who have discussed Alarcón’s Diario have struggled to explain the author’s sudden loss of faith in the war, attributing it to a brief moment of lucidity, a fit of pacifism, or the irresistible pull of “Europe” (see, for example, Lécuyer and Serrano 199–201; Morales Lezcano, “Pedro” 78–79). However, I believe that once Alarcón’s religiously inflected colonial ideology is fully understood, the change articulated in the final pages of the text becomes much clearer. As an Africanist who has been inspired by his own neo-Catholic zeal, Alarcón undergoes a second and singularly dramatic conversion once he understands that the Moroccans defeated by the Spaniards will not themselves convert. Unlike his earlier fictional creation Aben-Adul, the Jews and Muslims that Alarcón encounters during the war have no interest in abandoning their faith. Not even the Europeanized Algerian residents of Tetuán who have lived under French colonialism and acknowledge the decline of Islam (and whose company Alarcón seems to prefer over that of the Moroccans) are inclined to become Christians (Diario 446). Yet Alarcón has arrived at this understanding too late. He despairs of the Spanish newspapers that are filled with pro-colonialist rhetoric (Diario 430), clamoring for the conquest of all of Africa, although he is ultimately forced to admit, if only indirectly, his own culpability in the affair: “I sang the War in my way, and I did seek to inflame more and more, if that could have been possible, the public spirit, the patriotic enthusiasm of the people and of the army” (Diario 508). Now Alarcón attempts to persuade his readers of the folly of even remaining in Tetuán, for the Moroccans are just like the impassioned Spaniards who fought off the French in the Peninsular War: “Here I can only confess that the Moors’ attitude toward the Spanish invasion is the same as the one we adopted with the French invasion. Think about what happened then on the peninsula, and you can calculate what could happen to us in Africa over time. I believe that upwards of ‘half a million’ French were devoured by our soil in the space of six years” (Diario 475; see also 332). Even so, as peace negotiations fall through and the march toward Tangier is planned, Alarcón is incapable of avoiding falling back into his customary exaltation of the Africanist cause (Diario 507–8). It is telling, however, that immediately thereafter the author abruptly announces his

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decision to leave Morocco and take his case for peace directly to the Spanish public, returning to Madrid with two like-minded fellow correspondents, Gaspar Núñez de Arce and Carlos Navarro (Diario 508–12). In essence, Alarcón must abandon the theater of war in order to avoid his own dramatization of colonial conquest. ENVISIONING MOROCCAN REALITY

Juan Goytisolo has asserted that Morocco is but a “theatrical representation” in the Diario (Crónicas 19). Alarcón’s liberal use of theatrical metaphors—as when he writes, for instance, “the curtain may now go up” before detailing the battle of Azmir (Diario 182)—exemplifies the constant slippage between reportage and literary representation in his narrative, which has been exhaustively studied by critics. For Luis Fernández Cifuentes, Alarcón represents the modern phenomenon of mass tourism, where travel has become only a “second-hand discovery” (Fernández Cifuentes 16). Alarcón embarks on all of his journeys replete with a head (or in some cases, suitcases) full of texts, and everything that he sees and experiences may only function to confirm the commonplaces they contain. It is a tendency that begins in the Diario, and Fernández Cifuentes cites a characteristic passage from Alarcón’s description of Tetuán: “It was just as I had imagined [. . .] just as historians and poets had described it for me” (qtd. in Fernández Cifuentes 16). In their analysis of the Diario, Marie-Claude Lécuyer and Carlos Serrano view Alarcón as caught in the transitional moment from Romanticism to Realism. Through his last-minute decision to enlist as a soldier, the writer supplements his role as observer with that of actor. Despite his expressed desire and occasionally studious efforts to produce an objective description of the war, as well as of Morocco and its people, Alarcón cannot resist injecting his own dramatic emotional responses into his narrative; gradually, the poet supplants the war correspondent (Lécuyer and Serrano 191). Like Fernández Cifuentes, Lécuyer and Serrano note that Alarcón’s literary baggage predetermines his perceptions, adding that he is most likely to refer to Romantic authors such as Byron, Zorrilla, Chateaubriand, and Espronceda (188). But Alarcón labors to reveal the truth value of that literature. They compare his phrase “he was a true Arab of legend” with the oft-cited “He was a true Moor, that is to say a Moor out of a novel” (Diario 144, 188), concluding that ultimately Alarcón collapses the distinction between reality and literature (Lécuyer and Serrano 193). Alarcón employs metaphorical references to photography to describe the irresistible pull of the literary. He occasionally claims to aspire to a photographic-

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like objectivity, which is always, however, interrupted by poetic flights of fancy: “Tear up this crazy and incongruous page and return to imagining that your African campaign chronicler is a photographic apparatus, without sentiment. [. . .] But without wanting to, I return to poetry, despite having promised you to distance myself from it” (Diario 183, 186). There is more than metaphor at stake here. Thoroughly imbricated in the transition from Romanticism to Realism are the tensions resulting from contemporaneous shifts in visual technologies.⁴ The invention of photography, however, did not immediately produce a preference for presumably more “realistic” modes of visual representation (Barnhurst and Nerone), and Alarcón reflects the ambivalence with which daguerrotypes could be received. In the prologue to the 1880 edition of the Diario Alarcón proudly asserts that he was the first to take a camera to Morocco (just as he was the first to use a printing press there [Obras 834–35]), but the narrative proper reveals his disillusionment with the new medium. While in this later prologue the author refers in passing to the photographer he contracted in Málaga—without, however, indicating his name (Obras 834)—in his original narrative he is completely depersonalized: “I ordered the operation of the photographic machine, which follows me on all of these excursions, and I am sending you some views of this picturesque panorama. For my part, I’ll add a few general characteristics to the daguerrotype’s work” (Diario 51).⁵ Alarcón’s use of language converts photography into a purely mechanical process, all but divorced from human intervention. As in the quote above, it is “without sentiment,” thus requiring supplementation with literary impressions of the view. Moreover, at the time only static images could be captured on film, and Alarcón laments the camera’s inability to depict moving subjects, or move itself. A photograph was limited to presenting a single point of view, and thus failed to improve upon drawing or writing, which was in fact better at stimulating readers to conjure up in their imaginations the fullness of reality. This complaint is evident from his description of the soldiers, hailing from all regions of Spain, who camp out on the streets of Ceuta at the beginning of the war: “Neither the pencil, nor the pen, nor photography itself would suffice to reproduce the multiple perspectives of this picture; invent it in your mind with the aid of my indications” (Diario 41). In his 1880 prologue Alarcón confesses that he abandoned photography early on in the campaign, when technical problems arose with the equipment due to the inclement weather (Obras 835). Alarcón’s 1860 edition of the Diario did include numerous illustrations, although sketches quickly replaced photographs as the original source material for the wood engravings. As Bernardo Riego Amézaga argues, nineteenth-century Spaniards found themselves immersed in a visual culture that enabled them to engage in a process of abstraction, through which they accepted the images

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reproduced in books and periodicals (namely, engravings based on drawings and photographs) as substitutes for real-world experiences. This was the case even though engravers often took significant liberties with their sources. With drawings as well as photographs, which could not yet be directly reproduced in print, they transformed the images according to a series of conventions that were designed to enhance their clarity and legibility (Riego Amézaga, Construcción 38–39, 136–38, 230–31, 234–35; Barnhurst and Nerone). Why, then, were the images deemed “authentic”? Riego Amézaga explains the crucial importance of the concept of eyewitnessing by citing the Spanish-Moroccan War narrative published by Charles Yriarte, the French artist and writer who became Alarcón’s close friend and tent mate, and whose sketches formed the basis for numerous illustrations in the Diario. In Sous la tente (1863), Yriarte admits that in the heat of battle it is impossible to produce a finished drawing; the artist can only capture the crudest of sketches, which are later employed to create a more polished and composite image. The credibility of that image resides in the fact that the original artist has witnessed firsthand everything he has drawn, and has sought faithfully to commit his testimony to paper, for he is aware of his duty to history (Riego Amézaga, Construcción 233–34; see also Barnhurst and Nerone). Lécuyer and Serrano have also noted Alarcón’s obsession with eyewitnessing. The writer takes pains to substantiate his own presence at the events he describes, and when he is unable to view something in person—most notably, when he finds himself in a hospital in Ceuta after being wounded in action—he subsequently seeks out reliable eyewitnesses to make up for the gaps in his own firsthand knowledge. Alarcón also seeks corroboration from additional sources when he deems it important to do so (Lécuyer and Serrano 184–87). Much like his companion Yriarte, Alarcón explicitly refers to his understanding that the Diario will become a fundamental source of information concerning the war for future historians (Diario 174). Alarcón asserts that the presence of so many observers at the front serves as a brake on the excessive poeticization of the events to which he finds himself so susceptible, jokingly proposing that all the eyewitnesses be killed off (Diario 57). Ironically, however, Alarcón’s jest came back to haunt him when he found his own credibility disputed by another eyewitness to the conflict. In his missive published in the Museo Universal in early March 1860, Alarcón detailed the meeting between General Muley-el-Abbas (brother of the sultan) and General O’Donnell, in which the two leaders attempted to work out a peace accord. Alarcón provides a vivid description of Abbas, and his text is accompanied by an engraving (signed by Rico) reputedly based on Yriarte’s sketch. Alarcón’s main competition on the war-chronicle front came from the Crónica del Ejército y

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Armada de África (Chronicle of the African Army and Armada), produced by a team that included, among others, the famed political orator Emilio Castelar (who later became the first president of the Republic). The publication boasted as well that the only artist who followed the army into all of the battles was their own José Vallejo, who like Alarcón served as an enlisted soldier as well as a correspondent and was decorated for bravery in action. In the March 31 installment, the Crónica published a scathing condemnation of the Museo Universal, asserting that the published portrait and Alarcón’s description of Muley-el-Abbas were false. Vallejo, who had diligently attended the famous meeting, testified that the Moroccan leader remained in his tent the entire time, and even though he had stayed on after the Spaniards had left, it was impossible to catch a glimpse of him (García Figueras, Recuerdos 53–56). The accusations were clearly troubling to Alarcón, for in the complete 1860 edition of the Diario he goes to considerable lengths (perhaps suspiciously so) to explain precisely how he and Yriarte were able to witness the event, and Vallejo was not. According to Alarcón, whereas they were situated near the tent opening the entire time, Vallejo, who had been seated directly in front of the aperture, had been shooed away by O’Donnell, for he was concerned Abbas might not wish to have his portrait drawn. Although Abbas remained hidden during most of the meeting, at the end as O’Donnell stood to leave the Moroccan leader came into view. But Vallejo was too timid to return to his earlier position: “Iriarte, who, like I, was was waiting to pounce on the moment, took advantage of it to sketch the portrait that I’m sending you. Vallejo, our inspired compatriot, whose pencil has reproduced so many sublime episodes from this war, was less lucky than we and he lost that opportunity to enrich his travel album” (Diario 468–69). Yriarte, too, provided an excessively prolix explanation in his own memoirs of the war (García Figueras, Recuerdos 57). Interestingly, however, in the 1880 edition of the Diario Alarcón eliminates most of the justification as well as the somewhat fawning references to Vallejo (Obras 1052–56). Apparently, the momentary crisis in the system through which authenticity was manufactured had long since been forgotten. It is important to emphasize that the Crónica’s criticism of the Muley-elAbbas episode was as much caught up in questions of ideology as of authenticity. The editors noted of the portrait, “We’ll say that Muley Abbas must be a man like all other men, and [the Museo Universal] represents him to us as more than nine heads tall” (qtd. in García Figueras, Recuerdos 55). Marie-Linda Ortega perhaps has this quote in mind when she explains that the low-angle perspective of the engraving in question makes Abbas appear taller as well as elevated above the spectator (373). Ortega’s incisive article seeks to illuminate the ways in which the illustrations accompanying Alarcón’s Diario sometimes worked

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against the dominant ideology of the text. She focuses in particular on the artist Francisco Ortego, who contributed to a number of the engravings reproduced in Alarcón’s work. Alarcón speaks of his desire to see the enemy up close, but he does not have the opportunity to do so until the twenty-second chapter, when he scrutinizes the dozens of dead soldiers who litter a beach after a bloody battle. Readers of the 1860 edition, however, have a paradoxical “advantage” over the author himself, for they will have seen a number of Moroccans in illustrations signed by Ortego intercalated in earlier pages of the text (369–70). And these Moroccans are not dead but alive. For example, in one scene the artist represents a clash between two Spanish and two Moroccan soldiers, as the latter attempt to recover the body of one of their fallen comrades. As Ortega explains, the artist has devoted equal space to each side, and in general the composition “prevents the reader from ‘reading’ the Spanish army as at all superior, even though Alarcón sings their praises in that way from the beginning [. . .] it’s impossible to determine who is advancing and who is retreating” (369). In a number of works produced after the war, Ortego satirizes the Spaniards’ “civilizing mission” in the neighboring country—Moroccans struggle to learn to dance the bolero—calling into question as well Spain’s own adherence to Enlightenment values (377– 78). It might be argued that Ortego seeks to illustrate an idea briefly mentioned by Alarcón in one of his more lucid moments in the Diario, which presages his ultimate shift away from Africanism. Surprisingly, given his more characteristic championing of Spanish modernity, here Alarcón suggests that Spaniards should seek to develop the many regions of the peninsula itself that remained “incultas” (a term that can mean both uncultivated and uncivilized) before attempting to colonize other terrains (Diario 334). If Africa does indeed begin in the Pyrenees, then Spaniards should engage in internal rather than external colonization. RE-VIEWING COLONIAL CONQUEST IN FORTUNY AND GALDÓS

The most celebrated of the Spanish artists who “covered” the war, Marià Fortuny, also came to produce works of great ideological complexity, although for the most part the phenomenon has gone unrecognized by critics. In early 1860, the Diputació (or municipal government) of Barcelona decided to send the promising young painter to North Africa to document the conflict, charging him in particular with immortalizing the heroism of General Prim and his Catalan volunteer soldiers, whose January 1st victory in the Battle of Castillejos had created a great impression in Spain. As a star scholarship student in Rome under the sponsorship of Barcelona’s Fine Arts Academy, Fortuny had already proven

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his artistic potential, and since he hailed from Reus, the same Catalan town as Prim, he was considered an ideal choice for the patriotic mission. Fortuny arrived in Morocco on February 12 with his future brother-in-law and helper Jaime Escriu, pitching his tent among the soldiers of Prim’s division, whose activities he quickly set to sketching. When he met Prim in person a week later and showed him his work, the general was very favorably impressed and granted him safe passage to travel on to Tetuán, which had recently been taken by the Spaniards (González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 32–33). Charles Yriarte claims that when Fortuny arrived in the city he offered him accommodation in the luxurious palace, requisitioned by General O’Donnell, which he shared with Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (and which Yriarte described as “beautiful as an Alhambra”). But Fortuny preferred to seek out a more humble residence in the Jewish quarter, which would afford him the opportunity to immerse himself in Tetuaní life (Yriarte, Fortuny 8). Indeed, the artist produced several watercolors of modest interior patios whose inscriptions indicate they correspond to his lodgings in Tetuán (Doñate, Mendoza, and Quílez 94–97). Despite the likelihood that they at least occasionally encountered one another in the occupied city’s streets, however, there is surprisingly scant reference to Fortuny in Alarcón’s texts (García Figueras, Recuerdos 17, 41–42). Nowhere does Alarcón mention the young artist in his Diario, and in the section devoted to Rome in his later account of his travels through Italy (De Madrid a Nápoles [From Madrid to Naples, 1861]) Fortuny garners only the briefest attention within a long list of Spanish artists Alarcón encounters in a café: “The battle painter Fortuny, whom I met in Africa and who is now sponsored by the Barcelona provincial government” (Obras 1443). It is possible that tension arose from Fortuny’s choice of lodging, and that Alarcón failed to understand or perhaps even resented Fortuny’s preference for closer contact with the native population. Unlike Alarcón, who had no trouble discovering a suitable register for exalting the war, Fortuny appears to have struggled with his mandate, and he was slow to produce the requisite pieces. To facilitate Fortuny’s task, after his return from Morocco the Barcelona government funded an additional trip to France so that the artist might study consecrated military paintings by northern European artists, particularly French depictions of the Egyptian and Algerian campaigns. Given the differentialist construction of Catalan identity in the second half of the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that Fortuny’s sponsors believed that Prim and his soldiers should be depicted in a fashion similar to that of other European colonial war heroes. Later, Fortuny persuaded his benefactors to send him to Morocco again, where he spent several more months in the fall of 1862, this time with some knowledge of Arabic and dressed in native garb to facilitate

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his observation of local life (González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 41–42). The second journey most likely only made Fortuny’s task more difficult, for once he had experienced both the horrors of war and the beauty of the Moroccan landscape, people, and culture, he found himself unable fully to comply with his official imperialist nation-building duties. Over a period of several years, for example, Fortuny labored in vain to complete his immense Battle of Tetuán—which measured three meters tall by ten meters wide—and the unfinished painting was only acquired by the city of Barcelona after the artist’s untimely death in 1874 (fig. 8). Fortuny had arrived in Morocco several days after the famous battle, so he was forced to draw upon the eyewitness accounts of others—quite possibly Alarcón—as well as his own firsthand sketches of the terrain, of later battles, and of Spanish and Moroccan soldiers. The artist’s depiction of the Moroccan horsemen, who hover above the earth in a cloud of dust, with their colorful costumes and scintillating arms glinting under the sun, might betray the influence of those moments in which Alarcón expresses an exoticizing fascination with the enemy cavalry (who are “floating, airy, dispersed” [Diario 218]; “luxuriously adorned [. . .] they hardly touch the ground with their feet” [Diario 278–79]; “always captivating our attention with their graceful horsemanship and fantastical clothing [. . .] such an airy cloud” [Diario 276]). But his painting lacks the ideological clarity expressed in Alarcón’s portrayal of this particular battle (Diario 315). Indeed, for art historian María de los Santos García-Felguera, Fortuny’s work signals the futility of the didactic historical painting that dominated the Spanish Academy at the time. García Felguera argues that the painting “becomes a verification of the impossibility of Historical Painting in the mid-nineteenth century, of the impotence of painting to create grand historical machines in the traditional manner” (272). In Fortuny’s work, the nearly featureless figures of major military leaders such as the legendary Prim and O’Donnell barely emerge from the vibrantly chaotic brushstrokes that portray the mass of Spanish soldiers in the painting’s background. Yet this obfuscation of the epic heroism prescribed by academic historical painting is not the only notable feature of the Battle of Tetuán. Here it is helpful to compare Fortuny’s work with one of the “grand historical machines” of the Orientalist school, such as Louis-François Lejeune’s Battle of the Pyramids (1806; fig. 9), which the Spanish artist would have had occasion to see on his government-financed trip to France. The calm and rational organization of the victorious French troops on the right is opposed to the disorder of the Turkish soldiers on the left as they are driven into the Nile along a horizontal axis (Porterfield 61–63), a standard compositional strategy in panoramic battle paintings that works to inscribe the viewer into a position of illusory objectivity.

8. Marià Fortuny, Battle of Tetuán (ca. 1863–73). Oil on canvas, 3 × 9.72 m. Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

9. Louis-François Lejeune, Battle of the Pyramids (1806). Oil on canvas, 180 × 258 cm. Photo: Gérard Blot. Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France. Courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

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Fortuny’s work, by contrast, in effect situates its viewers on the side of the Moroccan soldiers, confronting them in startling fashion with a mad rush of fleeing troops, even as it foregrounds the sad plight of many of the vanquished. Through this dramatic manipulation of perspective, ideological iconoclasm accompanies formal experimentation.⁶ García Felguera suggests that the presence of photographers on the battlefield and their documentation of the reality of war contributed to the downfall of traditional historical painting, exemplified in Fortuny’s painting.⁷ It is a truism that the invention of photography pushed painting in new directions, and Fortuny’s “Battle of Tetuán” may very well reflect that trend in a number of different ways. As Bernardo Riego Amézaga has explained (Construcción 234, 266, 374–76), many photographs could be considered confusing to nineteenth-century cultural consumers, since the presence of moving (and thus blurry) crowds and other accidents of reality tended to obscure the more customary narrative and ideological clarity of the image. While engravers preparing a photograph for publication might edit out those aspects deemed too “chaotic,” a painter such as Fortuny could find inspiration precisely in that chaos, in the complications and ambivalences that were captured by the camera—and that could be communicated with a paintbrush as well. Along with photography, another important component of the visual culture of the era that may have influenced—and been influenced by—Fortuny was the panorama, which was imbricated with the trend toward oversize canvases so evident in the Catalan artist’s Battle of Tetuán.⁸ By mid-century, many Spaniards were familiar with the experience of traversing a dark tunnel and then climbing onto an observation platform to observe an enormous, seamless painting displayed in the round inside a circular building. The lack of visible borders, plus the natural lighting from above, contributed to the surprising effect of reality, and viewers found themselves viscerally drawn into a celebrated battle or transported to a foreign land. Carmen Pinedo Herrero has noted that the Spanish-Moroccan War was an eminently popular subject for a wide range of visual attractions in Spain, and she points out that in Valencia alone there were several cosmoramas (rooms full of windows with special lenses that looked out onto small-scale panoramic paintings) and a wax museum display devoted to the conflict, as well as panoramas of the Battle of Castillejos and the Battle of Tetuán in the Ciclorama Universal (176–77, 131). Agustín Sánchez Vidal refers to a Spanish-Moroccan war panorama from 1875 that was shown on a roll in a Madrid theater (the Jovellanos) before being sent to Lisbon for display (Jimeno 34). Because panorama paintings and other images produced for the technological spectacles of the day often traveled from venue to venue, it is possible

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that scenes from the war were seen throughout Europe, thus enhancing Spain’s reputation as a nation still capable of pursuing imperial endeavors. This was an ephemeral art, and without detailed descriptions from spectators it is difficult to know precisely what the images themselves were like, but it might be presumed that the earliest examples, unlike Fortuny’s later painting, did conform to traditional precepts concerning the depiction of imperial wars. Later, however, conventions may have changed. In 1880, two competing Belgian-owned panorama establishments in Madrid each decided to stage anew the Battle of Tetuán (Sánchez Vidal, Jimeno 38). A description of the Panorama Nacional’s offering published in the newspaper El Globo (qtd. in López Serrano 24–27) might suggest that Fortuny’s painting, which had entered the public domain in 1875, influenced the artist’s rendition of the scene, most particularly the placement of the viewing platform in the center of the Moroccan encampment. While Fortuny situated the Moroccans’ tents in the left foreground of his work, in the panorama real tents erected between the platform and the painting added to the verisimilitude of the spectacle. In this way, Fortuny’s novel approach to the depiction of the battle may have filtered out to the fairly sizable middle-class audiences that frequented the panoramas in Spain. The renowned master of Spanish literary realism Benito Pérez Galdós considered Fortuny “the most original and most applauded painter of these times, a master of his era” (Shoemaker 51). Thus it is perhaps not coincidental that when decades later Galdós turned to portray the Spanish-Moroccan War in his fourth series of historical novels (the “Episodios Nacionales” [National Episodes]), he employed aesthetic and ideological strategies similar to Fortuny’s. In Aita Tettauen (The War of Tetuán), published in 1905, Galdós undertakes a sophisticated exploration of issues of perspective, in both the narratological and the political sense.⁹ Like Fortuny, he works to dismantle the dominant structures of vision and power within the colonial context, and his sometimes quite explicit skewering of centralist nationalism very likely reflected his own experience of life on the “periphery” as a native Canarian. Galdós considered this the most difficult novel he had ever written, and he began gathering materials several years in advance of writing the manuscript. He immersed himself in Spanish chronicles of the war, read the Koran, and availed himself of the expert advice and bibliographical materials (including a Spanish translation of a Moroccan account of the conflict) supplied by the Arabist Ricardo Ruiz Orsatti, a native of Tangier. Ruiz Orsatti also arranged for Galdós to visit Morocco in the fall of 1904, although poor traveling conditions prevented the author from reaching Tetuán after his stay in Tangier (Márquez Villanueva, “Estudio” 21, 31–33; Ricard 101–6). In his novel, Galdós foregrounds the crucial role of war corre-

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spondents in the creation of public opinion, and his fictional protagonist, Juan Santiuste, garners a spot in the press corps thanks to the influence of an aristocratic friend, the Marquis of Beramendi, who intends to publish the missives he sends him from Morocco. While Santiuste’s friend by the name of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón also appears in the novel, somewhat surprisingly critics have devoted scant attention to Galdós’s extensive parody of the Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de África.¹⁰ “Perico” Alarcón is generally thought to function as a counterbalance to the pacifism Santiuste adopts once he arrives in Morocco (Ferreras 164; Goytisolo, Crónicas 65), but in fact, as Stephen Gilman suggests in passing, Santiuste and Perico (and the “real-world” Alarcón upon whom he is so closely modeled) are perhaps more similar than not (35, n. 12). Aita Tettauen is divided into four sections: an omniscient narrator takes charge of the first, second, and fourth sections, following closely the adventures of Juan Santiuste, while the third presents a first-person account of the military conflict, ostensibly from a Moroccan point of view. The bloated rhetoric of nationalistic warmongering dominates the opening pages, set in Madrid. Santiuste along with his friend Halconero, the latter’s wife Lucila Ansúrez, and their family are swept up in the growing enthusiasm for the Moroccan campaign, which reignites the desire for conquest and imperial expansion. On several occasions Santiuste is described as a disciple of the pro-colonialist politician Emilio Castelar (Pérez Galdós, Aita 20, 69, 189), who argued that “the African War is civilizing, it is patriotic, it is the light of our restoration in the Councils of Europe,” and who, like Alarcón, would edit his own chronicle of the war (qtd. in Serrallonga Urquidi 140–41). Santiuste draws on other sources as well, and his statements are a patchwork of Africanist commonplaces. He refers to the mandate of Isabella I’s last will and testament that Spain continue the Reconquest into the African continent. He also repeats the Africanists’ conceptualization of geographical determinism, asserting that the Strait of Gibraltar does not divide but rather unites Spain and Morocco, and he anticipates, as did Cánovas del Castillo, that “from the Pyrenees to the Atlas Mountains, everything will be Spain” (Aita 24). Galdós’s extensively developed musical metaphor—through inflated speech the “troubadour” Santiuste as well as a wide range of politicians and citizens “sing” and toot on a variety of horns to generate excitement for armed conflict (Aita 21–36)—also recalls Alarcón’s confession at the end of his Diario, cited above, that he “sang” the war’s praises to “inflame” patriotic sentiment (Diario 508). Santiuste, like Alarcón/Perico, believes that Spain’s glorious conquerors of the past will be “resuscitated” in Morocco (Aita 24). For his part, however, Lucila’s father Jerónimo Ansúrez provides an alternative viewpoint by marshaling Africanist notions in order to oppose the war. Jerónimo, like a number of Africanists of the time, views

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Moroccans and Spaniards as brothers: “Take away a bit of religion, take away another bit of language, and the kinship and family resemblance jumps out at you. What is a Moor if not a Muslim Spaniard? And how many Spaniards do we see who are Moors in Christian disguise?” (Aita 13). Jerónimo notes that his second wife, who hailed from the Alpujarras, cooked couscous and perfumed the house with incense; her mother decorated her fingertips with henna, and her father always sat on the floor with his legs crossed. He also observes that there is little difference between the polygamous tendencies of Moroccan and Spanish men. For Jerónimo, then, the conflict is much like a civil war (Aita 14). Even when Santiuste himself begins to recognize that the war has been manufactured by politicians to distract Spaniards from internal crises, he characterizes it as positive nonetheless. Again, his position resembles that of Alarcón, who in the Diario supports the war almost to the end, despite his own growing understanding of its erroneous pretensions. Much as Alarcón refers on countless occasions to the conflict as an entertaining spectacle, Santiuste describes it as an “admirable and sublime spectacle, which consoles us from the vulgarity and misery of politics” (Aita 23). And indeed, the Halconero family moves from one apartment to another in Madrid so that their sickly son Vicentito might enjoy a better view of that spectacle. By opening his tale with a tongue-in-cheek discourse on racial and imperial decline, Galdós’s narrator encourages us to read the prematurely aged and incapacitated Vicentito as symbolic of a Spain that is ill prepared for, but nonetheless enthralled with, the prospect of war. The Halconero’s new residence overlooking the Calle Mayor provides the perfect “watchtower” from which the boy observes the colorful troops marching in formation before departing for the front (Aita 11). For the days during which Vicentito is too weak to venture out onto the balcony, his father offers him a tantalizing substitute for the Spanish military spectacle: a stereoscope with battle scenes from the French colonial campaigns in Algeria (Aita 19). These are precisely the images that Fortuny was encouraged to view before painting his Battle of Tetuán, and they are another indication of the profound impact of visual technologies on the reality and representation of the conflict. Several contemporary cultural critics have asserted that this sort of creation and consumption of spectacle is in fact essential to the colonialist project. Mary Louise Pratt analyzes the “monarch-of-all-I-survey scene,” in which the representative of empire, situated in an elevated position, creates a literal or figurative panoramic painting that seeks to justify the subjugation of a land and its people (Imperial 204–5). Here it is important to recall that the term “panorama” itself derives from the nineteenth-century optical spectacle (Pinedo Herrero 125), which in Spain had been devoted to the popularization of battles from the Spanish-

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Moroccan War. For Timothy Mitchell, this aesthetic transformation of a particular geography into what he terms an “exhibition” also reproduces the panopticon’s visually based imposition of power (10–12, 23–26). Similar scenes abound in Alarcón’s Diario (for example, 42, 51, 196, 200–201, 229, 275, 297, 502), which emphasizes the perfect visibility of the Spaniards’ heroism and dominance over the Moroccans, even when the spectator is not situated on a lofty peak. In fact, Alarcón implies that he always enjoys the omniscience of God when observing Spanish victories (Diario 275), and in order to secure his position of privilege he decides to join O’Donnell’s encampment: “Only in this way will I be able to see and appreciate things from their true point of view: to take in the totality of the operations; understand the plan and development of the battles and dominate, in a manner of speaking, as if from an elevated summit, all the occurrences and movements of the campaign” (Diario 229). Galdós, by contrast, chooses to dethrone the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene in his novel. As soon as Santiuste arrives in Morocco he climbs a rocky promontory to observe a battle, accompanied by a number of Spaniards, one of whom shouts at the top of his lungs, “Here’s Spain looking at you” (Aita 53). From his vantage point, Santiuste witnesses the indistinct mass of Moroccan soldiers, who first emerge from the earth “like a cloud of flies” and then jump about the rough mountainside as if they were grasshoppers (Aita 52). After this characteristic reduction of the North Africans to insects, however, the archetypical monarch-of-all-I-survey scene undergoes a transfiguration. Although a friend attempts to guide Santiuste’s perception of the military spectacle by pointing out the heroic Spanish leaders, the Moroccan landscape fails to cooperate, hiding key figures from view: —Do you see how they spread out in a line? There is the left side; the right is hidden behind that hill, that doesn’t allow us to see Hell’s Canyon. —And your general, where is he? —Echagüe? Where would he be but in the most dangerous place? There you have him, to the right; we can’t see him. [. . .] Don’t you see Zabala? There, next to the hill that hides the right side. (Aita 52)

This frustrating conversation begins at the end of one chapter and carries over into the next, and demonstrates how the colonial gaze of mastery over the Moroccan terrain is thwarted. The terrain itself defiantly obscures the desired view of Spanish heroism. Galdós’s text thus departs radically from Alarcón’s to indulge in a tendency identified by Pratt, who affirms that “the solemnity and selfcongratulatory tone of the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene are a virtual invitation to satire and demystification” (Imperial 208). Santiuste’s subsequent descent from the mountain parallels a “descent in his

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enthusiasm” (Aita 53), as he wanders about the battlefields littered with dead soldiers (Aita 54).¹¹ It is here that Santiuste undergoes a dramatically abrupt transformation, apparently rejecting the colonialist perspective and echoing the oppositional viewpoint expressed earlier in the novel by Jerónimo Ansúrez. In an exchange with Perico Alarcón, Santiuste shares his impressions and insists on the constructed nature of national identity and patrimony: “I can assure you that after seeing innumerable bodies destroyed by bullets these days, I haven’t felt any more pity for the Spaniards than for the Moors. My compassion erases nationalities and lineages, which are nothing but artifices” (Aita 68). Santiuste also expresses the belief that Perico Alarcón has been similarly moved by the sight of so many dead Moroccans: “I believe you’ve felt the same thing as I; I believe that in the dead Moor you have seen a fellow man, a brother” (Aita 68). Yet nowhere previously in the novel has Perico articulated such ideas. Galdós’s readers might assume that Santiuste is referring to some conversation not reported on by the omniscient narrator, but those who have read Alarcón’s Diario will most likely recognize the intertextual reference. In fact, in one of the betterknown passages of the Diario Alarcón does seem to experience an epiphany similar to Santiuste’s. Wandering along a bloody beach on the day after a fierce battle (fought, significantly, on Christmas Day), he sees the Moroccans up close for the very first time, and in their lifeless bodies he discovers their common humanity: “If I must tell the full truth, the first sentiment they inspired in me was a certain disgust, a certain shame, a certain repugnance. [. . .] Then—I don’t know through what evolution of my ideas—I felt a profound compassion for those unfortunates. [. . .] I lamented the bad fortune of those who were my fellow men” (Diario 100–101). This passage has been cited by critics as evidence of Alarcón’s sympathy for the Moroccans (González Alcantud, “Poética” 21; Bauló Doménech 166, n. 4).¹² Galdós, however, would seem to view his literary predecessor quite differently, for in Aita Tettauen the fictionalized Alarcón suggests that ultimately patriotic values must trump humanist principles. When dead, the Moroccans may remind him of their humanity, but when they are alive, he only sees their nation, their race, and their religion, and for that reason he celebrates the fact that the Spanish soldiers kill them (Aita 68). The views of Santiuste and Perico Alarcón begin to diverge at this point in the novel, but since the latter attributes their differences of opinion to his friend’s malnutrition, he hopes to bring Santiuste back into the fold by plying him with the “epicurean refinements” (sausages, tinned meats and sardines, sherry, Champagne, coffee, and Cuban cigars) that are in plentiful supply in his comfortably appointed tent (Aita 64–69). A number of critics have found Galdós’s presentation of opposing perspec-

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tives on the war innovative, focusing in particular on the change of narrator in the third section of the novel. Juan Ignacio Ferreras, for example, argues that the work’s “great novelty consists in narrating to us a single historical structure from different perspectives,” one of which is the Muslim perspective (164). Similarly, Yolanda Arencibia observes that “the second and third parts center on the essence of the war’s events from two perspectives: the Spanish [. . .] and the Arab perspective” (527). It is true that the novel initially appears to offer a Muslim/ Arab viewpoint concerning the conflict. The third section is narrated by a man named El Nasiry, who directs his missives concerning the war, dated according to the Muslim calendar, to an elderly benefactor, El Zebdy. El Nasiry punctuates his reports with invocations in praise of Allah and numerous references to Koranic verses (which Francisco Márquez Villanueva has taken great care to document in his recent edition of the novel).¹³ Moreover, his descriptions of individual battles sometimes directly reverse those presented earlier by Santiuste. For example, while Santiuste saw the Moroccan soldiers as indistinguishable clouds of flies or grasshoppers, El Nasiry describes the Spanish troops as “flies” or “ants,” as an unindividualized “brown cloud” (Aita 120, 143, 147–48, 150). As Kathleen Davis has demonstrated, El Nasiry attributes the outcome of individual battles and of the war in general to the intervention of supernatural beings: Allah, who occasionally aids the Moroccans in their just cause, and Satan, who all too frequently protects the Spaniards, guaranteeing their victory. According to the worldview El Nasiry represents, however, human agency (including, for example, the Spaniards’ superior military technology and tactics) is of no real consequence, and only when he reports upon the speech of others (namely, Christians) does it enter into his narrative (Davis 647–48). Alert readers will suspect early on that El Nasiry is actually Jerónimo Ansúrez’s renegado or apostate son Gonzalo, the Muslim convert and Moroccan resident who has become a friend of the sultan himself, and who is described by his family members in Spain with a curious mixture of shame, pride, and exoticizing obsession. Although in the second section both Gonzalo’s brother Leoncio and Santiuste claim that they have witnessed a turbaned Gonzalo fighting and dying in battle for the Moroccans, their shared state of inebriation (Leoncio is feverish from a leg wound, and Santiuste partakes liberally of his friend’s “medicinal” brew) casts doubt on the story (Aita 85–86). Further doubt arises when the narrator of the third section mentions El Nasiry’s full name—Sidi El Hach Mohammed Ben Sur El Nasiry—and we remember (ideally, at least) that it is identical to the name Gonzalo has adopted, according to his father Jerónimo Ansúrez’s statement in the first pages of the novel (Aita 119, 18). Over the course of his narrative, El Nasiry indicates that he meets Santiuste in person in Tetuán,

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and he is distressed by the fact that on several occasions the young man implies that he knows his “noble family” and insults him by calling him a Christian (Aita 132, 180–81). Although we may now be convinced that El Nasiry is in fact Gonzalo, we will probably not doubt the authenticity of the Spaniard’s religious and cultural transformation, given the insistent, ostensibly Islamic rhetoric that imbues his missives. In the fourth section, however, Galdós pulls the rug out from under us. The move is anticipated when Santiuste begins to wonder if El Nasiry is another Alí Bey (Aita 188; see also 202). As I mentioned in the Introduction, Bey (a.k.a. Domingo Badía) was a Catalan spy and would-be conqueror who went so far as to undergo circumcision in order to assimilate into Moroccan society, though he never could bring himself to shed his disdain for Moroccans and their faith. Similarly, when El Nasiry finally confesses his true identity to Santiuste—he is indeed Gonzalo—he reveals not only the insincerity of his conversion but also his deeply entrenched racism: “Do you believe that what I write for El Zebdy is history? No, my son, it’s nothing like that, because I have had to write it according to Muslim taste, twisting the facts so that they always come out in favor of the moríos. And when it hasn’t been possible for me to disfigure the face of truth, I have covered it with a thousand cosmetics and adornments so that even her own mother would not recognize her. [. . .] Of course that beast El Zebdy won’t see beyond the surface of what I have written; he won’t penetrate to the depths, because his blunt understanding is incapable of penetration, like that of all Muslims who have remained in these foul-smelling cities” (Aita 205). In his otherwise favorable analysis of the novel, Juan Goytisolo laments El Nasiry’s cynical final retraction, evidently wishing that Galdós had fully realized his presentation of a North African viewpoint (Crónicas 70). Yet this could also be considered one of the more brilliant gestures of Galdós’s text, one that suggests the impossibility of a Spaniard ever providing such a viewpoint.¹⁴ This is a strategy that may force many of us as readers to confront our own complicity with racist thought, as we are first lulled into a comfortable, self-satisfied respect for El Nasiry’s “other” perspective, only to discover the base distortions underlying that perspective in the end. Indeed, Galdós appears to chide those readers who allowed themselves to be duped by the false “Moroccan perspective” when he has El Nasiry affirm: “Certainly if the text of my epistles fell into the hands of an intelligent Spaniard well versed in letters, he would read between the lines of that jumble of Koranic cites and adulation of the Maghreb and its barbarous troops, to glimpse the Christian ideas” (Aita 205). Our positioning as viewers before Fortuny’s Battle of Tetuán is similarly uncomfortable. José Yxart, whose 1881 book on Fortuny still provides the only truly in-depth analysis of this work, begins to capture its odd ambivalence of perspec-

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tive when he concludes of Fortuny’s representation of the Moroccans that “if as a Spaniard he celebrates their defeat, his artist’s heart is on their side, and he transfers them to the canvas in a fantastical atmosphere of colors so that they may immortalize their own names in that painting, not with their flight, but rather with the victory of our troops” (86). Spatially, the painting situates us on the side of the Moroccans, yet it employs a range of artistic styles to present an oddly multifaceted view of the North Africans’ experiences. The horrifyingly naturalistic representation of the dead Moroccan utterly denuded by his fellow soldiers, the careful modeling of the placid calm exhibited by the domestic animals seemingly oblivious to their masters’ fate, the impressionistically depicted troops who flee on horses that oneirically hover above the earth in a cloud of dust, even as they appear to rush headlong toward the viewer—together, such images may provoke conflicting feelings of repulsion, sympathy, wonder, and fear. (DIS)POSSESSING THE COLONIZED FEMALE BODY

Fortuny never considered his Battle of Tetuán complete, and never turned it over to the Barcelona municipality during his lifetime. Instead, as documented in photographs, it eventually came to preside over his richly decorated Orientalist studio in Rome (Doñate, Mendoza, and Quílez 381). The artist nevertheless attempted to satisfy the demands of his governmental benefactors by negotiating an intriguing substitution. In 1862, Fortuny sent a package to the Diputació in which he included a stunning painting of an odalisque (fig. 10), asking that it be accepted as one of the commissioned military scenes: “As a modest sample of the work that I propose to do on the African War, I have the honor of offering your Excellency the enclosed painting, a costumbrista scene of a Moroccan interior. If my first work merits your approval, I ask you to do me the favor of accepting it as one of the smaller canvases representing episodes in this great war” (qtd. in González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 43). Needless to say, the Diputació accepted the painting with enthusiasm, although once it was placed on public display the Revista de Cataluña’s celebration of the young artist’s technical brilliance was countered by the Diario de Barcelona critic’s discomfort over the “indecent” subject matter, which was bound to provoke blushing in viewers (González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 41, 44; Doñate, Mendoza, and Quílez 92). But in what sense might Fortuny’s odalisque be considered a representation of the Spanish-Moroccan War? In what is now considered a “cliché of colonial history,” the native woman’s body stands in for the colonized nation; her sexual subjugation figures the military and political subjugation of her home-

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10. Marià Fortuny, Odalisque (1861). Oil on cardboard, 56.9 × 81 cm. Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

land (Spurr 171). Thus, it might be argued that in Fortuny’s painting, mastery of the nude female body displayed for the viewers (implicitly Spanish and male) in effect re-presents the Spaniards’ conquest of the Moroccans. This is, in fact, how nineteenth-century European portraits of odalisques have come to be interpreted in recent years, since the publication of art historian Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking, if polemical, ideological analysis of Orientalist painting. Interestingly, there is a similar displacement of the imperialist impulse onto the female body in Aita Tettauen. The move is anticipated in yet another monarch-of-all-I-survey scene, a panoramic view of the Valley of Tetuán, which is feminized by Santiuste’s guide, the military priest Don Toro Godo. As the two men feast their eyes on the beauty of “the opulent Tetuán” stretched out before them, Don Toro expresses confidence that the Spaniards will conquer both valley and city (Aita 108). The feminization of an occupied (or soon-tobe-occupied) city is another well-worn cliché, and in his Diario Alarcón had already drawn upon it liberally when characterizing the intense desire that drove him toward Tetuán. In his first glimpse from a distance Alarcón describes the city as “reclining,” noting, however, that much is still out of view: “The rest of her beauty remains modestly hidden in the curves of the terrain” (Diario 201).

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As with a veiled woman, Alarcón’s longing to see more is only heightened by this gesture of modesty: “I want to see Tetuán in just one glance, completely uncovered, in all the plenitude of her beauty” (Diario 223). And finally he does: “There she is unveiled, entire, nude, surprised in her solitary dreaming. I’ve never before seen, nor do I believe there to be in the world, such a showy city, so artistically situated, of such seductive appearance” (Diario 223). As the moment of Spanish occupation nears, Alarcón comments that a city that opens her doors to enemy forces is commonly described by poets as the bride of the conquered, and he finds the metaphor apt: “The perfect image!” (Diario 349).¹⁵ For his part, Galdós chooses to emphasize the literal resonance of the city-as-woman metaphor by following Don Toro’s rapturous description of Tetuán with an extended conversation concerning the fate of women during wartime. Several soldiers and officers discuss the arrival of an enticing shipment of “cattle”: Spanish prostitutes who will service their compatriot soldiers (this is an episode that, if true, Alarcón chose to omit from his own narrative, destined to be read by a “family” audience). One commander wonders why the prostitutes are necessary if the women of Tetuán are just within reach: “We are headed to the harems, and we’ll be able to send a shipment of houris to Spain” (Aita 111). The priest Don Toro agrees, calling the men “pigs” for expecting Spanish women to be sent to them, when in his youth soldiers knew to look for women “in the harems liberated from the enemy” (Aita 112). As Don Toro explains to Santiuste, “The feminine element is in the soldiers’ thoughts, do you understand? . . . , and the soldier knows that in order to possess it, he must seek it out in the countryside and cities of the enemy” (Aita 106; Galdós’s emphasis). Santiuste ultimately will do just that. Deeply disturbed by the unrelenting brutality of the war, Galdós’s feverish protagonist dreams that he is a Moor, dons a makeshift turban, and begins to preach pacifism. Perico Alarcón, who can only view his friend’s change of heart as a sign of grave illness or insanity, insists that he return to the peninsula. Although he initially plays along with Alarcón’s arrangements for him to be transported home, Santiuste slips away at the last minute, adopting full Moroccan dress and crossing enemy lines to head toward Tetuán. Alarcón unwittingly facilitates Santiuste’s decision to “go native” by asking him to carry a bundle with gifts of Moroccan clothing to a friend back in Spain. Santiuste appropriates a djellaba and slippers from the bundle, ditching the rest. Feigning to be deaf and mute, the hapless Santiuste is pelted with stones by a Muslim boy before being taken in by Mazaltob, a sympathetic Jewish fortuneteller (here Galdós endeavors to reproduce Haketia, the Spanish dialect of the North African Sephardim, which allows Santiuste to communicate with the Jews of Tetuán).¹⁶ During his stay in the city, Santiuste meets and soon begins

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a sexual relationship with a beautiful and wealthy young Jewish woman named Yohar, who flees her father’s house to live with her lover. Despite his exaltation of the religious tolerance he observes in Tetuán, however, and his emphasis on the fundamental values shared by the three faiths, Santiuste soon insists that Yohar must convert to Christianity, to his mind the only truly civilized religion (Aita 189, 203). His hypocrisy is reminiscent of Alarcón’s own conflicted stance on tolerance in his Diario, and once again the Galdosian protagonist appears more to resemble rather than contrast with Alarcón/Perico. In fact, while critics have emphasized Santiuste’s pacifism, and Juan Ignacio Ferreras, for example, has argued that through this character Galdós prefigures the contemporary mandate “Make love, not war” (164), the young man’s actions in essence simply transfer imperialist power structures onto a new site. Santiuste’s “conquest” of Yohar coincides with and reduplicates the Spaniards’ conquest of the city, and the metaphorical language that he uses to describe the troops’ penetration of the urban walls seeks to poeticize both acts of physical appropriation, while echoing Alarcón: “They enter with respect, like polite men who delicately approach the new bride and remove her veils” (Aita 201). The omniscient narrator’s description, by contrast, is decidedly more crude: “The virginal [Tetuán] was already swollen with Spaniards” (Aita 201–02). In Galdós’s novel, the slippage between Yohar’s body and the conquered city is enabled by an affirmation of the whiteness of both. Tetuán is continually referred to as “the white dove,” and the pale brilliance of the city’s walls is invoked with frequency (for example, Aita 179, 185, 200, 207, 208). Similarly, the narrator insistently refers to Santiuste’s new love interest—nicknamed “Perla” (Pearl)—as “the white Yohar”; in all cases the Spanish adjective precedes the noun, suggesting that her color is deemed an essential characteristic (for example, Aita 169, 171, 175; Pérez Galdós, Carlos 13, 15). Recently, theorists have begun to dislodge the association of whiteness with a racial norm by analyzing how that whiteness is constructed through cultural discourse. As Rebecca Aanerud remarks, “Whiteness, like race in general, cannot be understood simply as a natural phenomenon. Rather, it is a highly orchestrated product of culture and nature. The recognition of whiteness as not a set condition of fact—that is, having white skin—but instead a product whose meaning and status must be sustained by a process of reproduction along preestablished lines is crucial to an interruption of whiteness as the status quo” (43). In Aita Tettauen, paradoxically, Yohar’s racial identity is “colored” precisely by the relentless description of her whiteness. That is, it is the very emphasis on Yohar’s pale skin tone that signals her whiteness as constructed. In this, her characterization contrasts notably with that of Lucila Ansúrez (Vicentito’s mother), whose whiteness is nowhere explic-

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itly stated but everywhere implied.¹⁷ Galdós’s narrator “amuses himself ” with pseudo-anthropological characterizations (Lécuyer and Serrano 306), tapping into the racialized discourses that circulated through late nineteenth-century Spain, which I discussed in chapter 1. By insistently labeling Lucila “the Celtiberian” (for example, Aita 8, 28, 29, 30, 38, 41), the narrator indicates that she is the perfect representative of Spanish “blood purity,” uncontaminated by the North African invaders (K. Davis 642). Lucila, then, is the racial norm against which Yohar must be measured. It is also evident from Santiuste’s descriptions of Yohar that he has imaginatively recast his lover in the guise of Orientalist portraits of women that enjoyed such popularity at the time; Santiuste’s own visual repertoire clearly includes a plethora of depictions of Turkish bathers, odalisques, belly dancers, and sensual biblical heroines, drawn from the same artistic genres that initially captivated Fortuny as well (Aita 194–95). Even as he Orientalizes her, Santiuste affirms her whiteness—remarking, for example, the “immaculate whiteness” of her limbs as she dances for him, undulating like a snake (Carlos 13). In fact, this is in complete accordance with Orientalist pictorial conventions, where, curiously, the “exotic” object of desire is nearly always figured as white. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Odalisque with Slave (ca. 1842; fig. 11) could be considered as archetypical in this sense, although any number of paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme would serve the same purpose (and Fortuny was well acquainted with the work of both artists [González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 124]). In these paintings, the native woman’s whiteness tends to be marked in overdetermined fashion not only through a virtuoso modeling of pale flesh tones but also through contrast: black servants are ever present, sometimes discreetly tucked into the background, at other times placed in “startling” immediate juxtaposition to their mistresses. Richard Dyer has suggested that often within Western cultural texts in general the more women are coded as white, the more they are associated with inaction. For Linda Nochlin the counterpositioning of active black servants in Orientalist paintings clearly serves to underline the linkage of whiteness with passivity (Nochlin 126). Thus while the odalisque, the market slave, or the bather’s nudity and exotic environs indicate her sexual availability, and may even hint at a certain erotic voracity, her whiteness simultaneously serves as a guarantee of willing submissiveness. Moreover, the construction of this figure as white facilitates her metaphorical consumption by European viewers, since she is aligned with a “safer” form of difference—only the superficial accouterments of architecture, interior decor, jewelry, and, when present, costume signal her as other.¹⁸ Indeed, in her study of the reception of Orientalist visual texts in late

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11. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Odalisque with Slave (ca. 1842). Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 105.4 cm. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

nineteenth-century Spain, Lou Charnon-Deutsch also reminds us that, as Edward Said first suggested, exotic representations produced by Europeans typically reveal more about European fantasies than about non-European social realities. For Charnon-Deutsch, feminine images that circulated in Spain “joined Spanish bourgeois women and exotic other women in a complex relation of similarity and difference” (Fictions 177; Charnon-Deutsch’s emphasis). While gazing with desire upon harem engravings, Spanish men may have enjoyed imagining their female compatriots as eager to bestow sexual pleasure and as naturally sensual and unfettered by the literal and figurative corsets of Western civilization, even while more conventional depictions of domesticity extolled the presumed spiritual superiority of European women. Although in her analysis Charnon-Deutsch emphasizes the contrast between representations of southern darkness and northern pallor (Fictions 219–20), Galdós’s descriptions of Yohar might be read as conjoining, rather than contrasting, the two, thus embodying the feminine ideal for the Spanish male: as both supersensual and ultrawhite, Yohar is at once enticingly other and reassuringly familiar. Yet Yohar will ultimately refuse to sustain this comfortable fantasy of the

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European woman who masquerades as exotic odalisque but offers herself up exclusively to her own white countrymen. And once again we discover a similar dynamic operating in Fortuny’s work. Although objectively the Spanish painter’s odalisque is neither blonde nor as impossibly pale as Ingres’, she was in fact modeled after a European woman named Martina that the artist met on the Spanish steps in Rome (González López 35). It is clear at first glance that the painting employs tried and true Orientalist tactics to construct her as white: Fortuny displays his masterful technique as he ventures to surround his odalisque with a white sheet that enhances her glow, while the luminous paleness of her skin contrasts notably with her own raven tresses as well as with the darker complexion of the musician who accompanies her. In this respect, Fortuny simply extends the Orientalist tradition. However, the relationship between the pale odalisque and the dark male figure that this painting portrays is in fact considerably more iconoclastic. Here a detailed comparison with the work of Fortuny’s famous precursor is instructive. Ingres’ black male eunuch is clearly situated outside the harem, at some distance from the odalisque; his duty, in fact, is to guard the harem from intruders. The work is structured so that, even if his gaze were not directed elsewhere, the eunuch would not be able to contemplate the odalisque’s frontal nudity; that perspective is reserved exclusively for the painting’s viewer, a furtive interloper to whom the harem guard remains oblivious. In this way, the guard serves to remind the viewer that violation of the harem is forbidden, while remaining utterly incapable of preventing that violation. For her part, the odalisque, caught in a reverie, gazes at and turns her body slightly toward the female musician, whose eyes are pointedly upturned. Neither this deflected hint of lesbian desire (a standard feature within many Orientalist works) nor the shadowy presence of a male figure within the painting is allowed to interfere with the viewer’s symbolic possession of the odalisque. The mechanisms effected by Ingres’ work are reproduced with varying degrees of sophistication in the scores of European Orientalist paintings that graced the pages of Spain’s illustrated weeklies in the late nineteenth century. For Charnon-Deutsch, as odalisque after odalisque turns her back on the native male depicted within the work, in order better to display her body to the viewer, the powers of mastery “are imagined as legitimately belonging to the European gaze more properly than to the Arab man’s gaze” (Fictions 200, 202). Fortuny’s painting, however, modifies this mechanism. It is significant, first of all, that the two ancillary figures of Ingres’ work have been collapsed into one. Unlike Ingres’ black eunuch, Fortuny’s well-muscled male figure is seated within the private space of the harem, in a position similar to that of the earlier painting’s female companion, in unusually close proximity to the odalisque: her

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bare foot could easily brush against his loosely draped lower limbs. In fact this intimacy would indicate that in this painting the handsomely depicted and darkcomplexioned man could not possibly be taken to be simply a servant. Here, then, the odalisque’s dreamy contemplation of the musician, as she languidly fingers her narghile, resonates quite differently from that of Ingres’ central figure. The posture of Fortuny’s odalisque is also altered in a meaningful way. Recent infrared reflectographic analysis of this painting has shown that Fortuny changed his mind concerning the position of the left hand, which originally was meant to rest with the palm down on the odalisque’s hip (as in the photograph in Admella, Pedragosa, and Tapol 441). In the new configuration, the hand works with the remainder of the figure’s limbs to produce a very pointed effect. The torque in her body, the pressure of the fingers of her right hand against the cushions, and the slight muscular tension and lifting in her right arm, along with the gesture of beckoning in her left hand that was added in the definitive version, all suggest that she is turning away from the viewer—in symbolic terms, she turns away from the European colonizer—and toward her Moroccan musician, who could be perceived as a lover or even a smitten husband.¹⁹ In this sense, Fortuny’s claim to the Diputació that this painting represents a typical Moroccan domestic scene, while still legible as a tongue-in-cheek nod to cherished Orientalist fictions, might also be read as more sincere than it would initially appear. In Galdós’s text, too, Yohar will turn away from the white European Santiuste, and toward an other, as she rebels against the colonization of her body. Yohar chooses to pursue her own desire—a desire for religious freedom and economic comfort, if not necessarily for sexual subjectivity—by abandoning Santiuste and agreeing to marry the wealthy North African Sephardic Jew her father has sought out for her. And it is at this point that the precariously fantastic construction of her racial identity collapses. As another Jewish woman of Tetuán observes, by rejecting her white lover, Yohar has become black: “She is no longer white, but black in her evil. [. . .] She no longer has the whiteness of milk, but the shadow of the dark night” (Carlos 23–24). Yohar’s preference for a partner who is not coded as white suddenly disqualifies her from standing in for a sexually exoticized and objectified white European woman. Now, she must be redefined, hastily, as black. The usual discursive slippage between racial identities and moral qualities is evident from the metaphorical references to blackness and whiteness here. Also lurking within the shadows to which Yohar has been consigned, of course, is the specter of miscegenation. According to the racist ideas concerning biological degeneration circulating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sexual contact with someone who is not white would in essence contaminate Yohar, “staining” her previously “immaculate” body with blackness (Stepan,

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“Biological” 107). In this sense, by turning toward other partners, both Galdós’s Yohar and Fortuny’s odalisque reveal the more “dangerous” desires typically repressed through the convoluted mechanisms of Orientalist representation. For his part, however, Santiuste is only temporarily disillusioned by his experiences with Yohar, and he continues to embrace and pursue the myth of an exotic whiteness, preserved and reserved for European possession. In his search, Santiuste ventures farther and farther afield; in fact, his wandering even carries him beyond the confines of the original novel, Aita Tettauen, and into the textuality of Galdós’s next National Episode, Carlos VI en la Rápita (Carlos VI in La Rápita, also published in 1905), which he himself will narrate. At the same time, Santiuste’s penetration into the Moroccan interior, as he travels overland from Tetuán to Tangier—yet another city-woman described as “completely white, reclining” (Carlos 51)—culminates in an attempt to breach the harem of none other than El Nasiry, the Spanish pseudo-apostate, whose only genuine adherence to Muslim practice, conveniently, involves jealously guarding his wife and two concubines from other men (Carlos 53). Once again, Santiuste is enthralled by whiteness, specifically, by the tantalizing glimpses of the “white hands” of his host’s womenfolk as they serve dinner from behind a curtain. Here, perhaps, the repositioning of the adjective “white” after the noun—implying that the color is no longer so clearly seen as an essential characteristic—is significant. Moreover, these white hands remain disembodied, since beyond them Santiuste is able to distinguish “neither a small piece of arm nor, even less, of face” (Carlos 55). The burgeoning European obsession with eugenics, the insistence on the crossing of “superior” bloodlines in order to counteract racial degeneration (Stepan, “Biological” 114), referred to at the beginning of Aita Tettauen, is also evident here. Santiuste comments on the “nobility” of El Nasiry’s racial identity; after all, like his sister Lucila Ansúrez, he, too, is a “Celtiberian.” When he meets El Nasiry’s seven-year-old daughter, who is named after Lucila (Luz-il-lah), Santiuste sees in her “another race, select, superior,” and notes that her mother—apparently one of the owners of the white hands he has caught sight of—must be a great beauty. El Nasiry confirms that the girl’s mother is indeed as fair as an angel, before sternly reminding Santiuste that “as a poet, you may imagine her, but you may never see her” (Carlos 57). Thus inflamed by his malicious host, Santiuste longs to gaze upon the “delicious spectacle” of El Nasiry’s domestic enclave (Carlos 58). But the full meaning of El Nasiry’s insistence that Santiuste may imagine but never see his fair wife is only apparent to the reader after Santiuste does in fact catch sight of her. Left alone one day in the patio of El Nasiry’s home, Santiuste hears screams emerging from the second-floor harem. Secretly hoping to witness

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a catfight, Santiuste manages to convince himself that the harem must be on fire, and he rushes through the door at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the forbidden quarters. Before he is bodily ushered out by an elderly female slave, Santiuste glimpses El Nasiry’s wife: “I saw at the top of the staircase a woman of gigantic stature, black as ebony, with a long snout and muzzlelike lips” (Carlos 60). Subsequently, Santiuste will refer to her with such phrases as “the woman with the monkey snout,” “that simian giant,” and “a real two-legged mule” (Carlos 61). Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, much of this troubling episode is inspired by Alarcón’s Diario. During his stay in Tetuán, Alarcón tours the opulent palace of a wealthy citizen of Tetuán named Erzini, and the writer confesses that as soon as he crosses the palace threshold he begins to think of women (Diario 409). Alarcón’s servant Jacob confirms that although Erzini is away from the city, he has left his concubines and their children behind, trusting that they would be safe with the Christian occupiers—a trust that Jacob dryly intimates might have been misplaced. Indeed, as a beautiful white cat brushes past him and enters into a back room, from which the sounds of a baby’s cry and a mother’s song emerge, Alarcón is overwhelmed by the desire to penetrate Erzini’s harem. While his companion Charles Yriarte provides cover, Alarcón slips away from the small group of visitors and sneaks into the forbidden room. But he is shocked by what he discovers: “What a disenchantment! The odalisque is black! There couldn’t be a greater misfortune!” (Diario 411). Although Alarcón quickly recovers from his repulsion, acknowledging that despite her blackness the woman is attractive, in order to intensify his own effect, Galdós perhaps chooses to supplement his version of the episode by drawing upon another of Alarcón’s passages: his description of the Moorish girl to whom he throws sweets (discussed earlier in this chapter), and whom he likens to a monkey (Diario 495). As well as a scathing satire of Alarcón, this is a radically disturbing moment in Galdós’s text that may recall any number of other archetypical “scenes of horror.” Santiuste’s position at the bottom of a long, steep staircase, gazing up at the woman who represents a terrifying difference, restages the Freudian scenario of the origin of fetishism as a response to castration anxiety (Freud, “Fetishism” 155). Yet here the woman’s sexual difference, while of exceptional significance, is all but eclipsed by her racial difference. Clearly, Santiuste’s characterizations of El Nasiry’s wife as simian evoke the most virulent of racist epithets, so predominant within nineteenth-century scientific and colonialist discourse. Moreover, by also referring to her as a mule—the linguistic origin of the term “mulatto”— Santiuste reproduces the “classic example” cited by degeneration theorists who equated interracial mixing with the infertile and improper crossing of species (Sander Gilman; Stepan, “Biological” 105–6). His fearful descriptions may also

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call to mind the “monstrous races” depicted on medieval maps (John Friedman), images that served to mark out the frontiers of the known world, and by extension the very limits of signification. Santiuste’s geographical explorations of the North African terrain have been driven by his desire to survey a feminized Moroccan landscape imagined as wide open, filled with light, and easily apprehended, mapped, and possessed. Instead, that landscape has consistently revealed itself to be crisscrossed by dark shadows and riven with sinister cracks and crevices, out of which may emerge monstrous beings. The folding in upon itself of space, in this moment in which Santiuste’s venturing out through Morocco has landed him at the ostensibly impenetrable borders of the innermost confines of the harem, might remind us of Derrida’s description of “invagination,” the textual pocket that, like any number of internal spaces of the body, but most particularly like the vagina, is formed through a folding-in of externality. Derrida suggests that by invalidating the distinction between inside and outside, the invagination marks the site of a crisis in all laws of difference, which are typically produced through relationships of negativity (243). Thus, in this Galdosian invaginated space, as Santiuste tumbles down the harem stairs, the structural oppositions upon which he has erected his racist Orientalist fantasies also come tumbling down. Signs now fail to function for Santiuste in the accustomed way, and the metonymical chain of meaning is also broken, since white hands are no longer linked through contiguity to white bodies, and white girls are not necessarily generated by white mothers.²⁰ Santiuste indulges in one last pathetic bid to reinstate the oppositions that subtend Orientalist aesthetics and ideology. His having perceived the ebony blackness of El Nasiry’s wife enables Santiuste imaginatively to construct the two concubines, whom he has not seen, as even more fantastically white (Carlos 62). Fixing his attention on Erhimo, who has attempted to communicate with him, Santiuste conspires to steal her from his host’s harem, carry her off to civilization, and convert her to Christianity, for he presumes that her silky dark hair will be even more fetching when glistening with baptismal water (Carlos 65). But when he first glimpses Erhimo’s “white fingers” gesturing to him through the harem’s latticework window, he quickly correct himself: “The fingers weren’t white, as I’ve said, but rather yellow [. . .] the natural whiteness disappears beneath the stain that Moorish women apply to their hands and feet with an herb called henna” (Carlos 62). In this ultimate disillusionment, the white flesh that Santiuste imagines as “naturally” present beneath the henna dye literally erodes away, since it is soon disclosed that this most unfortunate of El Nasiry’s sexual partners suffers from what would appear to be an advanced case of syphilis, which her master trusts might be cured by the Spanish military doctors who are

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so well acquainted with such maladies. Galdós’s text discreetly avoids naming the disease, but the list of symptoms—including gum degeneration and tooth loss, blindness, dementia, and of course most notably massive skin lesions—all correspond to medical textbook descriptions of secondary or tertiary syphilis (Carlos 68–69). The absolute breakdown of white flesh is accompanied as well by an absolute breakdown of the powers of signification, as Santiuste finds himself incapable of understanding the “dark language of the yellow fingers” (Carlos 62), or of penetrating the Arabic missive, scrawled in red letters, that Erhimo sends to him; the colored ink, rather than communicating meaning, simply confounds the clarity of the white page: “I will not succeed in expressing how much the blackness, or rather, the redness, of those lines hindered me” (Carlos 66).²¹ Santiuste can neither comprehend these radically different signs nor even properly express his lack of comprehension. We might find a similarly self-conscious breakdown of the powers of signification in Fortuny’s Moroccan-inspired work as well. It would seem that his growing preoccupation with questions of authenticity soon led him to abandon the odalisque, the most artificial of Orientalist genres. During this time, when he publicly criticized Spanish artists who depicted North African scenes without ever having left the peninsula, Fortuny began to paint only the Moroccans to whom he had access.²² Muslim women all but disappear from his work, showing up only occasionally as heavily veiled figures in his depictions of street scenes, as in his Moroccans (1871; reproduced in González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 317). He did produce several fine portraits of Jewish women, who were not kept apart from the male gaze, as well as an exquisite watercolor of a dark-skinned adolescent (fig. 12). Although Spanish-language sources consistently refer to this unique painting as Joven judía (Young Jewish Woman)—a particularly interesting appellation if we recall the racial construction of Yohar in Galdós’s novels—elsewhere (including at the Meadows Museum in Dallas, where the work is housed) it is known simply as Girl or Young Moroccan Woman. In fact, the ornamental motifs of the subject’s jewelry could suggest that she is either Berber or Jewish—or that she is both. In this sense, she exemplifies the “disruptive” hybridity of religious, ethnic, and racial identities in Morocco.²³ Critics have praised the brilliant depiction of the scintillation of the jewelry and the lovely modeling of her skin tones (Jordan 70). In particularly modern fashion, however, the painting appears unfinished. The outlines of the young woman’s right hand—like a ghostly trace of the disembodied white hands that so obsessed Galdós’s Santiuste—trail off into the blank whiteness of the paper, as if signaling once again the limits of representation.²⁴ Indeed, the blankness of the white paper or canvas serves as an apt metaphor for Fortuny’s representation of

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12. Marià Fortuny, Portrait of a Girl (ca. 1862). Pencil and watercolor on paper, 213⁄8 × 151⁄16 inches. Meadows Museum, Algur H. Meadows Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. MM. 68.25. Photography by Michael Bodycomb.

Moroccan women from this point on, since by the mid-1860s the female figure all but disappears from his North African work. Perhaps given the overwhelming hegemony of the European Orientalist iconographic tradition, the endeavor simply seemed too fraught. To paraphrase Galdós’s El Nasiry, though Fortuny may have been a poet of images, ultimately he recognized that he could neither see nor imagine the North African woman. COMING HOME TO AFRICAN SPAIN

When Alarcón, Galdós, and Fortuny returned home—both literally and, through their works, metaphorically—they had to reconcile their impressions

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of Morocco with diverse conceptualizations of Spain’s African legacy. While in his travel narrative La Alpujarra (1874) Alarcón continues to counterpose Christianity to Islam, Galdós, by contrast, chooses satirically to highlight their points of convergence in the second half of his historical novel Carlos VI en la Rápita, exposing the religious hypocrisy of Spanish church officials. In Galdós’s narrative as well as in the paintings produced by Fortuny during an extended stay in Granada, gendered bodies again “perform” national identities, while harem tropes represent emerging shifts in power relationships between men and women. At the beginning of La Alpujarra Alarcón asserts that his longstanding desire to visit the Spanish region most associated with the Moriscos had only been heightened during his trip to Morocco, where Tetuanis had spoken nostalgically of the area even though they had never set eyes on it (Obras 1497). Alarcón also expresses the urge (common in imperialist explorers) to enter into lands that are deemed impenetrable, and he notes that none of the many Spaniards and foreigners who set out in search of Spain’s Moorish past had ventured into the Alpujarra Mountains (Obras 1496). His narrative documents the difficulties of that journey, centering on the region’s isolation and the continued need for internal colonization, due to “the innumerable uncultivated [uncivilized] and solitary lands that cover the major part of our own civilized Europe” (Obras 1533). Alarcón also registers the slow but encouraging progress of economic development through mining and agricultural exports. He focuses as well on the spectacular beauty of the area, and in his prologue he reveals his hope that the contemplation of nature might assuage the terrible anguish he has felt since the death of a beloved daughter (Obras 1497). But in his text the author devotes as much time to recounting the history of the region, most specifically to narrating the Alpujarras War of 1568–70, as to his experience of the trip itself. The war began as the Moriscos rebelled against the numerous laws prohibiting many of their customs and mandating religious conversion, which clearly violated the terms of the 1491 Capitulations Agreement guaranteeing freedom of religion, culture, and language to the conquered Muslims. Alarcón has packed a trunk full of texts, or notes from texts, by Spanish, North African, and foreign historians, Arabists, and novelists who recount the war (Obras 1498), and he quotes from them at length, seeking to parse their points of convergence and divergence. He paints a moderately sympathetic portrait of the Morisco leader Aben-Humeya (a.k.a. Fernando de Válor), whose family had suffered persecution despite its ostensibly successful incorporation into Christian society, counterposing him to his bloodthirsty rivals for power, Farag Aben-Farag and Aben-Aboo. Along with dramatizing particularly gripping episodes, Alarcón is interested most of all in detailing the legacy of the conflict, which ended with a crushing defeat for the Moriscos, who were

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subsequently expelled from the former Kingdom of Granada to other regions in Spain by Philip II (and, several decades later, from all of Spain by Philip III). Alarcón’s narrative is punctuated with the occasional metaphorical Orientalization of the region, as when he compares the Alpujarras chain to an odalisque or a houri (Obras 1564). He also notes the similarity between a number of the towns he encounters and Tetuán, and asserts that in one village the customary Moors and Christians festival is accompanied by powder plays (in which horsemen raise a cloud of dust while riding at a furious clip and shooting their rifles in the air), just as in Morocco (Obras 1592). These passages are exceptional, however, for in most of his text Alarcón insists that in the modern-day Alpujarras there is no trace whatsoever of the Moorish past (González Alcantud, Lo moro 91–92). Perhaps even more than in the Diario, here the Andalusian writer appears particularly anxious to demonstrate that the Islamic legacy no longer exists in his native land; the ghosts of history may only be conjured up from the imagination. Alarcón thus endeavors to counter assertions that some of the expelled Moriscos did manage to return to the Alpujarras after the war, or that the Old Christians who remained were themselves so assimilated to Morisco ways of life that their influence was still palpable in the region (as reflected, for example, in Galdós’s character Jerónimo Ansúrez, who describes the numerous Morisco customs practiced by his second wife and her family).²⁵ Alarcón attributes the complete erasure of the Morisco past to the violent intolerance of the war’s victors, who “ripped the population out by its roots,” destroying entire villages, monuments, and even cemeteries (Obras 1573). The region was thus thoroughly cleansed of Moorish and Jewish blood, and as a consequence several centuries later it was not unusual to find homes like the one in Murtas where the author spent the night, in which “there was a flavor that was so Latin, so Catholic, so Spanish, so Castilian, that we ended up forgetting that we were in the Moriscan Alpujarra, and that centuries ago there were Agarenes in the Peninsula and that in Mecca there was even an imposter named Mohammed” (Obras 1587). As in all the towns of the region, the entire population of Murtas faithfully attends church, and when doing so it is clear that “they looked more like Philip II’s soldiers than descendents of the Moors. And in truth, their lineage was the former, not the latter” (Obras 1597). In his epilogue Alarcón confidently states that modern-day Alpujarrans have nothing whatsoever to do with Moriscos, for their ancestors are the people who had come from Castile, León, Extremadura, Galicia, and even Germany and the Netherlands, to repopulate the region when the war was over and the previous inhabitants had been systematically expelled; as the author concludes, “In the Alpujarra, as in the rest of Spain, there were only pure Christians” (Obras 1658).²⁶

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Alarcón is particularly taken by the “pure Christians” he finds in the Alpujarras. He lauds the religious fervor of the inhabitants, who maintain Catholic traditions forgotten elsewhere in Spain. One evening in Orjiva, for example, he is delighted to hear a chorus of angelic children traveling from house to house to sing the rosary, a daily Lenten tradition that the author has not witnessed in at least twenty years (Obras 1545). As his text reaches its climax, Alarcón’s passion for the Moriscos is swept aside by another, more transcendent passion. The end of Alarcón’s trip has coincided with Holy Week, and once he and his companions begin observing the stations of the cross alongside the devout Alpujarrans, their immersion in what Alarcón terms the “Epic of all centuries” (Obras 1617) completely eclipses their fascination with the Moriscos’ minor epic: “The Moriscos had lost their bid for us as soon as Maundy Thursday dawned. It was useless for us to try to lower our imaginations to take interest in their fate!” (Obras 1635). It is, of course, no coincidence that the end of Alarcón’s trip coincides with Holy Week. Although in his prologue the author lists the principal motivations for his journey, he fails to mention that he has also conceived of it as a religious pilgrimage. This only becomes evident half-way through the text, when he remarks (in part 3) that he and his traveling companions were preoccupied with fulfilling “our goal of commemorating the mysteries of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday in the churches of the snow region” (where, as he later argues, the inhabitants are closer to God [Obras 1565, 1629]). And indeed, part 6 (the final section before the epilogue) is entitled “Holy Week in the Sierra Nevada,” and here the author refers explicitly to his mission as a pilgrimage (Obras 1632). At the beginning of this week, the historical texts from which Alarcón so liberally quotes in earlier sections of the book are now supplemented with passages drawn from the Gospels, and an odd sort of parallelism emerges as the anticipated death of Aben-Humeya evokes another imminent demise. Alarcón even cites a passage from Martínez de la Rosa’s historical play, in which Aben-Humeya declaims, “I have sacrificed everything in order to redeem these people from their chains” (Obras 1626). But shortly thereafter he short-circuits the implied association between the Morisco leader and Christ, insisting that “Aben-Humeya was far from being a saint; rather, he was a wanton libertine” (Obras 1628), drawing attention, as he does on a number of occasions, to the Morisco leader’s reprehensible appetite for beautiful women, including the one—Zahara—who would eventually provoke his downfall (Obras 1555, 1651). Although the Moriscos disappear completely during the pages devoted to the stations of the cross, they are resurrected for an oddly revised crucifixion scene, in which Alarcón imagines that Aben-Humeya and Aben-Aboo have replaced Dimas and Gestas, the common

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criminals who were executed on either side of Jesus. While the “monstrous” Aben-Aboo remains unrepentant to the end, Aben-Humeya (like Saint Dimas) declares himself a Christian at the hour of death (Obras 1645). Alarcón quotes Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s history to support this idea, citing as well the fact that Juan of Austria ordered that Aben-Humeya’s remains be given a Christian burial in Guadix (Obras 1655). Aben-Humeya thus resembles the Aben-Adul of Alarcón’s story “Conversación en la Alhambra,” whose decision to embrace Christianity suggests that some Muslims may be (or might once have been?) receptive to sincere conversion. Alarcón’s strange crucifixion scene also condemns those Spaniards, such as Cardinal Cisneros, Philip III, and the inquisitors, who had promoted intolerance and refused to grant forgiveness to the Moriscos (Obras 1645). Here the author’s meditation on the errors of the expulsions leads him to conclusions even more sweeping than those expressed in the earlier texts considered at the beginning of this chapter. The disillusionment he experienced during the Spanish-Moroccan War seems to have contributed to this shift: not only did Spaniards fail to convert the Moriscos; as a consequence, they also lost their best chance to convert all of Africa, a continent that still finds itself hopelessly unenlightened, despite its proximity to Spain (Obras 1665). Moreover, Alarcón argues that the history of Spanish intolerance has enabled nineteenth-century liberals to blur the distinction between religion and tyranny, paving the way for the scourge of communist atheism that the author views as even more threatening than the beliefs of infidels such as the Moors: “Mobs that are more ferocious, more impious, more anti-Spanish, more anti-Christian than the Agarenes are teeming in the desert” (Obras 1645). Political elites, believing themselves redeemers, have deprived the masses of the only knowledge they ever had—religion—thus transforming them from men into beasts. Only by actively promoting the Catholic faith can the Spanish government restore the humanity of all of its citizens (Obras 1546, 1628, 1637, 1664). Alarcón sees no contradiction between this position and his earlier support for the 1869 Constitution establishing freedom of religion in Spain, for his exaltation of tolerance always presupposes the self-evident superiority of the Catholic religion. It is perhaps for this reason that he is confounded by the harsh criticisms lodged against La Alpujarra upon its publication. How, he asks, could an author who had so clearly condemned the intolerance of the inquisitors possibly be considered akin to Torquemada? (Obras 17–19). Benito Pérez Galdós’s evaluation of the imbrication of Spanish Christianity with the nation’s “African legacy” is much darker in spirit than Alarcón’s. In the second half of Carlos VI en la Rápita the Marquis of Beramendi decides to send Juan Santiuste not to the Alpujarras but through Aragon and into the border-

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lands between Catalonia and Valencia, another geographical area historically associated with Spain’s Muslim past (here it is important to recall that Valencia and Aragon lost one-third and one-fifth of their populations, respectively, as a result of the expulsion of the Moriscos from 1606 to 1614 [Kamen, Early 50]). Initially, however, Galdós’s novel appears much more preoccupied with the area’s modern history. Between 1833 and 1840, the traditionalist Catholic Carlists had rejected the ascension to the throne of Fernando VII’s daughter Isabella, and they fought a lengthy war in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, as well as in the Basque Country, in a failed attempt to bring their preferred candidate, Isabella’s uncle Carlos, to power. Later, from 1846 to 1849, they sought the same for Carlos’s homonymous son, the Count of Montemolín, again unsuccessfully. During the Spanish-Moroccan War the exiled Carlists decided to take advantage of the absence of Spain’s military leaders and army to disembark with Montemolín at La Rápita on the southern Catalan coast in order to attempt another coup, this time with the encouragement of Isabella’s king consort, Francisco de Asís. In Carlos VI, the liberal Beramendi asks Santiuste to travel incognito as a priest to this most recent civil war front and inform him of his observations. Well accustomed to going native, Santiuste has also learned the art of dissimulation from the masterful El Nasiry, and he is delighted to play along with Beramendi’s “farce,” adopting a variation on one of the names by which he was known in Morocco—Juan Pérez de Confusio—as he shaves his face and dons a cassock (Carlos 92). Armed with letters of recommendation from a number of pious personages, including Francisco de Asís’s notorious crony, Sister Patrocinio, Santiuste sets out on yet another journey through exotic territory. While the Andalusian Alarcón proclaims the Alpujarras to be eminently “Castilian,” the Santiuste of Galdós’s novel, by contrast, finds Aragon and the Catalan-Valencian border evocative of the Maghreb. Again, given the contemporaneous construction of Catalonia as the most “European” of Spain’s peripheral nations, the Canarian writer’s representation of this area is particularly ironic. Because many of the inhabitants only speak Catalan, Santiuste once again finds himself without adequate knowledge of the native language, misunderstanding crucial details concerning local life (Carlos 97, 116). The countryside is desolate, populated by brutal, warrior-like men whom he refers to as “beasts,” “mastiffs,” or simply “animals”; superstition and religious fanaticism—rather than the truly Christian devotion lauded by Alarcón—hold sway (Carlos 98–100, 134, 163–65, 176–77). The narrow, unpaved and garbage-strewn streets of the town of Ulldecona remind him of Tetuán or Tangier (Carlos 122). As Kathleen Davis explains, Santiuste is dismayed that many of the qualities shared by Spain and Morocco are negative ones (653). At the same time, however, Santiuste is delighted to

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discover that the women of the region are as enchanting as the North Africans who still populate his fantasies. He notes that the two maidens who serve him at an inn in Alcañiz reflect the region’s “mestizo” Celtiberian and Moorish heritage (Carlos 96). Santiuste’s opportunity for contact with the opposite sex will increase significantly once he is taken captive, and then taken in, by a colorful Carlist archpriest who is involved in the failed conspiracy. Juan Ruiz de Hondón enjoys a splendid standard of living in Ulldecona, thanks to a generous family inheritance and the attentive care of the dozens of women who reside under his roof. After Santiuste catches sight of the female members of Hondón’s household, he quickly falls for one of them, whom he describes as a “classical Hispano-Arabic beauty” (Carlos 146). In a dream, Santiuste confuses Donata, his new beloved, with an imagined, unsullied Erhimo. Donata, like Erhimo, has been imprisoned by a despotic sultan—Hondón—and must be rescued (Carlos 111). But gradually Santiuste will discover that his dream is not, in fact, far from reality, for despite his religious vows the “caliph” Hondón enjoys sexual favors from many of the innumerable members of his “harem,” arguing that God created women to receive the “offerings” of men (i.e., their ejaculations; Carlos 113, 136–38). Even the archpriest’s dog is named Sultán. Through Hondón, Galdós resurrects a national author now celebrated for his representation of the profound syncretism of Christian and Muslim culture in medieval Spain: Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita. As if his impressive carnal appetites, given names, birthplace in Alcalá de Henares, and status as archpriest were not clue enough, Hondón’s penchant for reciting his forerunner’s verses in praise of the Virgin Mary, included in the Libro de buen amor (Book of Good Love, ca. 1330), prompts Santiuste explicitly to articulate the parallelism (Carlos 131). Two noted scholars of medieval and early modern Spanish literature, Francisco Márquez Villanueva and Stephen Gilman, have both remarked that the characterization of Hondón demonstrates that Galdós understood the Archpriest of Hita’s “Arabism” well before Américo Castro detailed the impact of Muslim knowledge and culture on the Libro de buen amor (Gilman 31; Márquez Villanueva, “Estudio” 48). Once again though, critics may have allowed the monumental figure of Castro to obscure the many illustrious Spanish Arabists who preceded him. In his inaugural address to the Royal Academy, delivered and published in 1894, Francisco Fernández y González had already argued that like a typical clergyman of his day, the Archpriest of Hita was eminently familiar with Arabic literature, as well as with the Arabic language and musical instruments, and that he had written songs for Moorish girls. His Libro de buen amor, according to Fernández y González, had unquestionably been influenced by the didactic maqamat genre (Monroe 115–16). It is quite possible, then, that Galdós,

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rather than anticipating Castro, simply incorporated Fernández y González’s perspective into his novel. For his part, Castro later expanded upon Fernández y González’s ideas, asserting that the Archpriest of Hita’s celebration of the sacred and the profane, his exaltation of both the Virgin Mary and sexually aggressive women, though all but incomprehensible within a purely Christian context, was a brilliant reflection of a society suffused with Hispano-Arabic poetic genres. Castro explained that Ibn Hazm’s erotic guidebook, El collar de la paloma (The Neck Ring of the Dove) was also clearly a direct or indirect source for the Libro de buen amor (355–446). Although in Galdós’s work the Archpriest of Hita appears ever poised between sin and saintliness, however, he is ultimately a more devilish character, whose exploits enable the novelist to mount a scathing critique of religious hypocrisy in modern Spain. Hondón functions to confirm Jerónimo Ansúrez’s claim at the beginning of Aita Tettauen that the brotherhood between Spaniards and Moroccans is clearest from their mutual preference for seraglios over monogamous relationships. In fact the Spanish men that Santiuste meets on his journey, including priests, express the desire to possess “a flock of beautiful submissive women” (Aita 13; Carlos 162–63). While Ansúrez had argued, however, that Spanish odalisques are slightly more privileged than their Moroccan counterparts because they are free to come and go, Santiuste will discover that such is not necessarily the case with Hondón’s harem. Here Galdós’s novel draws to a close in a particularly unsettling way. As Santiuste continues to conflate Donata with Erhimo and Hondón with El Nasiry, he aspires to accomplish in Spain what he could not in Morocco: steal an odalisque. The stakes are high, for Santiuste has learned that Hondón, who brags of his merciless treatment of enemy soldiers in the Carlist wars, also murdered the lover of one of the members of his harem. After careful planning, Santiuste manages to flee with Donata to the city of Tortosa, where he witnesses the execution of the Carlist conspirator Ortega. The experience plunges him into a state of shock over the barbarism of a government—and clergy—that sanctions murder, as well as the savagery of a populace that revels in the spectacle. Shortly thereafter, Donata also recounts the tragic circumstances that led her to the archpriest. The illegitimate daughter of a churchman, Donata grew up in a vicarage learning to serve men of the cloth, and she was on the verge of repeating her mother’s fate when a new parish priest pressed her to share his quarters. Donata’s mother tried to protect her daughter, and the two women found themselves in a state of abject penury as a result. Desperate, they appealed to Juan Ruiz, but when he refused to extend them a loan, Donata’s mother was compelled to sell her daughter to the archpriest for 1,500 reales. After hearing Donata’s story, the disappointed Santiuste realizes that rather than wooing away

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a treasured odalisque, he has simply filched a common slave. Donata is closer to the Erhimo that El Nasiry had bought with a donkey (Carlos 70) than to the Erhimo of Santiuste’s flights of fancy. Much as Santiuste eventually comes to resemble the impassioned imperialist Perico Alarcón in Aita Tettauen, in Carlos VI he perhaps shares more with his nemesis the archpriest than he would care to admit. The liberally uncelibate Juan Ruiz embodies the priestly ideal that Santiuste had preached during his stay in Africa. While the archpriest claims that he runs a charitable harem, for he has been a “great civilizer” of the disadvantaged women gathered under his roof (Carlos 137–38), Santiuste also prides himself in his civilizing mission, as he seeks to convert first Yohar, then Erhimo, and finally Donata to his enlightened religion. Although Donata is devoutly Catholic, Santiuste endeavors to rid her of her superstitious practices, which, despite their references to Christianity, are similar to the popular beliefs of Morocco. But after his several disillusionments, Santiuste has begun to doubt that conversion is possible, and one of his acquaintances insists that it may only be accomplished through sound beatings, just as with Donata’s cousin Polonia: “with the hand, through clean slaps. . . . Convince yourself that with these females raised in Moorish fashion there is no other way to set them straight and teach them the catechism of practical life, so they can live and make life tolerable for everyone else” (Carlos 179). By the final page of the novel, Santiuste wonders if life with his own odalisque will be tolerable, or if he might not wish to sell her in the end (Carlos 187). Kathleen Davis has emphasized that the situation of women is central to Galdós’s comparison of Spain and Morocco in Carlos VI (653). Indeed, it might be productive to view Galdós’s novel as a sobering response to the assertion, in wide circulation from the last decades of the nineteenth century on, that Spaniards had a duty to colonize Morocco in order to “save” Moroccan women from their brutal menfolk. Carlos VI suggests that Spanish men would be poorly equipped to teach their North African counterparts to treat women with humanity and dignity. The novel also implies that in Spain the ongoing denigration of women is intimately related to societal discomfort with their accession to positions of power. After all, Carlism emerged from protest over the legislation that allowed Fernando VII’s female heir to ascend the throne. Isabella’s reportedly libertine behavior after her unfortunate marriage, together with the reputed homosexuality of her king consort, only served to stoke the flames of the Carlist cause. Juan Ruiz’s derogatory characterization of Spain as “this land governed by women” (Carlos 103) must thus be read literally—as a reference to both Isabella and the conspiratorial Sister Patrocinio—as well as

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metaphorically—as a nod to the none-too-virile men who occupy positions of power and influence within the government. It is not inconsequential that Santiuste’s friend Higinio is treated with derision by the masses when he faints at the sight of Ortega’s execution. But the perceived crisis in masculinity (to which I return in the following chapter) is often attributed precisely to women’s growing independence, and the proposed solution characteristically involves slapping them back into their place. Hondón studiously seeks to “civilize” his enslaved women by instructing them in the art of serving men, and for his part Santiuste is never so pleased with Donata as when he sees her joyously turn to domestic duties alongside her beaten-into-submission cousin Polonia once they arrive in Tortosa. Marià Fortuny’s meditations on the nation’s African legacy were also caught up with the changing position of women in Spain. The artist reversed the usual Orientalist trajectory, for he only journeyed to Andalusia well after undertaking several trips to North Africa, most likely at the prompting of the French painters whose studios he frequented in Paris. Fortuny’s status as a European-identified Catalan—by now perhaps better known abroad than in Spain—could not but have had an impact on his perceptions and representations of Andalusian landscapes and people. In the summer of 1870, the artist and his pregnant wife Cecilia de Madrazo—granddaughter, daughter, and sister to several famous Spanish painters—set up housekeeping on the grounds of the Alhambra, which had just been declared a national monument (on July 12, 1870) and was undergoing its first systematic restoration under the direction of Rafael Contreras, a friend of the Madrazo family (Mendoza 47–48, 59 n. 17). Over the course of his two-year stay there, Fortuny produced a series of exquisite paintings that serve imaginatively to repopulate the halls of the palace. Some of his works, such as La matanza de los Abencerrajes (The Massacre of the Abencerrages, 1871), bring to life legendary events of the Nasrid period, which the artist took care to document by consulting a number of historical sources (Martí Ayxelà, “Mariano Fortuny, intérprete” 401–2). Other paintings are less readily identifiable as picturing a concrete era or even a specific place. As in similar works by other European Orientalists, the overlay of geographical referents is not uncommon, and Fortuny draws freely upon sketches made in both Morocco (he visited Tangier and Tetuán yet again in the fall of 1871) and southern Spain. Fortuny characteristically treats Granada as a stage, upon which his subjects play out a host of identities from different historical periods, and frequently there is a self-consciously performative quality to these works. During his stay in the city, Fortuny also added to his impressive collection of Islamic decorative arts, including textiles,

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ceramics, and weaponry, and acquired a number of important pieces thought originally to have adorned the Alhambra, which would subsequently serve as props or elements of staging in his works. At this time, Fortuny also returned to the portrayal of a new form of “native woman.” Scouring the Albaicín for interesting models, the artist recruited a number of Gypsies, several of whom achieved international fame as a result. In the Albaicín, Fortuny also met a fifteen-year-old gypsy girl named—appropriately enough—Carmen. Not only did Carmen Bastián pose for a number of Fortuny’s Andalusian works, she appears to have been incorporated into his household as well, and photographs and paintings from the period attest to her positioning within the painter’s extended family groupings. It is important to remember that since the beginning of the century, European Orientalists had depicted the Alhambra as populated by Gypsies, who were considered successors to the Moors, and members of a similarly moribund race, incapable of entry into modernity (Charnon-Deutsch, Spanish Gypsy 47, 50, 53, 79, 92, 65). Ironically, it was the severe depopulation and loss of skills resulting from the expulsion of the Moriscos that had spared the equally marginalized Gypsies from suffering the same fate. Instead, Philip III forced the Gypsies to abandon their peripatetic lifestyle, and as the anthropologist Harold López has argued, they gradually came to occupy the social spaces and occupations left vacant by the Moriscos (Charnon-Deutsch, Spanish Gypsy 25–26; González Alcantud, Lo moro 94). Thus, the longstanding conflation of the two groups is not surprising. For his part, Fortuny both repeats and revises the association, for Carmen represents Spain’s Andalusi past, as well as its modern present. In his Gitana bailando en un jardín (Gypsy Dancing in a Garden, ca. 1870–72), for example, while Carmen’s colorful figure and gracefully posed arms are dramatically superimposed over a whitewashed wall in the right half of the piece—like a protocinematic spectacle—another sensually curved, geometrically bedecked form sprouting artfully arranged limbs provides a subtly playful visual echo on the left side of the composition, and casts a historically resonant shadow as well: it is a depiction of one of Fortuny’s prized antique Hispano-Arabic ceramic vessels (Martí Ayxelà, “Catálogo” 168). In another remarkable painting—surely one of Fortuny’s most brilliant but, curiously, least well known works—Carmen embodies an amalgam of seemingly irreconcilable traits that reflect the fascinating contradictions in formulations of Spanish national identity during this period. Here the artist works to negotiate Spain’s “African inheritance” from his own position as the most “international” of Catalan artists. His “Carmen Bastián” (ca. 1870–72; fig. 13) is both exotically different and boldly European; in this painting, Fortuny’s model play-acts the role of modern odalisque.

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13. Marià Fortuny, Carmen Bastián (ca. 1870–72). Oil on panel, 45 × 62 cm. Private collection. Reproduced by permission.

To appreciate the radical novelty of this work, it is important to understand the avant-garde experimentation that produced what has been considered the “crisis of the nude.” Within the dominant tradition of academic painting the female nude had only been “authorized” within certain genres. Generally speaking, depiction of the contemporary nude was strongly discouraged. Historical, particularly classical, settings were preferred, and mythological figures such as Venus were especially popular subjects. The nude might be adorned with discreet drapery or suitable (minimal) items of clothing, but depictions of trails of discarded clothing, which were deemed too titillating, were to be avoided unless absolutely necessary for the purpose of narrative coherence or historical accuracy. The female figure was idealized according to somewhat shifting aesthetic standards, but her genital region was typically “airbrushed”—neither anatomical details nor pubic hair were permitted. In essence, even if no fig leaf was literally present, the nude’s genitals were always covered with what Peter Brooks has referred to as “the ultimate veil: the woman’s sex as unknowable and unrepresentable” (141). Thus, the academic tradition was quite circumscribed, and one of the reasons that Orientalist painting became so popular in the nineteenth century is that it provided fresh justification for the portrayal of the female nude,

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14. Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863). Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 190 cm. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

now made over as the market slave, the Turkish bather, or the odalisque. The exotic Orientalist painting, according to Brooks, “excuses its own display of the nude through representation of a ‘foreign’ (barbaric, deplorable, enticing) practice of display of the nude” (136). By the 1860s, however, European painters had begun to experiment with new ways of depicting the nude. Perhaps the single most commented upon painting in this context is Edouard Manet’s Olympia, which was first shown publicly in the Paris Salon of 1865 (fig. 14). Although Fortuny was not in the French capital at the time, he undoubtedly knew of the work by reputation as well as through photographs or lithographic reproductions. It is difficult today to imagine the tremendous scandal that this painting provoked; daily, a throng of appalled salongoers pressed in to view it, contributing their catcalls to the noisy expressions of derision. As T. J. Clark demonstrates in his ground-breaking study The Painting of Modern Life, reviews published at the time open a window on the mindset of these viewers: Olympia was naked, not nude; rather than being elevated above the vulgar plane of daily reality by the artist, she was clearly depicted as a prostitute, and a dirty, deathly, decaying prostitute at that; moreover, she gazed with-

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out shame at the viewer. The hard tension in Olympia’s left hand was deemed most shocking, for it seemed to mock the gesture of modesty that had characterized the classical nude since the time of Titian. Clark remarks that Olympia “has no pubic hair, of course; that would have been unthinkable” but that “the hand is Olympia’s whole body, disobeying the rules of the nude” (136). Clark’s purpose throughout his book is to demonstrate how late nineteenth-century French painting links modernity and social marginality (259), and here the prostitute is a particularly adept agent of that modernity, for her skillful role-playing and her transgression of class divisions blur the boundaries of social distinction (111). According to Clark, only one art critic of the time, Jean Ravenel, seems to have captured the significance—the striking modernity—of Manet’s painting. Ravenal characterizes the work as “a very crazy piece of Spanish madness, which is a thousand times better than the platitude and inertia of so many canvases on show in the exhibition” (qtd. in Clark 139). While Ravenal may have been unique in his valorization of this quality, he was certainly not the only critic to remark upon the work’s “Spanishness.” On the one hand Manet’s painting was reminiscent of the single prior Western nude deemed equally revolutionary, Goya’s Maja desnuda (Nude [or Naked?] Maja); on the other, Olympia herself tended to be “read” by the French as an exotic other or even as vaguely Spanish. While, as Sander Gilman has argued, the presence of the black servant—a standard figure in paintings of odalisques—suggested Olympia’s close proximity to Africa and served to underline her association with an “uncivilized” or uncontrolled sexuality (76–83), the poem that accompanied Manet’s painting in the official salon catalogue described Olympia as, among other things, a Spanish sultana. In her discussion of this poem, art historian Griselda Pollock insists that “the verse plays upon notions of the put-on, airs, play-acting, which run the gamut from Venetian sleeping nymphs to Goyaesque royalty and the profane desnudas that would be the referent points for any intelligent criticism of the painting” (303). Pollock, too, links this kaleidoscopic performance of identity with the modern, and in this sense Olympia sets the stage for the dramatic debut of Fortuny’s Carmen Bastián. No less than in the painting that depicts her dancing sevillanas, in this work Carmen also performs an identity. Carmen’s playful gesture of exposure duplicates Fortuny’s own move to expose—and to violate in spectacular fashion—the laws governing representation of the nude. Not only does this painting depict with naturalistic detail the pubic hair that, according to Clark, would have been “unthinkable” for Manet’s Olympia, it in effect underlines that depiction by “framing” it with items of clothing—the stockings to the left, and the flounces of skirt above, below, and to the right—thus converting this work into a sort of

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portrait within a portrait. In essence, this painting is particularly radical precisely because it is not a full nude: the depiction of the genital region is itself the subject of this painting. It is crucial as well that Carmen is represented as participating fully in this revisionist spectacle. She is portrayed as an artistic as well as a sexual agent, caught in the process of making herself naked, not nude. It is she who appears to have raised her skirt, whose folds are entwined within her left hand, while coyly in her right hand she holds at bay the open fan that would substitute for the requisite fig leaf. Moreover, the motif of the fan as fig leaf—so close, yet ultimately so far from screening off the female genitals—is reduplicated in the decorative patterning of the wooden divan—yet another example of Fortuny’s supremely playful deployment of the visual echo. No nineteenth-century treatments of Carmen Bastián are extant. After Fortuny’s death the painting remained within the Madrazo family, and even if it had some limited exposure in that context it was probably too radical to be assimilated by Spanish critics of the time, for, just as Clark writes of Manet’s Olympia, “it altered and played with identities the culture wished to keep still” (100). But twentieth- and twenty-first-century art historians have also neglected the painting. Montse Martí Ayxelà is the only one of the many specialists who have written on Fortuny to have devoted any attention to the piece, which she has characterized as “Fortuny’s most original and modern work,” similar in sensibility and intent to Impressionist nudes. She also briefly remarks the possible influence of French or Japanese erotic art (“Mariano Fortuny Marsal” 44; “Desnudos” 42–44). Another critic attempts to justify his own silence: in his book on Spanish artworks featuring Gypsies, Eduardo Quesada glosses over the piece, claiming that “in this lovely work, however, Carmen Bastián does not practice Gypsyness” (115). Yet to make such a claim is to deny the complex cultural and ideological context within which Carmen Bastián was produced and would have been received. Carmen’s “Gypsyness” is in fact absolutely essential to this painting, for no “white” Spanish woman of the time would have been portrayed thus, at least not in a work of “high culture” that might be subject to public exhibition. By contrast, as Lou Charnon-Deutsch has explained, it was common for artists to suggest the sexual availability of their subjects when depicting Gypsy women (Spanish Gypsy 76–77). Quesada’s claim also suggests that Gypsies may only be read as such when they are engaged in archetypical Gypsy activities, such as flamenco performances, or when they are adorned with or surrounded by stereotypical Gypsy accouterments. Clearly, however, Fortuny is interested in figuring a “different” form of identity here. At the same time, perhaps the only other contemporaneous artistic renderings of female nudes in Spain that might be deemed similar to Fortuny’s paint-

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ing are to be found in Los Borbones en pelota (The Bourbons in the Raw), a collection of pornographic watercolors depicting the sexual and political exploits of Isabella II and her court.²⁷ The queen is shown engaging in a wide range of sexual acts with countless men, women, and animals (including her confessor and Sister Patrocinio), often while her hapless husband Francisco de Asís looks on. Signed with the pseudonym “Sem[en],” but attributed to several different artists, principally Valeriano Domínguez Bécquer, his brother the poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, and Francisco Ortego (who, as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, had also been involved in illustrating the Spanish-Moroccan War), Borbones was produced after the revolution that dethroned Isabella in the fall of 1868 (Pageard 17–18; Cabra Loredo 75–77, 83, 104). Although there is scant information concerning the (necessarily clandestine) circulation of these images, it is not inconceivable that Fortuny saw them when he returned to Spain from Paris in the summer of 1870. One of the many Spanish artists who came to call on the internationally celebrated Fortuny during his brief stay in Madrid that June, for example, may have been involved with the Borbones project and shared the portfolio with him. Moreover, from Madrid Fortuny traveled on to Granada, stopping over in Seville, where he examined a Spanish-Moroccan War painting depicting a meeting between Generals Muley-el-Abbas and O’Donnell in the studio of Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer (González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 80)—none other than the uncle and mentor of the two brothers responsible for the majority of the watercolors. It may not be coincidental, then, that Fortuny’s painting bears a striking resemblance to the cover image of Borbones, which shows a female allegorical figure (“Truth”?) drawing back a theatrical bed curtain to reveal a reclining Isabella with her skirts hiked up to her waist, exposing a pubis replete with hair (fig. 15). Like Carmen, Isabella also wears stockings that help to “frame” her sex, although in her limp hand she bears not a fan but a scepter. In the right half of the work, a painter with his back to us sets to work committing the scene to canvas, as a number of shadowy men look on in the background (Sem 115). The similarities between Fortuny’s audacious portrait of Carmen and the scandalous depiction of the queen signed by “Semen” raise a number of intriguing interpretive possibilities. Charnon-Deutsch has argued that the Borbones watercolors represent the queen as defiling the Spanish throne by masquerading as a dance-hall girl or circus performer (Fictions 120); perhaps in Carmen Bastián she could be seen as morphing into a flamenco artist as well. Isabella’s husband, however, had a different take on his wife’s performative capacities. As historian Isabel Burdiel has revealed, Francisco de Asís acknowledged in a transcribed conversation to the minister of the interior that he didn’t love Isabella any more

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15. Sem [pseud.], Cover illustration, Los Borbones en pelota. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.

than she loved him, but he criticized her for refusing to accept her duty and “play her part” (311). For Charnon-Deutsch, in Borbones Isabella is portrayed as incapable of “playing her part” precisely due to her sex: “The images of the wayward queen expose a terrible gender mistake: the person occupying the throne is of the wrong sex [. . .] these sketches show a fundamental anxiety about a woman’s occupying Spain’s most visible place in the public sphere; the queen’s body (like the other public menace, the prostitute) can only corrupt the body politic” (Fictions 119; Charnon-Deutsch’s emphasis). That corruption is figured through the female sexual agency displayed in spectacular fashion throughout the Borbones collection, as Isabella beds (or perhaps more accurately in some cases, “thrones”) innumerable men. Writing from Paris, Isabella’s cousin Enrique tellingly draws upon Orientalist metaphors in a letter condemning the queen shortly before the revolution that deposed her: “You were born to represent a harem court, with a turban on your head, rather than a constitutional European nation” (qtd. in Burdiel 316). In her study of French Orientalist discourse, Madeleine Dobie persuasively argues that the “Orient” was deemed threateningly despotic and chaotic not because of the strict separation of the sexes but rather because of the

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collapse in gender distinctions that presumably arose as a natural consequence of harem life, enabling women to gain the upper hand over men (43–56). As the queen’s cousin in France articulates, and as artists such as the Bécquer brothers and Fortuny also suggest, from Isabella to Carmen Bastián, Spanish women are no longer content to play the role of passive, domesticated European odalisque; rather, in their bold assertion of sexual subjectivity, they turn the tables on gendered power relations, thus threatening traditional constructions of masculinity. It is no wonder, then, that as Charnon-Deutsch has noted, Borbones is littered with detached penises (Fictions 121–25). While Carmen Bastián may have resonated with Spaniards’ discomfort concerning their “sultana” Isabella and her harem of men, for Fortuny’s extended family the work suggested instead that it was the artist who had an embarrassing proclivity for “harem life.” In 1864, the Catalan produced a gouache that explicitly foregrounded one of the possible subtexts of the traditional “artist and model” genre: Pareja amorosa en un taller (Amorous Couple in a Studio). In this work, a large canvas on the right has been abandoned, while on the left two people (likely the artist and his model) enjoy a wildly passionate moment; as art historian Francesc Quílez characterizes it, “Fortuny tends toward an amoral representation, which is even transgressive of social conventions, and thus he invites us to participate in an act of voyeurism” (Doñate, Mendoza, and Quílez 136). Fortuny’s desire to push the boundaries of representation and decorum is also evident from his “gynecological painting” of 1872 (Estudio de vagina, reproduced in González López and Martí Ayxelà II: 30, where the model is presumed to be Carmen Bastián). This work, which is even less commented upon than Carmen Bastián, is far more explicit than Gustave Courbet’s notorious 1866 cabinet painting, commissioned by Turkish diplomat Khalil-Bey (and later owned by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan), The Origin of the World. It is not surprising, then, that the nature of Fortuny’s interactions with his teenage Gypsy model were subject to indirect but pointed efforts at “rewriting” after the artist’s premature death in Rome in 1874 (at the age of thirty-six). For example, an article written by the uncle of Fortuny’s widow, Pedro de Madrazo, published and repeatedly reprinted in a number of high-circulation periodicals (Ainaud de Lisarte 94), attempts to make Fortuny over as a patriotic painter, emphasizing as well his “saintly affection” for his angelical wife Cecilia (Madrazo 269). Madrazo’s discussion of the breadth of subject matter tackled by the artist would seem to reflect a profound anxiety concerning the resonances of Fortuny’s painting of Carmen Bastián, including any possible similarity to infamous French works: “Fortuny painted with astonishing variety [. . .] among his figures, the nobleman, the soldier, the playwright, the bullfighter, the juggler, the bandit,

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the beggar, the Gypsy, all human beings except the whore, [be she] aristocratic or plebeian” (270). More intriguing still is José de Castro y Serrano’s widely read “Carmen, la de Fortuny” (Fortuny’s Carmen), which was first published in 1875 in the Ilustración Española y Americana and subsequently reprinted in the author’s 1887 collection of biographies. Throughout the pages of this presumably heavily fictionalized narrative, Carmen is explicitly characterized as a brown “white Gypsy” who endeavors to become truly white. Transformed from animalized Albaicín cave dweller to sensual “Oriental woman,” Carmen escapes from the “Turkish” or “Arabic” relatives who would isolate her from the world, only to embrace her status as civilized domestic slave, dutifully tending to her beloved master Fortuny’s smallest desires (232–35, 241–45, 248). The painter abandons her when he leaves Granada for Rome with his family, and the disconsolate Carmen makes her way to Madrid, where she is taken in by a British artist who continues to educate her in the ways of polite society. But Carmen’s dark background returns to haunt her when her brother, consumed with avenging the family honor, follows his sister to Madrid and savagely beats her. The focalized narration reveals that although she feels disillusioned by “the lifestyle of civilization,” Carmen is not particularly surprised when the British artist abandons her, as any white man would do in similar circumstances (264–65). Castro y Serrano thus foregrounds his heroine’s awareness of the racial discourse that, as Charnon-Deutsch has explained, customarily subtends the tragic denouments of literary representations of “mixed” relationships between Gypsy women and non-Gypsy men (Spanish Gypsy 113, 240). Ironically, it is only at this point in the tale that Carmen may come to embody the ultimate icon of tragic bourgeois whiteness: a Spanish Ophelia, she turns up a suicide in the Retiro Park pond. Throughout his text, Castro y Serrano emphasizes that Carmen is a natural actress (246), noting that “the Gypsy girl mastered all the roles that the vicissitudes of her fortune obliged her to play” (256). Ultimately, however, the self-sacrificing role she is forced to play in this particular narrative of cultural assimilation substitutes a less threatening, more traditional feminine stereotype of victimhood for the complexly modern, albeit conflicted, image that she presents in Fortuny’s painting. If, as Charnon-Deutsch has argued, the danger of the Gypsy woman’s racial difference was represented as reduplicating the seductive danger of her sexual difference—capable of “castrating” men (Spanish Gypsy 240)—then it is no surprise that Castro y Serrano determined that drowning “Fortuny’s Carmen” was simply the safest course of action.

4

T M R   SM T  W

While, as discussed in the previous chapter, late nineteenth-century Spanish colonial texts that centered on North Africa were frequently forced to negotiate the dramatic sociocultural shifts associated with modernity, including the growing independence of women, by the early twentieth century the intensive militarization of the Spanish neocolonial venture in Morocco brought into much sharper focus the related crises in masculine identities. In recent years cultural theorists and historians have worked to scrutinize the fundamental importance of colonial and other forms of warfare for the construction of men’s gender roles and sexuality in a number of European nations at the time. This chapter begins to explore some of the complex ways in which a parallel dynamic played out within and as a result of the context of Spanish Africanism, a phenomenon that up to now has remained largely outside scholars’ purview. Although Spain’s victory in the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60 had provided an initial boost to the Africanist movement, in reality from this point on the nation’s ambitions in North Africa would always be circumscribed by the interests of the other European imperial powers that had risen to dominance during this period. It was Britain that had pressured Spain to cede the city of Tetuán in the early 1860s, providing loans to Morocco so that the financial terms for ending the Spanish occupation might be met. And it was France that interceded to broker a peace accord between Spain and Morocco when, in 1893, yet another border skirmish on the outskirts of Melilla led the Iberian nation into war—with twenty-five thousand troops sent to defend the enclave—precisely when uprisings in Cuba also demanded immediate attention (Bachoud, Españoles 41). Several years later, after the Spaniards’ crushing loss to the United States in the Spanish-American War, commonly referred to on the peninsula as

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the “Disaster” of 1898, and generally considered the official end of the Spanish Empire, European nations were at once delighted and concerned at the possibility that North African strongholds might be up for grabs, given Spain’s weakened state (Balfour, End 48). Beginning in 1900, France had entered into secret pacts with a number of its neighbors in order to prepare for the eventual establishment of a protectorate in Morocco; German objections notwithstanding, at the Algeciras conference of 1906 the stage was set for increased European control over Moroccan affairs, with France slated to occupy a dominant, and Spain a subordinate, position of authority (Bachoud, Españoles 41–43). While these negotiations were under way, Spain’s situation in North Africa was complicated by the discovery of promising metal deposits near Melilla. In the first years of the twentieth century, the Spanish commander of the enclave, General José Marina, had worked to maintain friendly relations with all of the local leaders, including the rebel and pretender to the throne, El Rogui, as well as the heads of rival tribes. But the balance of power was upset when competition ensued between several European nations to establish mines in the region. One Spanish company managed to strike a deal with El Rogui, even agreeing to facilitate his bellicose activities by allowing him use of the railway they planned to construct between the mines and Melilla. For their part, rival tribes sought to negotiate their own mining concessions with other Spanish and European competitors, while they attacked the facility under El Rogui’s protection. When El Rogui initiated a bloody campaign of reprisal, however, General Marina refused to support him, sending his troops out to protect the workers. Although El Rogui was eventually forced to retreat to the south, another tribal leader sought to gain dominance over the area and foment anti-Spanish sentiment; attacks against the miners were renewed, and war finally erupted in July 1909. Although the Spaniards were successful in some of the earliest encounters, fought with trained soldiers from the Melilla garrison, when reinforcements arrived from the peninsula and more ambitious maneuvers were attempted in late July, the nation suffered a tragic loss, which would be termed (just as the Spanish-American War had been) the “Disaster” of the Barranco del Lobo (Wolf ’s Ravine). The officers’ ignorance of the terrain had led them to direct their inexperienced soldiers into an unprotected ravine, where they were ambushed by the Riffians; Spanish casualties numbered more than a thousand, with some 180 killed (Balfour, Deadly 14–23). Meanwhile, another crisis had exploded on the peninsula. In order to send the necessary reinforcements to General Marina, Prime Minister Antonio Maura had decided to call up the reserve troops, including more than five hundred men in Catalonia who had presumably finished their service six years earlier.

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Spain’s unjust conscription system allowed upper- and middle-class men to pay their way out of military duty, so the burden of fighting fell almost exclusively on working-class men. But because of the increased politicization of Spanish workers via Anarchist and Radical Republican labor unions, many of those who were drafted had come to adopt an impassioned anticolonialism, and likely viewed their own position in society as akin to that of the Moroccans the central government sought to colonize.¹ It is not surprising that draftees objected to risking or sacrificing their lives, killing their impoverished counterparts across the strait in order to protect the interests of Spain’s moneyed classes, the only ones who would benefit from mines in the Rif. The resulting antiwar protests and strikes in Barcelona quickly developed into violent riots that paralyzed the city during what would come to be known as the Semana Trágica, or Tragic Week (July 26–August 1). Maura’s conservative government moved swiftly to repress the protestors, declaring a state of war and bringing in troops from other Spanish regions. Hundreds of participants were killed in the fighting, hundreds more were subsequently court-martialed, and five were executed, including the Anarchist education reformer Francesc Ferrer, an event that provoked international condemnation and led to Maura’s downfall (Boyd 20–25). After 1909, workingclass opposition to the colonial project in Africa would have an increasingly significant impact on Spanish internal and external affairs, for as historian Carolyn Boyd has explained, “Morocco was the prime justification for revolutionary politics” (25). Other sectors of Spanish society, however, reacted quite differently to the events of July 1909, and their valorization of colonial war would also have an indelible impact on the nation’s history. The Barranco del Lobo disaster and the ferocity of the Riffian resistance outside Melilla only functioned to strengthen the resolve of the military officers and politicians who were preoccupied with restoring Spain’s imperial luster after the painful loss of 1898 and, by extension, with securing the nation a place within the latest permutation of the “European club.” As always, the so-called Law of Blood would be invoked by Africanists to justify the unique appropriateness of the intervention of “the European Iberia and the African Iberia” in Morocco (as Tomás Maestre phrased it; qtd. in Alfaya González 439). Yet in reality the November 27, 1912, treaty that officially granted Spain a small protectorate in the notoriously conflictive northern tier of Morocco had nothing to do with Spain’s Law of Blood, and everything to do with appeasing the Iberian nation while maintaining equanimity between France and Britain, the two major European colonial powers of the modern era. Spain would simply serve as a buffer between the British outpost of Gibraltar and the French protectorate in southern Morocco. Even so, the “pacification”

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campaigns in the Moroccan protectorate would provide members of the Spanish armed forces a means to recuperate their reputation and advance quickly in their careers (Muñoz Bolaños 16, 18). Moreover, throughout Europe both imperial endeavors and warfare had come to be associated with the revitalization of a masculinity now deemed to be under constant threat (Mosse, Image 107–19), and Africanist officers in the Rif campaigns would formulate a unique conceptualization of their own virility, as well as a concomitant disdain for the perceived decadence of men on the peninsula (Balfour, Deadly 36, 183). The anxiety over shifts in women’s roles certainly continued apace during this period, but within the by now thoroughly militarized context of Spanish Africanism, a related preoccupation with masculine identities would soon move to center stage. WOMEN WARRIORS AND MILQUETOAST MEN IN CARMEN DE BURGOS’S RIF NARRATIVES

As Spain’s first female war correspondent, journalist and novelist Carmen de Burgos reveals how pressures on the configuration of masculinity accompanied challenges to traditional notions of femininity. Together with her sister Ketty, Burgos traveled to Melilla in the fall of 1909, and her reports from the Rif front were published in the prominent Madrid daily El Heraldo de Madrid, for which she worked as a staff writer. Strict censorship of newspapers—famously condemned in the very issues of El Heraldo in which Rif war articles by Burgos and her editor José de Rocamora appeared—silenced many details concerning the conflict. Because literary texts were not subject to the same censorship norms as newspapers, however, Burgos decided to produce a work of fiction that would expose more of the reality of the war she had witnessed. “En la guerra” (In War) was published just one month later, in the fall of 1909, in the extraordinarily popular series El Cuento Semanal (no. 148); it was preceded by a brief prologue in which the author informed her readers that the novella was written “without mediation of telegraph or censorship” (165). Burgos’s novella features a thirdperson omniscient narrator who is closely allied with the protagonist, the beautiful and cultured Alina. Married to Luis, a military officer twenty years her senior who served in the Spanish-American War, Alina insists upon accompanying him to the 1909 campaign. While in Melilla she meets Luis’s younger companion from the earlier war, Gonzalo, and the two fall in love, although their relationship remains unconsummated even when they are left alone together in the enclave after her husband is sent to the front. Burgos incorporates many passages from her newspaper accounts into the fictional work, but there are some notable differences, including Alina’s pacifism, which she struggles to maintain while in

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Morocco; the final pages of the novella include her debates with Luis concerning the validity of warfare. In a later article entitled “Guerra a la guerra” (War against War), Burgos reveals that during the Melilla conflict any expression of antiwar sentiment in the periodical presses was considered unpatriotic (201), so it seems evident that in the novella Alina functions to communicate a perspective that Burgos felt she could not express openly in her Heraldo pieces. As we shall see, additional discrepancies between the journalistic pieces and “En la guerra” also suggest that Burgos held conflicted views on the Spanish colonial project. Burgos’s novella is a veritable encyclopedia of Africanist commonplaces, showing that the ideas first articulated within political and intellectual circles in the nineteenth century continued to circulate through ever-wider cultural venues. For example, like many Africanists, Burgos’s narrator views the Strait of Gibraltar as uniting rather than dividing Spain and Africa: “It was more properly the lake that united its shores rather than the dividing line of the continental frontier” (176). Remarking that the countryside and lifestyles in North Africa are much like those of southern Spain, the narrator also employs the Africanist metaphor of the geographical mirror: “Those infertile, dusty, fields [. . .] presented a certain similarity with the fields and small towns of the Níjar coast. [. . .] The sinister Gurugú [. . .] was a geological unfolding of our Spanish Penibetic mountain chain [. . .] and if you closely observed the Riffian customs, it wouldn’t be long before you found them similar to those of the farmers of Granada and Almería” (176). One Spanish custom that Burgos, like so many others, associates with the continuation of Andalusi mores is the seclusion of women. As she says of the Spanish women who remain shut up in their rooms in Melilla, “Perhaps the withdrawal of the women was not voluntary; they were constrained by the traditional customs left by the Muslims in Spain, still dominant even among those who were fighting against the Moors in the name of progress.” Spaniards who deem themselves capable of bringing modernity to the neighboring continent are thus viewed with irony, for they are in fact possessed of “an atavistic spirit, signaling our centuries of backwardness in relation to world culture” (167). Even some of the Spanish officers of “En la guerra” exchange sarcastic comments about their nation’s presumably greater degree of civilization (185). However, Carmen de Burgos mobilizes time-worn Africanist rhetoric in order to convey a less familiar message. For her, the very commonalities between Spaniards and Moroccans function to fuel not a fraternal closeness but rather a fratricidal hatred: “Perhaps the shared origin of their race and the yearning for similar historical destinies were the principal causes of the rivalry and hatred between the Spanish and Moroccan peoples” (176–77). Paradoxically, then, de-

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spite the racial affinity of its opponents, the war provides a rare window onto “the savage tradition of racial hatred” (166).² The narrator herself stoops to articulate this racial hatred on more than one occasion. Commenting that “all those Riffians couldn’t be viewed without hatred,” the narrator describes them as hungry wolves, ferocious, dirty, and poorly dressed, dark like the devil, with brutish features and stupid eyes (173, 175, 192, 212). Ultimately, however, the narrator is unable to sustain a consistently racist depiction of the Moroccans, and the novella’s contradictions betray the profound ambivalence that is so characteristic of Spanish colonial discourse on Africa. When Alina encounters a group of Moroccan children selling cigarettes and trinkets to the Spanish soldiers, the narrator’s description is withering: “Nothing was so reminiscent of the theories of transformism than those boys; they seemed like surly little animals, half-savage, ugly, with strongly marked features and a black complexion” (184). A similar characterization appears in an earlier Heraldo piece (“El domingo en el campamento” [Sunday in the Encampment]). By using the term “transformism,” which refers to the development of higher organisms from lower ones, Burgos demonstrates her familiarity with Lamarck, Darwin, and other scientists whose ideas concerning evolution were widely discussed in Spain, and she appears to accept a concept that had been strenuously opposed by her compatriot Emilia Pardo Bazán, who found it impossible to reconcile transformism with biblical creationism (Otis 141). But in the novella Alina’s more extended interaction with the Moroccan boys leads the text away from the scientific orthodoxy of the time. Once she converses with a clean and neatly dressed member of the group—who clearly enjoys a more comfortable economic status—and after another boy solicitously warns her to stay away from the Moroccan soldiers on Gurugú Mountain, Alina begins to feel tenderness for the “little animals.” She remarks to her husband, “Do you see, Luis? At this age all men are good” (186). By the end of the encounter three of the boys begin to play flutes, and the narrator observes that if it weren’t for their Arabic dress or the strong African sun the young musicians would have evoked shepherd’s pastorals, Scandinavian songs, or even Wagnerian airs (186; in the corresponding Heraldo passage Burgos also mentions the similarity to Andalusian song [“El domingo en el campamento”]). This odd scene functions to dismantle racist appropriations of evolutionary theory, and indeed later in the novella we find a radically different application of Darwinian thought. After observing the simple nobility of the Spanish soldiers and the serene generosity of their commanding officers, Alina feels “proud to have been born on Spanish soil, with the undeniable superiority of a race ennobled by the natural selection of sentiment, the only one worthy of account in the common origin of humans” (192). Here the text works to counter

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the earlier notion that the Spaniards were poorly equipped to “civilize” their Moroccan brothers, by rejecting a purely biological conceptualization of evolution in favor of a more properly cultural emphasis on “the natural selection of sentiment.” Burgos’s Rif texts are as unsettling with respect to gender as they are with respect to race. As Spain’s first female war correspondent, the author herself was considered a curiosity, and was forced to negotiate the prejudices of the day. When she failed to receive a medal for her activities during the war—a recognition granted to a number of other (male) journalists who covered the conflict— the omission was protested in the August 17, 1910, issue of La Correspondencia Militar. But the precise description of her accomplishments could hardly have pleased Burgos. Of her tireless efforts to determine the fate of the sons, sweethearts, and husbands of women on the peninsula, for example, the article noted: “A woman, weak like them, timid like them, had had to accomplish properly masculine daring and tasks!” (rpt. in Burgos, “En la guerra” 218). Rather than emphasize her “masculine” ambitions and accomplishments, however, Burgos’s strategy had been to gain privileged access to the front via a more “properly” feminine activity: as a representative of the Women’s Commission of the Red Cross. Here it is instructive to compare her tactic with that of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, who, it will be recalled, chose to enhance his status as journalist in the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60 by enlisting as a soldier as well. Before her arrival in Melilla, Burgos pens a number of articles first from Málaga and then from Almería, where she describes the profound dedication of the women who prepare to care for the war wounded, hoping to imitate the gesture of their French counterparts, who had tended to soldiers in the recent conflict in Casablanca. However, Burgos indicates that General Marina has repeatedly discouraged the Red Cross women, who have now decided to appeal to his wife to arrange space for them to set up a hospital in Melilla. Burgos insists on the unique qualities that women bring to the war front, assuring soldiers’ family members that they “invest their care with that tenderness, that caress, that soothing calm of a mother’s love, which is the most beautiful gesture of Spanish women” (“Servicios de la Cruz Roja” [Red Cross Services]). Indeed, the Red Cross women desire to provide soldiers with “that extension of the home that the feminine soul always carries with her” (“Hablando con la marquesa de Polavieja” [Talking with the Marchioness of Polavieja]). Burgos’s novella continues to emphasize the special contributions of women at the front. One of the characters criticizes Spaniards’ resistance to a phenomenon that the French in Casablanca had seen as quite natural, noting, “Decidedly, we are still not Europeanized” (169). “En la guerra” includes a moving figure described as well in one of the Heraldo articles

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(“Almas femeninas” [Feminine Souls]): a “cantinera,” or female water bearer, who kisses the forehead of a dead bugle boy in place of the mother who is unable to do so (202). For her part, Alina is overwhelmed with motherly feelings for the soldiers, as she “felt her womb open up in a maternal love for all of them” (170, 192). Although Burgos would become one of Spain’s most impassioned advocates of Spanish women’s rights to educational, professional, and personal fulfillment, in her early writings in particular she is concerned that they not “masculinize” themselves either, preferring not to stray from traditional notions concerning their maternal destiny (Establier Pérez 23–30)—a perspective that is quite apparent from the Rif war narratives. As a female journalist, Burgos enjoys one distinct advantage over her male colleagues: the ability to meet with Moroccan women and describe them to her readers. Gabriela Pozzi has noted that in several of her missives from the front Burgos writes somewhat sympathetically, albeit not wholly free from condescension, of the native women she meets (192–93). For example, when she and her sister venture into a poor community (“En el dchar” [In the Encampment]), the women gather in one of the tents to greet the visitors, caressing their faces and clothing with tender and respectful curiosity. Later Burgos is invited into the home of a wealthy Moroccan, where she is surprised to see that his plump and stunning wife has blond hair and white skin; the husband then informs her that female slaves work so that wives might remain beautiful (“El té de las cinco” [Five O’Clock Tea]). In her article, after reproducing the comment, Burgos condemns Moroccan men for their lazy dependence upon the labor of women, whose suffering is signaled by their prematurely aged and deformed bodies. Burgos thus contributes to common Spanish colonialist representations of Moroccan women as in need of salvation from their own cruel menfolk. In this sense, the perspective she offers harmonizes well with that of her editor, José Rocamora, who was also at the front, even though her descriptions attenuate the Orientalizing gaze he casts (or imagines casting) upon the “splendid beauties” of the region. In his article entitled “El amor y la guerra” (Love and War), for example, Rocamora reproduces a conversation with Maimón Mojatar, one of Spain’s most valuable native allies in the war, who brags of having captured four Moroccan maidens in a recent raid. Mojatar laments the fact that General Marina compelled him to free the young women before he could enjoy their company, protesting, “I didn’t wish to make them slaves. The captivity I planned to subject them to wouldn’t last very long. I only desired to have them in my hands until the next day.” Not without irony, Rocamora follows this conversation with the comments of another important “moro amigo” (friendly Moor), El Asmani, which are evocative of Africanist discourse, thus reflecting the mul-

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tiple layers of mimicry produced within the colonial context: “We are the same as Spaniards, identical blood swells our veins. The grandchildren resemble the father of their progenitor.” Rocamora dryly remarks that El Asmani appears to have forgotten that the ancestors of Spaniards and Moroccans were also characterized by chivalry; it is a virtue that the Spanish officers and soldiers, by contrast, continue to display, as they protect the dignity of the native women in the war zone. Burgos’s opinion of these women, however, appears to shift dramatically over the course of her stay in Morocco. Her article “Una mora del harén del Roghí” (A Moorish Woman from El Rogui’s Harem, published on September 27, 1909) describes an “odalisque” who is forced to take on a position as a maid for a Spanish woman in Melilla after her master, the Riffian rebel leader El Rogui, dissolves his harem and abandons the region for the French zone. Burgos describes the former concubine as “primitive, semisavage,” with “a little beast’s eyes,” which are completely empty of affect. The author follows her denigration of this one particularly unfortunate woman with a much more sweeping generalization concerning the difference between Moroccan and Spanish women in her October 2 article, “Almas femeninas” (Feminine Souls). Here Burgos focuses on the warrior-like tendencies of the Riffian women who fight alongside their men. Citing the famous example of the Peninsular War, Burgos reminds her readers that Spanish women have also been capable of armed action. But for Burgos, there is one crucial distinction: paradoxical though it might seem, Spanish women only fight out of love, in order to protect cherished family members, while Moroccan women fight out of pure hatred. In the novella the gentle creatures of the earlier newspaper pieces disappear, and the narrator pointedly redefines the race of her subjects, insisting that “all of the Moorish women were ugly, deformed, black” (211). Pozzi has explained how in the novella the Heraldo articles’ descriptions are altered to present the native women in a more negative light, citing the example of the poor residents of the dchar, who to Burgos’s surprise wear black cotton wigs. Originally the author claims that, like women everywhere, the Moroccans hide their natural beauty—in this case, their jet curls—believing that supplementary adornments will augment their attractiveness. In the novella, by contrast, the narrator observes that the women must wear the wigs to cover over their bald and lice-ridden scalps (Pozzi 193–94). Assertions drawn from “Almas femeninas” dominate in the novella, as the narrator highlights the affinity for war of the Riffian women, who accompany their men to the front: “They ferociously encouraged them to kill and they even helped them, satiating their religious hatred. [. . .] They didn’t go to fight out of love for their own, but rather out of ferocity, out of hatred for the enemy. The legends of

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their passion were as false as those of their beauty” (210). Most damning, when they find themselves under enemy fire at home, the women rush to save their farm animals before concerning themselves with their children, who often perish as their mothers shamelessly seek refuge among the Spaniards (210–11). This is certainly one of the most disturbing passages of “En la guerra,” for despite her moralistic stance the narrator appears oblivious to the decidedly “unchivalrous” inhumanity of the Spaniards, who mercilessly bomb villages full of women— “barbaric” though they might be—children, and the elderly. Historian Sebastian Balfour has noted that the Spanish government was particularly concerned with censoring news of the troops’ cruelty toward the native population during this campaign (Deadly 24–25), so it is especially curious that Burgos chooses to reveal these less palatable details in her novella, even as she attempts to condemn the Moroccan women who suffer the brutal consequences of Spain’s military incursion. Why, then, does Burgos’s perspective on Moroccan women change so radically, when she herself makes clear that they are the victims of Spanish as well as Moroccan men? The answer might have to do with the timing of revelations concerning the Barranco del Lobo disaster, another of the episodes of the war that had been subject to strict censorship. Those at the front were well aware that the Spaniards had suffered a crushing defeat, born of ignorance and inexperience, on July 27, 1909, but journalists were not allowed to share that information with the Spanish public. Moreover, key details were also painfully slow in coming, because General Marina prudently awaited the arrival of reinforcements before attempting another advance, and Spanish troops did not make it back to the original battle site until two months later, toward the end of September (Balfour, Deadly 22–25). The troops were horrified by what they discovered, for the dead soldiers’ bodies had been extensively mutilated. In her Heraldo articles, Burgos was prohibited from publishing this information, but it is tempting to attribute the altered tone of a piece such as “Almas femeninas”—which must have been written after the discovery of the mutilations—to the author’s desire to transmit to her readers a new perspective on Moroccan “barbarism.” Here it is important to note that another of the most remarkable differences between the content of Burgos’s Heraldo articles and the novella is in fact the detailed reference to the mutilations: “They all showed barbaric mutilations: the heads crushed by stones, the temples run through with sticks; the eyes dug out with daggers, the bodies, opened up, filled with rocks and the arms and legs cut off. Not satisfied with all this, the cadavers looked burned” (214). This is not, however, the first time in this text that Burgos refers to the savage treatment of Spanish soldiers. In her earlier discussion of the contributions of the Riffian women to the war, she

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had noted that in their furor “they beat the exhausted and dying soldiers with wooden clubs studded with steel nails” (210). By initially attributing such behavior to Moroccan women, Burgos encourages her readers to recall them when she describes the Barranco del Lobo mutilations. “En la guerra” is thus as shocking for its more general exposure of the brutality of the war as for its “unveiling” of the ferocity of North African women in particular.³ Pozzi insightfully highlights the ultimate ambivalence of Burgos’s juxtaposition of Spanish to Moroccan women. Although Alina is associated with a nurturing maternalism throughout the text, as her feelings for Luis move away from the realm of the motherly toward a more forbidden form of love—adultery—she finds herself increasingly drawn to the Spaniards’ bellicose discourse. Because Alina comes to experience the hatred of the other that Burgos associates exclusively with Moroccan women in her article “Almas femeninas,” her character development belies the neat opposing of women on either side of the strait. As Pozzi argues, both groups “partake of the savage state that underlies hatred, which allows Moroccan women to venture into the battlefield and mutilate wounded Spanish soldiers. The differences remain, but both are subject to the same ‘atavismos’” (196). In Burgos’s texts, the anxiety over women’s capacity for “unfeminine” warmongering and military engagement is also accompanied by questions concerning the virility of the men at the front. Not surprisingly, in the novella the masculinity of the native men in particular is viewed as compromised. While there is a fleeting Orientalist-style reference to the elderly Jewish men whose features recall biblical patriarchs (173), Moroccan Jews are more extensively represented through the characterization of David, the “boy” who accompanies Alina as she travels about Melilla. The description of David is related to the more generalized European stereotype of Jews at the time as lacking in masculinity (Mosse, Nationalism 143–45). He is abjectly solicitous of Alina’s every need, trailing behind her when they walk through the streets, always at the ready with a fan, handkerchief, or parasol, just like a “faithful dog” (199). Other Jewish “boys” provide companionship to the foreign men who are covering or participating in the war. In the very first pages of “En la guerra,” the narrator introduces us to a Swiss journalist “of feminine tastes” (166), who will later complain mournfully to Alina of the fickleness of his intimate friend, a “little Hebrew [. . .] who abandoned him to go for amusement with the Moors” (196–97). As Joseph Boone has explained, in the first several decades of the twentieth century, the French and Spanish protectorates in Morocco superseded Algeria as a preferred destination for gay sex tourism, and those travelers who sought out younger men (whether they were truly “boys” or not) found favor among the impoverished

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“Riffian lads” who struggled to survive in the cities (62, 73, n. 14; see also Driessen 73). In Burgos’s novella, the Swiss are not the only ones drawn to this form of tourism. Her narrator also introduces us to a Spanish aristocrat, the Marquis of San Mario, whose decadent tastes and degenerate body are symbolized through his nasal voice and the limp he attributes not to a war wound but to a shot of morphine; he is derided by the other military officers “who were familiar with the marquis’s character” (169). The marquis’s susceptibilities are further highlighted when he later allows himself to be “seduced” by the apparent sweetness of a Riffian prisoner of war who professes love for Spain (194). This episode also functions to call into question the legendary virility of the Berber warriors, whose aptitude for performance is at odds with the authenticity that, according to cultural theorist George Mosse, was demanded of “real men” by contemporaneous European nationalist movements (Mosse, Nationalism 32, 153). Alina is sorely disappointed when she meets the prisoner, the first Riffian that she has had occasion to view at close range: “The appearance of the [man from the Kebdana tribe] thwarted all her expectations. He had a sweet, friendly face, with light-colored, ingenuous and honorable eyes, and a mouth which closed with a mystical fold” (194). Unlike the marquis, Alina recognizes that the man’s gentle aspect is but a ruse designed to curry favor with the enemy. Despite his underlying ferociousness, however, the man’s capacity for performing a more “feminine” demeanor undermines his virility. The narrator is also disquieted by the Riffians’ over-the-top representation of submissiveness when they surrender to the Spaniards: “They came to humble themselves at the feet of the generals with a duplicity that clashed with their legendary spirit. After the sacrifice of turning in their weapons, they prostrated themselves on the ground and kissed the horses’ hooves. It was reminiscent of the American Indians’ submission before the conquerors, in the era of our power and greatness” (204). “Overacted” though it may be, the spectacle of the capitulation of native men facilitates the exaltation of their colonizers, and Burgos hints at the possibility that Spanish men might recuperate their “power and greatness”—which elsewhere in the novella she characterizes as “remote” (167)—through the African imperial project. At the same time, the blurring of boundaries between native and metropolitan men which now characterizes the modern “civilizing mission” clearly troubles Burgos’s narrator, who describes the indigenous policemen (modeled after their French colonial equivalents) as possessed of “stupid eyes and solemn, deliberate, movements, as their black heels appear through the dirty drapery of their clothing, with a rifle on their shoulder and wearing an armband with the Spanish colors” (175). Significantly, Burgos ridicules the Moroccans who mistakenly feminize the Spanish word for “rifle” (“fusil”), which is masculine.

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Here it is the radically uncultured and impoverished condition of the Moroccan men, rather than their “feminine” duplicity, that diminishes their masculinity, rendering them unworthy of bearing Spanish insignia. In an Heraldo article (“El té de las cinco”) Burgos warns her readers that in person the “moritos” (and here her use of the diminutive is also significant) fall far short of their reputation— “The legend of their glories and the promise of their future are equally far off ” (198–99 in Al balcón reprint)—and she chides the Spanish women who have sent them expressive love letters. Evoking again the “dirty heels” of the native men, the author insists that she will always prefer the humblest Spanish soldier over the most elegant of Moors. Even so, the Spanish soldiers Burgos praises in her writings are not necessarily icons of virility. The repeated emphasis on the maternal sentiments that Spanish women direct toward them tends to infantilize the soldiers. Moreover, in her journalism as well as in her fiction, Burgos also exposes the gendered resonance of the military hierarchy that is deemed so essential to the successful prosecution of war. The passage in question first appears in an Heraldo article (“Recorriendo las tiendas” [Traversing the Tents]), where it is attributed to Burgos’s friend, the military officer, well-known writer and member of the Academy of History, Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo Burguete, much of whose career was spent in Morocco (G. Jensen, Irrational 31, 58): “The collective soul—Burguete tells me—is always feminine, even though it is made up of men; for that reason, in war, it is necessary for the leaders to know how to love the troops, to seduce them and dignify them, as with a woman one loves” (189–90 in Al balcón reprint). Burguete’s comment certainly resonates with the literary and political elites’ feminization of the masses, which had emerged in the nineteenth century and intensified during these years, reflecting the influence of Nietzsche and anticipating fascist ideology. Historian Geoffrey Jensen has detailed how Burguete’s conceptualization of the regenerative power of war presupposes overlapping hierarchies of class and gender, calling for a “new aristocracy” of virile, militarized leaders to undertake revitalization of the nation (Irrational 37, 45, 54). Burguete’s characterization also exemplifies the homoerotic charge subtending many European officers’ conceptualizations of military relationships and power structures during this period, as leaders actively sought to “win the hearts” of their men, in the words of George Mosse (Nationalism 126–27). When she incorporates Burguete’s statement into her novella, however, Burgos works ever so subtly to attenuate the homoeroticism, adding the masculinizing noun “valor” and eliminating the verb “seduce,” which, it will be recalled, she reserves to refer to the marquis’s reaction to the “sweet” Riffian prisoner: “The always feminine soul of the multitude, even when it is formed by men, inclined them to respect

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the leaders that knew how to love them, to dazzle them with their valor, dignifying them as one dignifies the woman who is loved” (191). Even so, Burgos’s modifications hardly alter the passage’s destabilization of more traditional notions of military virility. Burgos’s Rif war texts are remarkable for the ways in which they synthesize the key anxieties of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity imbricated in the Spanish colonial project in Africa at the beginning of the century. Moreover, a number of her preoccupations would also prove to be prescient. Her obvious discomfort with the assimilation of Moroccan men into the armed forces would be born out by the case of Mohammed Abd-el-Krim, who had been educated in Spanish schools in Melilla and was a newspaper editor, serving also as an interpreter and Arabic instructor as well as a judge for Spain’s colonial forces. It was Abd-el-Krim who led the spectacular revolt which would culminate in the “Disaster” that was foreshadowed by the Barranco del Lobo episode: the 1921 Annual massacre, in which nearly ten thousand Spaniards perished, and in which many of the Moroccan soldiers in Spain’s Army of Africa defected to join their compatriots (Balfour, Deadly 47, 62–64, 75). Burgos had included graphic descriptions of mutilated soldiers in the Barranco del Lobo in her novella, circumventing censorship in an effort to influence public opinion. Similarly, after Annual literary texts and even picture postcards depicting the desecrated bodies of Spanish soldiers (in which Riffian women were again implicated [Pando 165]) escaped control of the censors and once more had a profound effect on public opinion (Almuiña Fernández 404, 413–14; Martín Corrales 130–33). It is also tempting to compare Burgos’s description of Moroccan women blithely abandoning their children when their villages are bombed to the wrenching stories of Spanish officers tearing off their insignia and fleeing Annual, leaving their soldiers behind to be massacred by the enemy. While in 1909 Burgos is horrified by the unfeminine behavior of Moroccan mothers, the Spanish public of the 1920s could not help but be disgusted by the unmanly comportment of their own military leaders. DEGENERATE MASCULINITIES

Burgos was writing at a time in which the preoccupation over degenerate masculinity was continuing to build. Although, as I argue throughout this book, notable precedents had begun to appear several decades earlier, many of the historians and cultural theorists who have focused on discourses of degeneration in Spain presume that they were provoked by the “Disaster” of 1898, an event that does subtend Burgos’s novella, since Luis and Gonzalo first meet fighting

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together in the Spanish-American War. In a lengthy article on the impact of 1898 the historian José Álvarez Junco sketches out the crucial conjunction of discourses that converged with Spain’s crushing loss in the war and produced a profound sense of national decline among Spain’s lettered classes. Álvarez Junco asserts that from the late nineteenth century on, the “national problem” was posed in racial terms (“Nación” 455). While other European nations had rushed to demonstrate their racial superiority by colonizing Africa and the Far East, Spaniards were forced to negotiate their own position within hierarchies of race: “Doubt was raised about whether [Spaniards] really belonged to superior or inferior races, whether Africa began in the Pyrenees or not, whether the ‘oriental’ component of Spanish blood hadn’t irreparably hindered our ability to operate in the modern world and belong to the club of the dominators” (“Nación” 456). While traditionally Spanish elites had sought to blame their presumed decadence—if they acknowledged it at all—on pernicious foreign influences, by the end of the century many intellectuals in Spain had come to believe that their nation’s fall into decline had to be attributable to some essential characteristic of Spaniards (“Nación” 454–55). Despite his recognition of the crucial role played by racial theories, however, because Álvarez Junco links the origins of Spaniards’ preoccupation with race to 1898, he misses the importance of earlier formulations of degeneration. He makes no mention, for example, of Bénédict Augustine Morel’s Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species, 1857), which, as Jo Labanyi has shown, had a notable impact on a broad range of cultural discourses in Spain from the 1860s on (Labanyi, Gender 78–80, 315, n. 17; see also Martin-Márquez, “Anatomy” 211–12). He also only refers in passing to Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau, who attributed the degeneration of Europeans specifically to their history of mixing with “inferior” races in his 1853–55 Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, or to the criminal anthropology put forward by the Italian theorist Cesare Lombroso, who believed that European social degenerates were racially different and akin to the “savages” of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. By the end of the century, Lombroso’s works provided a particularly apt model for those who were concerned with Spanish degeneration, for he argued that it was the racial inheritance of the “Berber and Semitic tribes” who came to occupy the South of Italy that led to the greater criminality of that region (qtd. in M. Gibson 103). Álvarez Junco prefers to trace the widespread influence in Spain of a disciple of Lombroso, the Austrian Max Nordau, whose 1892 work Entartung (Degeneration) quickly began to circulate on the peninsula in French translation (L. Davis 308). Mary Gibson has argued of Lombroso

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and his followers that they “constructed a sliding scale, with heredity at one end and environment at the other: Africans and other ‘savages’ were placed near the pole of heredity, while Jews, and, after the rise of a threatening Germany, Aryans were placed near the pole of environment” (114). Both Lombroso and Nordau were Jewish, but while the former clearly was more interested in the heredity end of the scale, the latter preferred to emphasize environment.⁴ Nordau attributed the enervation of European races to the increasingly vertiginous pace of modern life, which led to a fatigue that burrowed its way into the very cellular composition of those who were affected (Pick 24). The fin de siècle was threatening to bring about the fin de race, and Nordau excoriated in particular the decadent literature that he viewed as both a product and producer of social pathologies (Presner 277–78). It might be argued that by turning to Nordau during this period, a number of Spanish intellectuals hoped to reframe the debate concerning their nation’s decline, shifting emphasis away from the contamination of “atavistic” races, emphasized by such writers as Gobineau and Lombroso, to the deleterious effects of modernity itself, thus drawing Spain into the European fold.⁵ However, when Nicolás Salmerón y García (son of the former prime minister) translated Degeneration into Spanish in 1902, he made clear in his introduction that Spanish degeneration was not, in fact, the product of advanced civilization but was instead the culmination of many centuries of “atrophy,” of a fanaticism that dragged Spaniards down to the level of beasts (qtd. in L. Davis 313). Even so, the consequences of Spanish degeneration with respect to gender were the same as those identified by Nordau and his predecessors: the emasculation of Spaniards, a phenomenon that was all the more threatening given the theoretical alliance of femininity with the primitive (Siegel 209, 213, 217). As Álvarez Junco notes, Salmerón underlines the lack of “manly airs” in Spanish literature, which he viewed as characterized by “the feminine note” (qtd. in Álvarez Junco, “Nación” 461). It is revealing that Carmen de Burgos, who welcomed Nordau into her literary salon, reportedly considered him “a virile, profound, daring writer” (Cansinos-Asséns 191)—the opposite of the effete figures that she satirized in her own work. Perhaps because of his focus on Nordau, Álvarez Junco does not tease out the implication of the racial questions he considers in the contemporaneous discourse on Spanish emasculation. Instead, he traces an oddly disjunctive genealogy for the preoccupation with masculinity, claiming that Francisco de Quevedo and other intellectuals of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who attributed the feminization of Spaniards to the importation of foreign luxury goods and vices, are the pertinent precursors (“Nación” 449, 460). Yet during the several decades prior to 1898, the construction of race and gender had become

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completely intertwined: degenerate races were deemed quite naturally to produce degenerate masculinities (Mosse, Nationalism 133–52). It is a phenomenon that perhaps may be found buried in the subtext of one of Álvarez Junco’s own brief asides. Noting that the lions that have flanked the entryway to Congress in Madrid were forged out of melted-down cannons confiscated from Moroccan soldiers in the war of 1859–60, the historian observes of Spain: “Incapable of conquering any arms other than Moroccan ones, in the same monument in which [the nation] exhibited its glories it was also expressing the poverty and limits of its power and ambitions” (“Nación” 448). The Spanish-Moroccan War had been marketed in part as a cleansing of the Iberian nation’s besmirched honor, and in this way the nation’s gendered code of honra (through which men affirm their masculinity by avenging affronts to—or by—their womenfolk) framed the campaign. Spanish writers such as Pedro Antonio de Alarcón sought to bolster the virility and vitality of the nation, exalting the heroism of Spanish soldiers. The strategy, as Israel Burshatin has shown, dates back at least to the Spanish national epic Poem of My Cid, in which the Almoravides are represented as “an already beaten yet prestigious foe” (121); the enemy Moors merit their inevitable defeat, but they must also be shown to be worthy opponents, manly in their own right. Álvarez Junco’s description of the monumental lions, however, implies that in the context of the late nineteenth century even the most resounding victory over the Moroccans—of questionable position on the scale of manliness—could not confirm the masculinity of Spaniards. Moreover, the historian’s observation that Spaniards preferred to commemorate their battles with Europeans, rather than with colonized peoples (“Nación” 447), also suggests that racial categorizations played a significant role in the construction of masculinity during this period. Indeed, while many of the traditional stereotypes circulating throughout Spain and the rest of Europe had cast North African men as fierce warriors, as early as the conflict of 1859–60 Spaniards themselves were beginning to alter that representation in accordance with the broader European discourse of racial degeneration. For example, the artist Marià Fortuny, who (as we saw in the previous chapter) had failed to structure his monumental Battle of Tetuán around the exposition of Spanish heroism, produced a number of iconoclastic paintings of Moroccan men as well. Notable, for example, are his vivid “Fantasias” (also known as “Powder Plays”), a Maghrebi tradition that the French painter Eugène Delacroix had converted into a commonplace subject for Orientalists. The Catalan artist’s renditions of this genre, which usually features horsemen kicking up dust as they show off their equestrian skills and shoot their rifles into the air or the ground, departs significantly from those of his forerunner. Delacroix’s Moroccans are located in the open countryside, and their activity, while

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16. Eugène Delacroix, Moroccans Conducting Military Exercises (Fantasia) (1832). Oil on canvas, 60 × 73 cm. Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

certainly showy, is threatening; it is clear that the popular spectacle is closely linked to the practice of warfare. This is apparent, for example, from the very title of his 1832 Moroccans Conducting Military Exercises (Fantasia), in which a group of horsemen appear to be charging an unseen enemy beyond the right edge of the canvas (fig. 16). Fortuny’s powder plays, by contrast, are confined to an urban scenario, and the riflemen are on foot rather than on horseback (see for example, the three paintings entitled Fantasía árabe dating from the 1860s, reproduced in González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 224, 234–35, 236). The men’s movements are constrained by the streets of the city, and are clearly divorced from the military context. Fortuny makes particularly effective use of his architectural backdrops, framing his subjects with doorways and other structural elements that are evocative of the proscenium arch. In the two works from 1866 and 1867 (fig. 17) the surrounding buildings also channel the sunlight onto the scene in order to produce the effect of a dramatically lit stage set. In these paintings, the masculinity of Maghrebian men is now depicted as a performance, rather

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17. Marià Fortuny, Arab Fantasy (1867). Oil on canvas, 52 × 67 cm. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

than an essence; it is the same idea that, as we have seen, appears in Carmen de Burgos’s Rif war narratives, and will also be played out in a number of other Spanish texts. Fortuny’s virtuoso 1874 portrait of an elderly Arab chief (fig. 18), seated under the full sun against a brilliantly whitewashed wall, also symbolizes the fall into decadence of the formerly virile men of North Africa. The man’s body betrays the cruel effects of age: his flesh is wrinkled and hangs a bit loosely about his nude torso, and his posture is somewhat hunched over. His face is gaunt, with pronounced cheekbones, his eyes are hooded and squinting, and his mouth is agape; he appears winded, for portions of his skin also gleam from a fine layer of perspiration. Even so, the powerful muscles that are still evident in his shoulders and arms, burnished by the sun, recall the vigor of his youth. Similarly, the deep aquamarine and cream-colored fabric that is draped across the figure’s lap must once have been a beautifully decorative textile, though now the weaving and the tassles are worn from many years of use. Fortuny’s most evocative gesture, however, is to portray this once-great warrior with a profusion of weapons in his

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18. Marià Fortuny, Arab Chief (1874). Oil on canvas, 122.9 × 79.1 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917. Photograph by Will Brown.

lap, where they function as an overdetermined substitute for the phallus.⁶ Two ebony pistols with silver and ivory inlay, a tooled silver-clad scabbard bearing two curved swords with jewel-encrusted golden handles, and an ornate silver dagger and scabbard make up the man’s impressive arsenal, yet the attention that the painter has devoted to representing the richness of their materials converts them into artistic rather than military objects. The chief grasps a pistol in one hand, signaling his desire to continue to engage in warfare, but it is not clear from his spent demeanor if he would still have the strength actually to wield it. While the traditional stereotype of North African men as indomitable warriors was called into question during this time, other centuries-old clichés were reaffirmed, solidifying the linkage to late nineteenth-century conceptualizations of degeneration. The association between Muslims and sexual “perversions” was

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certainly not uncommon during the medieval period, but, as Mary Elizabeth Perry explains, it gained particular currency during the sixteenth century, as the Moriscos were converted into a racialized minority. The attribution of sexual excess to Moriscos was tied to fears that the community was reproducing at an alarming rate. At the same time, bathing was deemed to lend a feminine “softness” to the bodies of male Moriscos, while a proclivity toward sodomy also led to threatening gender inversions, represented as well in the sartorial customs according to which men wore “skirts” and women, “trousers.” In their daily lives morisca women engaged in activities reserved for men in Christian society, and in the Alpujarras rebellion of 1568–70 they were reported to have engaged in battle, attacking the enemy with stones and roasting spits—much as Carmen de Burgos later claimed of Riffian women (Perry, “Politics” 39–41, 43–44). Similarly, sixteenth-century travel narratives, which are sometimes directly cited by nineteenth-century commentators on Moroccan men, also attributed sexual perversions and inversions to Muslims in North Africa. Indeed, the wildly popular works of the Spanish-born Leo Africanus and his successor Luis del Mármol Carvajal might be construed as, among other things, sex tourism guides.⁷ Both extol the unique hospitality offered to male travelers by effusively “friendly” African women, noting which towns include female inhabitants who are generally unchaste (Mármol, “Libro Quarto” folio 102, verso, folio 146, recto) or who offer themselves with pleasure to foreigners (Leo 116, 183), which towns are guarded by dangerously jealous men (Leo 139, 71; Mármol, “Libro Quarto” folio 83, recto, folio 145, verso), and which towns feature houses of prostitution (Leo 160, 312; Mármol, “Libro Quarto” folio 87, recto). By contrast, both Leo and Mármol hasten to condemn the scandalous transvestite hotels found in Fez, which are run by close-shaven innkeepers dressed in women’s clothing, who speak in falsetto, enjoy weaving, and take on male lovers, with whom they behave “as wives with husbands” (Leo 144). Mármol’s critique is even harsher than Leo’s, and extends beyond the inns to the public baths as well, which he suggests are the scene of many such “enormous sins against nature” (“Libro Quarto,” folio 86, verso). Furthermore, Mármol asserts that the cross-dressed innkeepers must accompany the royal army every time it heads out to war, in order to cook for and otherwise attend to the soldiers, and Leo also supports the same claim, noting of the innkeepers that “the sultans make use of them for the army’s needs” (Mármol, “Libro Quarto” folio 87, recto; Leo 144).⁸ Leo and Mármol’s condemnations of sodomy were hardly unusual for normative Christian discourse of the era, which as Perry has argued worked to denigrate and distance the Islamic other. It is difficult to gauge, however, to what extent the claims they make as travelers are based upon an observed (or directly

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experienced) reality. Theorist Bruce Dunne recognizes the danger of relying on European sources to document Middle Eastern sexual practices, but he also warns that the categorical rejection of those sources as ideologically biased and thus false is equally problematic; as Dunne insists, “Homosexual practices in the Middle East cannot, any more than the segregation or veiling of women, be dismissed as being peculiar to a ‘sexual exoticism’ long attributed to the ‘Orient’” (“Homosexuality” 77). In his provocative book The Geography of Perversion, Dutch scholar Rudi Bleys also attempts to negotiate the treacherous terrain between imperialist representations penned by conquerors, missionaries, scientific explorers, and other Western travelers, on the one hand, and the male-to-male sexual practices they claim to have observed, on the other. Bleys demonstrates that, regardless of their biases, such representations have undeniably come to shape post-Enlightenment constructions of gender and sexuality in Europe (8, 10). In the case of Mármol, then, it might be argued that, whether or not, for example, the Moroccan army as an institution sanctioned homosexual practices in certain historical periods—as indeed some contemporary specialists in North African sexuality have affirmed (see for example Dunne, “Power”; Dunne, “Homosexuality”)—Mármol’s representations of such practices have without question inflected more modern accounts by Spaniards of Moroccan, and by extension Spanish, homosexuality. As Jarrod Hayes has argued, Western writers often assume that every aspect of Muslim culture, including sexuality, is static and unchanging (4–5). It is not surprising, then, that Mármol’s sixteenth-century preoccupation with the “enormous sins against nature” presumably committed by Moroccan citizens and soldiers returns at the end of the nineteenth century, precisely when military campaigns in North Africa brought Spanish soldiers and other officials into close—and perhaps sometimes intimate—contact with their Moroccan counterparts. It is also significant that this resurgence of interest in Muslim sexuality in Spain coincides precisely with an explosion of discourses concerning homosexuality and other “perversions” in Western society. Although those discourses may not have brought about the discovery of the “new species” of the homosexual, as Michel Foucault has polemically argued, they do certainly attest to a notable increase in tensions, and usher in a period that, according to Eve Sedgwick, is characterized by the coexistence of diverse models in which the relationship between homosexuality and gender roles is figured in a variety of ways (Epistemology 44–48). A number of Spaniards, for example, recirculate even as they revise centuries-old ideas concerning gender and sexuality as a result of their experiences as conscripts in or even advisers to the Moroccan army in between the periods of warfare in 1859–60 and 1893 (Gatell 60). Such was the case of Joaquín

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Gatell, who insinuated his way into the sultan’s forces in the early 1860s. Gatell’s recounting of his experiences supplements Mármol’s “homosexual panic” with a greater sensitivity to the performative; his self-positioning vis-à-vis North African masculinity and sexuality is accompanied by an obsession with theatricality. Gatell pretended to be an artillery expert, and once he was incorporated into the Moroccan army as an instructor, he adopted the name El Kaid Ismail, dressed in an Algerian military uniform, shaved his head, and donned a turban. Gatell evidently delighted in “going native,” and in his Traveler’s and Explorer’s Handbook to Africa he recommends that other European travelers master the art of passing and become artful liars in order to “seduce” the local population (a verb he uses on several occasions: 131, 132). However, Gatell often berates the Moroccans for their own partiality to role-playing (for example, 64–66), and his descriptions of “sinful” sexual practices again highlight their theatrical nature. Gatell, like so many before him, condemns the Moroccan proclivity to sodomy (83), asserting, “I don’t believe there is a single vice on the face of this earth that is not widely found among Moroccans [. . .] they passionately love women (the authentic ones, and those who only appear to be so) [. . .] around here only lies and fictions rule” (68). Within the army, boys are also passionately loved: the three thousand men of the infantry are served by three hundred to four hundred male adolescents (aged twelve to fifteen), who “live, in a word, the same sort of life as do European courtesans” (23). Although each is provided with a rifle and a horse, the military props are just for show, as the boys are too small to load the weapons or reach the stirrups (23). For his part, the medical doctor Felipe Olivo y Canales, whose 1886 book on the plight of Moroccan women draws explicitly on both Mármol and Gatell, as well as on his own experiences as an employee of the Moroccan Medical Advisory Council, also chooses to emphasize the theatrical nature of Moroccan masculinity and homosexual practices. He characterizes the activities of the transvestite innkeepers described by Mármol as reenactments of “scenes” from the decline of the Roman Empire (37). Indeed, for Olivo y Canales such practices have continued to multiply into modern times, leading Moroccan men to bombard European doctors with “requests for medications that would fictitiously produce a vigor which continuous excesses and the most repugnant practices have caused prematurely to disappear; old, decrepit men surround themselves with innocent boys” (37; my emphasis). Proto-Viagra substances would enable elderly Moroccan men to stage performances of virility, and bring innocent boys to ruin. Olivo y Canales repeats Gatell’s assertion that hundreds of such boys routinely accompanied the Moroccan infantry, whose officers delighted in surrounding themselves with five or six handsome “little friends” (38).

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By the first decades of the twentieth century, although the obsessive fascination with North African virility and sexuality remains in full force, official Spanish government documents seem to avoid all references to “traditional” Moroccan homosexual practices, particularly within the military context. I would argue that this is directly related to the shifting nature of the relationship between Spanish and Moroccan military and political forces.⁹ For many decades the skirmishes with Morocco over the enclaves tended to facilitate the representation of the two nations as diametrically opposed enemies. Once the protectorate was established in 1912, however, Spanish forces were said to be working in tandem with the Makhzen, or centralized government of the sultan, as well as with the local leader (khalifa) and his men to achieve pacification of the rebel Riffians and further modern nation-building. The process initially appeared to demand a methodical combination of diplomacy and limited military action, and native police officers and civil representatives were recruited to convince tribes in the region to ally themselves with Spain and the Makhzen and against rebel leaders such as El Raisuni. When necessary, native soldiers were also employed to occupy or hold areas and disarm all but those deemed most loyal to Spain (Boyd 163–66). In their decision to rely upon native troops to bear the brunt of the military action, Spaniards had found a model among the French, but with one very crucial difference. Because of the extent of France’s territorial possessions, in their fight against Moroccan rebels in their own sector of the protectorate the French were able to supplement local troops with soldiers brought in from elsewhere in their empire (namely, West Africa). In this way they avoided the large-scale threat, always a concern for the Spaniards, that native soldiers might defect and join forces with their compatriots in the heat of combat (Balfour, Deadly 56–57). The Spanish practice, by contrast, potentially allowed for a greater blurring of boundaries between colonizer and colonized, as many Moroccan men were drawn into a collaboration with the Spanish forces. Moreover, although undoubtedly genuinely fierce battles took place, the Moroccans sometimes worked with the Spaniards to stage showy performances of masculinity: local leaders were bribed into simulating resistance to the colonizers, so that Spanish officers might demonstrate their “bravery”—and thus “earn” lucrative promotions—by heroically leading their native troops to victory against the indomitable rebels (Pando 82–84).¹⁰ Despite the effectiveness of such theatrical displays, other more “seductive” forms of performance were officially discouraged. The Delegation of Indigenous Affairs, for example, specifically warned Spanish military and civilian agents in

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Morocco to “dress appropriately, and flee from the ‘theatricality’ of the imitation of the native with exotic costume” (qtd. in Franco Bahamonde, Papeles 17). Going native was evidently popular enough among Spaniards to provoke such censure, yet the delegation’s mandate appears to have had little effect. The memoirs of participants in the Rif campaigns make frequent reference to those officers who adopted Moroccan dress, lived with Moroccan women, and assimilated other North African cultural practices (see for example, Balfour, Deadly 161–63, 202; Cordón 98). Moreover, in the silent documentary films of the conflict that were produced and circulated in the 1920s, it is sometimes impossible to differentiate the white-robed Spanish military authorities from Moroccans, a fact that is even underlined in an intertitle of one film (La toma de Alhucemas [The Capture of Alhucemas, 1925]), which claims that only an even greater valor distinguishes the Spanish officers from the fearless indigenous warriors under their command.¹¹ There were also parallel efforts to keep the Moroccan troops distinct from the Spaniards. Despite the fact that new military formations would place the two groups in close proximity, cultural mestizaje was to be studiously avoided. In his award-winning book on the Regulares, the newly created indigenous fighting force, Captain Luis Berenguer pointedly explains the difference between conquest and protection, affirming that the Spanish protectorate in general, and Spanish military officials in particular, should respect local customs and ways of life—in part so that the Moroccans would not come to see themselves as equal to Europeans and deserving of independence from them (12).¹² Berenguer thus insists that uniforms provided to the Regulares conform to local modes of dress (99). Moreover, he staunchly supports the preservation of unique Moroccan military traditions, such as the elite black guards, or “Tropas Jalifianas,” whose members were originally composed of slaves brought to Morocco from sub-Saharan territories (114). Yet curiously this insistence on the maintenance of Moroccan custom disappears when Berenguer turns to a discussion of the marital status of indigenous soldiers (83). Here the Moroccan men are shoehorned into the simple binary—married or single—of European bourgeois domestic morality. Berenguer makes no reference whatsoever to Islamic marital practices involving polygamy and concubinage, issues that for economic reasons would probably not be pertinent for foot soldiers but might be so for the indigenous officers that Berenguer insists must form a part of the Regulares (95). It is perhaps less surprising that Berenguer also fails to mention the need to supply tentfuls of cross-dressed men or adolescent boys when discussing the provisioning of these troops. Notwithstanding the attempts of such official documents to regulate the behaviors of both Spanish and Moroccan members of the joint forces known as the

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Army of Africa, the plethora of published memoirs from both soldiers and officers involved in the colonialist wars during the first several decades of the twentieth century sometimes paint a “different” picture. George Mosse has noted that it is important to distinguish the “myth” of war from the “reality” of combat as it is experienced by the multitude of soldiers, whose perspectives are less likely to make their way into print (Nationalism 115). While in the case of the Rif conflict there is an abundance of material from a relatively wide range of sources, myth is not necessarily distinguishable from reality, as nationally inflected constructions of gender and sexuality are clearly at stake, both on and off the battlefield. Spain’s future dictator Francisco Franco himself produced a memoir of his experiences in the Rif, which was first published in 1922 and then re-edited on four occasions during his regime and after his death. Franco began his long and spectacularly successful military career in North Africa in 1912 as a second lieutenant, and soon requested a transfer into the Regulares. By 1920, however, as tensions in the Rif were increasing, Major Franco would be recruited by the founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, José Millán Astray, to serve as his second-in-command. Franco led a battalion of the legion, four-fifths of it made up of Spaniards and one-fifth of foreigners (Millán Astray 97), which complemented and often worked alongside the Regulares as a special shock assault corps. Franco’s Diario de una bandera (Diary of a Battalion/Flag) provides a chronological recounting of the first months of the legion’s activities in Morocco, including its defense of the city of Melilla after the catastrophe at Annual, and its subsequent campaign of revenge. A number of the cruder passages describing that campaign in the 1922 edition were excised in the second and third editions of 1939 and 1956, and Dionisio Viscarri has detailed the ways in which the text and its prologue were constantly revised to serve the political exigencies of the moment (Nacionalismo 75–85). In contrast to many other narratives of the colonial wars, Franco’s works to present a positive image of the legion, and for Viscarri his text is perhaps more intriguing for what it leaves out—the explicit references to cocaine use, rapes, prostitution, and the officers’ sadistic treatment of the soldiers found in other accounts—than for its blandly predictable emphasis on the camaraderie and heroism of the legionnaires (Nacionalismo 107–12). Even so, as Tatjana Pavlović argues, the dictator’s self-representations, effected through the Diario as well as through his public and private performances, were eminently contradictory, vacillating between a “masculine” propensity for cold violence and a “feminine” tendency toward hysterical weeping and blushing (24–26, 35). Viscarri views the Diario as reflecting Franco’s sexual puritanism, which he attributes not to any fervent devotion to Catholic values but rather to shame over the sexual exploits of his father (an alcoholic womanizer who aban-

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doned his mother) and his brother Ramón (who married a prostitute whom he met in Morocco), or to embarrassment over rumors that a colonial war injury had left him impotent (Nacionalismo 127–29, 154–55, n. 16, 162–63, n. 52). At the same time, as Viscarri notes, Franco’s later and insistent promotion of condom use for the prevention of venereal disease among military cadets suggests that Spain’s future leader was well aware of the powerful sexual urges of his men (Nacionalismo 128). Indeed, Franco’s Diario is at times characterized by a coy rhetoric of euphemistic allusions to sexual behaviors, which contradict the official propaganda concerning the legionnaires’ sublimation of their erotic energies into self-sacrifice for the Spanish nation, promoted through their well-known moniker, “the bridegrooms of death” (“los novios de la muerte”). Interwoven with a more heteronormative discourse of military imperialism, some of these allusions also suggest that homosexual practices were not completely foreign to the Spanish Foreign Legion. Moroccan sexuality and theatricality are linked when Franco describes how Moroccan women would feign disinterest in Christians to their male compatriots and flee like frightened birds when pursued by the “gallant” legionnaires. But, according to Franco, the more intrepid soldiers would not be deterred: “Some decisive ones court them and on many occasions the ancient olive trees of the sacred forest have been mute witnesses to the gallantry of the legion” (Franco Bahamonde, Papeles 71). What Franco terms “gallantry” is of course most likely a reference to the rape of native women, for which the Spanish Foreign Legion, along with other soldiers and officers of the Army of Africa, quickly became infamous (see, for example, Balfour, Deadly 210–11; Prieto 30–31). Franco’s rhetoric of gallantry disappears, however, when he refers to sexual activity in the less pastoral context of cities and military encampments. For example, during the period in which the nascent legion is being formed, those who have been chosen to join the ranks “bid farewell to the pleasures and attractions of city life in several days of orgy” (59). (Other sources specify that on the first such night four people were killed, including a prostitute [Preston, citing Arturo Barea, 28].) Franco suggests that these “urban pleasures” will be reexperienced when, once on their mission, the men approach another city. As the soldiers eagerly strain to catch sight of the white towers of Tetuán, for example, one Spanish official tells them of his earlier experiences while stationed in the region: “He lived in Tetuán where he has male friends and female friends, and his squadron will have a good time” (63). The pointedly gendered reference to “amigos y amigas” recalls Mármol’s earlier characterizations of North African “hospitality,” suggesting that a variety of sexual tastes will be satisfied. And indeed, several memoirs by soldiers who participated in the colonial wars, both inside and outside the legion, include even more explicit such references. Arturo

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Barea, for example, whose obligatory military service landed him in Morocco, describes his first visit to a brothel in Tetuán: the passageways to the bedrooms are lined with both female prostitutes and “fairies” (38), and the servants are homosexual as well (40; see also Nerín, La guerra 40–41). Various other sources indicate that within the military encampments and in the isolated outposts male-to-male sexual activities were not uncommon. Although the historian Sebastian Balfour notes that homosexual practices were so taboo that they were routinely silenced in Spanish memoirs—a claim that is perhaps belied by some of the texts studied here—he does note that Moroccan soldiers who fought alongside Spaniards in the Army of Africa described scenes of group masturbation and indicated that sexual relations among men occurred during prolonged periods of isolation at the front or in the blockades (Deadly 230). Such practices might be found within most wartime scenarios, of course, when men who would otherwise self-identify as heterosexual find themselves deprived of the company of women—or inspired by the company of men. Dennis Duffy has argued, in fact, that “any military unit maintaining high morale and professional standards inevitably involves homoerotic bonding between its members” (qtd. in Goldie 47). However, certain military cultures have promoted greater degrees of homosocial or even homosexual bonding in order to enhance apprenticeship, cement solidarity among soldiers, and produce a more effective fighting force (Ogden 107). I would suggest that such a tendency may have emerged to some degree during the colonial wars in the Rif, particularly within the legion, and most likely in tense coexistence with a more “properly” fascist mobilization of homosociality, as I discuss below.¹³ During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of European writers had drawn attention to the ancient Greek paradigm, considered to be characteristic of a more widespread “Mediterranean model,” in which lovers fought side by side, striving to impress each other with their valor; less experienced soldiers were tutored in the martial and amatory arts on and off the battlefield by their superiors. The Mediterranean model suggested that homosexuality was not in the least at odds with virility (Mosse, Nationalism 41). Similar practices were found among the Samurai of Japan (Watanabe and Iwata), and indeed Millán Astray claimed to have founded his Spanish Foreign Legion upon Samurai principles (G. Jensen, Irrational 141; Togores 176). Although he nowhere explicitly promotes sexual relations among his men, Millán Astray does insist that they renounce all other personal relationships and swear absolute loyalty to the legion, which functions as a peculiar new form of religion (Millán Astray 23), as well as an equally peculiar new form of family (Millán Astray 20, 94–95, 130). “Fraternal” relations among the soldiers are everywhere exalted (Millán Astray

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23–25, 28, 113–16, etc.), and an official U.S. government complaint asserted that the men were literally tied together when they were sent into battle (qtd. in G. Jensen, Irrational 149). Such physical closeness was also cultivated off the battlefield. Millán Astray dedicates one chapter of his book on the Spanish Foreign Legion, entitled “The Legionnaire’s Gaiety,” to the forms of amusement in which his men indulge when not in training or on the battlefield: music-making, dancing (and here Millán Astray indicates that the tango is very popular in the barracks), and playing dress-up. Demonstrating great artistry and creativity, the men adorn themselves as exotic others—Indians, Chinese, Moors—and cross-dressing is evidently quite popular. At the end of this chapter, the eminently histrionic Millán Astray expresses his grief upon discovering that one of the legionnaires, whose seductive drag performance had won over many of the men and earned the legion a prize in a costume contest, had been gravely wounded in battle (35–39). While in his analysis of contemporaneous German “soldier males” (members of the Freikorps paramilitary units) Klaus Theweleit asserts that drag performances were strictly limited to a public stage and functioned as a “dam against any possible intrusion by sexuality” (II: 330), within the Rif war context those “dams,” if they were in fact conceived of as such, may not always have succeeded in holding back the flow of same-sex desire. For example, in Captain José Asenjo Alonso’s novelized account of his years in the legion, while the practice of crossdressing is also highlighted, one of the main protagonists, who has a manly face with a heavy beard, is characterized as “intersexed,” and openly prefers men to women (20–21).¹⁴ Within the North African context, this radically homosocial if not homosexual ethic is sometimes filtered through the aesthetic homoeroticism of Orientalism. Viscarri has noted the “Orientalized impressionism” of the uncredited illustrations that accompany the 1939 edition of Franco’s Diary of a Battalion, featuring “Legionnaires of angular face, notable musculature and evident virility” (Nacionalismo 78–79). These highly aestheticized and virile men are situated largely in homosocial spaces and depicted in homoerotically inflected poses. In a blockade scene, for example, one legionnaire embraces a fallen comrade as another lends a hand while maintaining a stance of masculine exhibitionism, propping a bared leg on an ammunition box (fig. 19). In another image, which corresponds to Millán Astray’s descriptions of the soldier’s leisure activities, a group of soldiers recline on cushions in a Moroccan-style interior, drinking, singing, and playing North African guitars (fig. 20).¹⁵ While the vaguely Orientalist illustrations accompanying the second edition of his text hint at a “refined” homoeroticism, Franco himself betrays disapproval of the “darker” side of such intimate ties when he notes that in the encampments

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19. Anonymous illustration. Francisco Franco, Marruecos: Diario de una bandera. Seville: Editorial Católica Española, 1939: 96. Widener Library, Harvard College Library.

legionnaires fraternize with Moroccans “beneath the drab canvas of the dark little Moorish cafés” (Franco Bahamonde, Papeles 67) (Moorish cafés tended to be associated with male prostitution, at least within the French sector of the protectorate [Dunne, “Homosexuality” 62]). Franco’s subsequent reliance upon a discourse of hygiene, employed since the mid-nineteenth century in Spain to refer to the legal and medical regulation of sexual behavior, suggests that this particular “fraternization” of Moroccans and legionnaires must be brought under control. A clean-up campaign will relegate the shadowy cafés to the “rear guard,” “and the esplanades and streets of the encampment shine beneath the sun. Cleanliness and policing is characteristic of legionnaires’ encampments” (67). Franco’s narrative attempts to remap the sexuality of his troops onto a more “normative” grid, in which relations between Spanish and Moroccan men in particular are carefully regulated. But this is evidently a “panicky” response to

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20. Anonymous illustration. Francisco Franco, Marruecos: Diario de una bandera. Seville: Editorial Católica Española, 1939: 43. Widener Library, Harvard College Library.

the behavior of any number of soldiers who may have eschewed the straight and narrow in their preference for going native, sexually speaking, that is, for “going queer.” Here it is important to note that what is at stake is not so much the threat of “inversion” itself but rather the threat of an inversion of the racialized topbottom logic—the “master-slave” paradigm—that may structure homosexual relationships in militarized colonial contexts.¹⁶ Franco’s own desire to exercise a steely discipline not infrequently spills over into the brutal repression of his men, a phenomenon which he elides in his own Diario but which is subjected to a rhetorical eroticization in the texts of others. Millán Astray, for example, insists in his book that legionnaires must learn to experience pleasure in submission to their superiors (Millán Astray 33–34). Some historians have hinted at the sadomasochistic dynamic implicit in the legion’s hierarchy: leaders revel in physi-

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cally abusing the men under their command, some of whom apparently view such treatment as part and parcel of the demand for absolute subordination. In Los caballeros de la Legión (The Gentlemen of the Legion, 1922), Carlos Micó includes an astonishing characterization of the relationship between officers and recruits in the legion as “a struggle between the subliminal powers of two forces that meet face to face: the leader, who incarnates in those moments the whole of military discipline and spirit and virile vigour and energy, and on the other hand, men who want, falteringly, to shake off from their shoulders the imponderable weight of the decadence of a race” (qtd. in Balfour, Deadly 175). The violently sexualized and racialized overtones of Micó’s statement harmonize perfectly with the customary metaphors of colonization, according to which a feminized colonial other gives herself up to (i.e., is raped by) the virile force of conquest (Spanish fascist writer Ernesto Giménez Caballero is but one of many to have placed this trope into circulation during this period [Labanyi, “Women”]). Similarly, in Micó’s description, the legion, composed of members of a “decadent”— and thus feminized—race, must itself be colonized before it may in turn serve as a colonizing force, and this process involves total submission, figured here as a homosexual rape that is in essence “asked for.” Reading T. E. Lawrence’s descriptions of his purported rape by Turkish captors, Joseph Boone draws upon Leo Bersani’s argument that according to phallocentric discourse, anal penetration produces an erasure of the boundaries of the self, “a shattering of the male ego that is tantamount to psychic death”—even as it may be accompanied by an intense desire for sexual surrender (Boone 60). I would suggest, then, that within the discursive context I have traced out here, it is possible to interpret the mythical phrase that was and continues to be intimately associated with the legionnaires—“the bridegrooms of death”—in a radically different way. While, as I mentioned above, the slogan is generally assumed to signal the soldier’s complete sublimation of sexual desire into heroic self-sacrifice for the nation, it perhaps functions to closet a dramatically different rechanneling of erotic energies, a dramatically different form of “death.”¹⁷ Regardless of how that “death” is read, however, it invariably signals the crucial role of masochistic—as well as sadistic—impulses in the construction of masculine identities during this period. SADOMASOCHISTIC VIRILITY, FROM ISAAC MUÑOZ TO LUYS SANTA MARINA

While going queer has not previously been a focus of discussion for historians and cultural theorists analyzing the Rif campaigns, another phenomenon that was also traditionally closeted in official accounts of the conflict has in fact be-

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come the subject of recent scholarly attention: the apparent relish with which some Spanish soldiers engaged in war atrocities. Although, as we have seen in the case of Carmen de Burgos, many Spanish primary sources preferred to underline the mutilations committed by Riffian men (and women), scholars such as María Rosa de Madariaga and Sebastian Balfour have recently insisted that Spaniards were just as likely as Moroccans to indulge in sadistic practices, including the severing of heads, noses, and ears, which were frequently collected as war trophies by legionnaires and worn as necklaces or spiked onto bayonets. Members of the legion even saw fit to express their gratitude to a duchess who had organized a nurses’ corps in the zone by sending her a basket of roses and decapitated Moroccan heads (Balfour, Deadly 212; Madariaga, Moros 104, 309). As is the case with male-to-male sexual practices, battlefield mutilations are not particularly unusual during times of war. But Madariaga, Balfour, and others have again remarked one crucial detail: during the Rif conflict, it was converted into a systematic and even ritualized practice, which was fully supported and encouraged by the Spanish officers themselves (Balfour, Deadly 41–42; G. Jensen, Irrational 146; Madariaga, Moros 80; Cordón 77; Nerín, La guerra 187). Mutilation also included castrations—of war dead as well as of live prisoners—and Madariaga has described the morbid “phallic cult” common among the different sectors of the Spanish military in Morocco, who constantly linked success in war to the possession of “a good pair of balls” (Moros 309).¹⁸ Balfour’s description of these practices suggests that it was the Spanish legionnaires who assimilated the highly theatrical war rituals of the Riffian soldiers: their battle cries, the dramatic flourish of their dust-raising cavalry runs, and their decapitations (Deadly 212). Yet in his famous series of speeches in Congress after the Annual disaster, the socialist journalist and politician Indalecio Prieto speaks instead of a significantly more ambivalent “contagion of barbarism,” condemning Spaniards’ pursuit of a “championship of barbarism and savagery” (34–35). Indeed, I would argue that in the context of the Moroccan theater of war, it is perhaps difficult to judge whose violently sexualized performances of virility are more “primordial.” Perhaps nowhere is the intersection of virility, violence, and (homo)eroticism more spectacularly staged than in the work of Orientalist novelist and Africanist essayist Isaac Muñoz. Muñoz was born in 1881 in Granada, a city whose Moorish heritage would have a tremendous impact on his life and career as a writer. As a university student, Muñoz traversed the streets of his hometown in Arabic garb, and became fast friends with the modernist and Orientalist poet Francisco Villaespesa. The two later boasted of the scandals they provoked with the orgies and “black masses” they claimed to have organized in Muñoz’s residence on the grounds of the Alhambra (Cansinos-Asséns 91–92). In 1905, Muñoz moved to

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Madrid, where he continued to hobnob with Villaespesa and other modernist notables, and by 1906 he was alternating between the capital city and Ceuta, where his father, an officer in the army, had been transferred (Correa Ramón 49–61). Muñoz’s modest boarding-house room in Madrid was decorated with Moroccan textiles and perfumed with incense and the aroma of mint tea. According to his friend Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, Muñoz spent the winter pining for all that he had left behind in Morocco, including the warm sun, a Jewish girlfriend, and an ephebe named Hamid, whose face was marked with a tattooed star. Claiming to be a descendant of the Nasrid princes of Granada, Muñoz adopted as his own Manuel Machado’s famous verses, “I am of the Moorish race, long-time friend of the Sun [. . .] I have the tuberose soul of a Spanish Arab” (Cansinos-Asséns 149–51). Cansinos-Asséns recalls as well Muñoz’s reference to the many “crimes” that he so artfully committed while in Morocco, a comment that leads to discussion of the mandate that writers immerse themselves in vice (Cansinos-Asséns 171). As with many of the texts considered in this chapter, it is difficult if not impossible to ascertain where “real life” ends and myth begins, particularly since Spanish literati of the early twentieth century were enamored of inventing fantastical pasts and personae for themselves. It is also problematic that, given the relative dearth of information regarding Muñoz, the memoirs of Cansinos-Asséns, a pronounced homophobe who nonetheless socialized with many gays in Madrid, must remain a principal source. For those reasons, it is not surprising that Amelina Correa Ramón “straightens out” Muñoz in her otherwise meticulously researched critical biography. Correa Ramón skims over the homoeroticism of his texts to focus on his female characterizations, associating the misogyny she finds there with the author’s contraction of syphilis (which she clearly assumes was transmitted heterosexually [179]), and carefully documenting the last years of his life, when he lived with a woman, Carmen Peracho, and fathered a son (128– 33). In his history of modern gay culture in Spain Alberto Mira initially appears to accept Correa Ramón’s assertion that for Muñoz homosexuality was strictly a “pose” (Correa Ramón 144, 200; Mira 65). Later in his text, however, when he again mentions Muñoz in passing, Mira arrives at a more satisfying understanding of Muñoz’s imaginary—of greater interest for my purposes here—if not his sexuality, which seems to have been significantly more diffuse. Seeking to explain the writer’s open revulsion for a flamboyantly gay writer who was frequently seen on the streets of Madrid, Mira notes: “He openly declares himself against Antonio de Hoyos and other aristocratic dandies, whom he considers effeminate, as opposed to his own homosexuality, which is supposedly of ‘a virile’ character. [. . .] The idea of a ‘virile’ homosexuality incarnated by the Greek

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warriors constituted a forceful response to nineteenth-century psychiatrists’ attempts to characterize the Uranist in terms of effeminacy” (120). Although Mira does not explicitly link the two, it might be argued that Muñoz’s valorization of a masculine-identified homosexuality anticipates the French writer André Gide’s equally exclusivist defense of homosexuality in Corydon (1924), a text which also draws upon the “Greek model” and which would have a significant impact in Spain, particularly after the release of several editions in Spanish translation beginning in 1929 (Mira 210–16). It is precisely this conceptualization of a presumably more “virile” and militarized homosexuality that, as I have been suggesting here, may have gained purchase within the context of Spain’s colonization of Morocco and circulated alongside other constructions of homosexual acts and identities.¹⁹ Between 1907 and 1915, when he became an official librarian on the government payroll, Muñoz appears to have resided largely in Morocco, learning Arabic, Hebrew, and Berber dialect, and adopting Maghrebi culture to an even greater degree than the later Juan Goytisolo, in the (perhaps somewhat hyperbolic) opinion of Andrée Bachoud (Correa Ramón 80–85, 106; Bachoud, “Isaac” 153). He achieved renown on the peninsula not simply for the colorful life he claimed to have led, however, but for the two apparently disparate series of texts he published with great frequency throughout the second decade of the century, and subsequently less regularly before his premature death from syphilis in 1925: violently erotic Orientalist novels, to which I shall turn in a moment, and journalistic articles on Spain’s colonialist mission in North Africa. The articles were often featured on the front pages of the prominent Spanish newspapers and magazines for which he wrote, including El Heraldo de Madrid—where Carmen de Burgos’s war correspondence had also been published—the Ilustración Española y Americana, El Nuevo Mundo, and La Esfera. Sometimes a photograph or portrait of the author in Arabic dress accompanied his texts (Correa Ramón 91, 99). Periodically, Muñoz also gathered his articles for republication in book form. Bachoud expresses surprise at the fact that prominent liberal politicians of the day, such as José Canalejas and the Count of Romanones, promoted the widespread circulation of Muñoz’s views on Spain’s endeavors in Morocco (“Isaac” 163). In his articles, Muñoz grounds his support for Spanish intervention in Morocco in the idea that Spain is not in fact European. Rather, the Iberian nation represents a “separate zone” (Agonía 181), whose identity is best understood in relationship to the African continent. Muñoz recirculates time-worn clichés concerning Moroccan decadence, but interestingly, he also draws upon degeneration theory to emphasize the “exhaustion” of the Spanish race. While many European writers of the era had followed Gobineau’s lead in

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attributing the supposed degeneration of Western races to miscegenation, Muñoz adopts the opposite perspective, more characteristic of conceptualizations of racial identities in Spain: the Spanish race has degenerated precisely because of the more recent lack of vital mixing that had characterized earlier moments in history (such as the time of al-Andalus and the conquest of the Americas [Agonía 85–86]). While the White Legend or Hispanotropicalist discourse circulated by Spaniards sometimes exalted a mestizaje that simply masked the project to “whiten” other races deemed to be inferior, however, Muñoz’s formulation is closer to that of Francisco Fernández y González, discussed in chapter 1. Spain’s colonization of Morocco will provide for a mutually beneficial injection of new blood into both the Spanish and the Moroccan races, which are already “kindred” (Agonía 57). As Muñoz asserts, “To colonize is to live, to ingest new and potent blood into the exhausted veins, to affirm and define a future existence” (Agonía 81). Muñoz also insists that colonization in Morocco will enable the Spanish nation to recuperate the virility of its essential Mediterranean identity—and turn away from the impotently immobile character of Castile (Agonía 86).²⁰ Muñoz, in short, discovers in Spain’s colonization of Morocco what Philip Holden and Richard J. Ruppel have termed “the revitalization of primitive gender energy” (xi). While Richard Cardwell argues that Muñoz’s articles and novels exhibit “distinct ideological and intellectual underpinning[s]” (315), I believe that in many ways they are essentially of one piece. Indeed, the “primitive gender energy” that is theorized in Muñoz’s Africanist essays is also incarnated by the characters of his novels. In fact, two noble Moroccan men who are described in his journalism, Hameido and El-Arbí (Agonía 98–99), are converted into the protagonist and the narrator, respectively, of his 1909 novel La fiesta de la sangre (Festival of Blood), which later reappeared in print in Paris under the title Un héroe del Magreb (A Hero from the Maghreb). Both men are descendents of al-Andalus and express nostalgia for their beloved but long-lost Granada and “the Golden Age of our race” (Fiesta 112, 19, 50). They are devoutly religious, potently virile, and obsessed with their honor, which they will preserve by any means necessary, including murder. Many pages of the novel exalt the thrill of warfare and of killing, which is described with sensual exuberance as a veritable “festival of blood,” as enemy bodies are eviscerated, decapitated, dismembered, and burned alive.²¹ The battlefield is a ritualized space, within which self-sacrifice may be enacted, but which also bestows a renewed potency and vitality. As El-Arbí exults, “The potency of my proud and arduous thoughts was exalted by the harsh earth, and out of that fervor of life I felt acutely anxious to open the imperious flow of my blood, and to fill the earth in a magnificent bloody ritual” (Fiesta 93). That

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potency, in turn, is reinvested into a wide range of erotic experiences. Lengthy passages describe El-Arbí’s violent sexual encounters with his favorite wife, which often follow upon extended periods of highly charged homoerotic exchanges. The pleasures of the bath are described in detail, as El-Arbí succumbs to the agile hands of the male slave massaging his nude body and expires in “a diaphanous death” (evocative, of course, of the “little death” of orgasm [Fiesta 46]). El-Arbí continually underlines the peculiarly feminine seductive traits of Hameido: his “beautiful feminine mouth” and “feminine smile,” “full of grace and seduction” (for example, Fiesta 118, 120, 31, 59), his soft and halting voice, “of an unspeakably feminine charm” (Fiesta 110), and his “long, pure hands, like a woman’s” (Fiesta 60). Yet Hameido’s hands are also “capable of all massacres, and of caressing all living things” (Fiesta 31); they are as practiced at killing as they are at seducing—men, women, and beasts. It is important to emphasize that Hameido’s “femininity” is not in the least at odds with his virility. Muñoz’s work attests to the complexity with which gendered identities and homosexual proclivities could be figured during this time in Spain, as Eve Sedgwick has asserted with respect to other contexts. La fiesta de la sangre also melds a “polymorphously perverse” eroticism (according to Freud’s classification; “Three” 191) with a horrifically violent ethos of self-sacrifice and murder. Muñoz’s Africanist essays and novels formed a part of the library of Franco’s close friend Tomás García Figueras, one of the most impassioned Africanists of this period, who occupied an important military post in Morocco (head of military intervention for the Western Region [Madariaga, Moros 359]), and whose own writings are discussed later in this chapter and in the next. Muñoz’s works were also in the circulating collection of the Spanish army’s lending library in Madrid (as documented in Gistau Ferrando 419). Thus it is not unreasonable to assume that these texts—together with the other ambiguously eroticized Orientalist works included in these private and public collections—would have been familiar to many Spanish Africanists, as well as to some percentage of the increasing numbers of literate soldiers who participated in the colonial wars in the Rif. Not all of those who subsequently found inspiration in Muñoz’s sadomasochistic and erotic representations, however, would have sympathized with his maurophilia. The cultural production of the 1920s reflects the rifts that were emerging between what Balfour has termed the “enlightened Africanists,” who were sincerely (if problematically) interested in Moroccans and their culture, and the more xenophobic of the militaristic Africanists, who were disdainful of the natives as well as of the Spanish officers who chose to identify with them (Balfour, Deadly 162–64). The Annual disaster, in which many Moroccan sol-

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diers in the Army of Africa turned on their Spanish “brothers,” also provoked a hardening of attitudes, as well as a desire for a quick end to the war, that enabled Spanish Africanists to support the use of mustard gas against the civilian population in the Rif (a previously suppressed fact, which has been extensively documented by Balfour, Deadly 123–56). Indeed, while I have emphasized the Africanists’ ambivalent fascination with a North African culture viewed as uniquely vital and virile, it is important to note that other Spanish observers of, or participants in, the colonial conflict preferred to embrace a cult of masculinity that sought the absolute annihilation of the enemy other. Such is the case with Luys Santa Marina’s notorious yet artfully written 1924 Tras el águila del César: Elegía del Tercio (1921–1922) (In Pursuit of Caesar’s Eagle: Elegy of the Tercio [1921– 1922]). The author himself boasted that he was condemned to death by the Republicans during the Civil War—a sentence he eventually managed to escape— “for this book [deemed] sadistic, bloodthirsty, and the like” (Santa Marina 12). As Dionisio Viscarri has detailed, much controversy surrounds the authenticity of the fictionalized legionnaire’s memoir. Although many critics have presumed that it must have been based upon Santa Marina’s firsthand experience of fighting in the Spanish Foreign Legion after Annual—a presumption that the author himself never sought to correct during his lifetime—since as early as the 1940s some began to cast doubt upon his participation in the war in the Rif. Although it is clear that by 1925 Santa Marina had moved to Catalonia, where he became a Falangist leader, there is scant information concerning his activities earlier in the 1920s, and his name does not appear on official lists of soldiers and legionnaires fighting in the war. Shortly before his death in 1980, Santa Marina’s wife insisted that he had never enlisted in the legion (Viscarri, Nacionalismo 252–54). Ultimately more interesting than the “truth value” of Santa Marina’s text, however, is the author’s interventionist engagement with the Spanish Africanist narrative tradition and, by extension, with racialized constructions of gender and sexual identities. While acknowledging the seductive pull of the Andalusi legacy, if only inadvertently, Tras el águila works systematically to purge Spanish colonialist texts of their Orientalist inclinations. This is perhaps most apparent in a scene that reworks an episode from Muñoz’s La fiesta de la sangre. In the earlier novel, Hameido invites two noblemen allied with his enemy the sultan to a sumptuous banquet, where he regales them with delicate pastries, iced beverages, pipes replete with kif, Andalusi music, and a beautiful dancing girl, as El-Arbí looks on. When the noblemen leave, Hameido follows them out into the darkness and murders them with his own hands. In Santa Marina’s work, the hosts are two Spanish legionnaires who desert and become renegados, marrying

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North African women, but who are ultimately unable to bear the sight of their countrymen suffering at the hands of the rebel Riffians and the Frenchman who urges them on. The two men invite the Frenchman to a feast marking the end of Ramadan, and after he has eaten, drunk, and sung to his heart’s content, one renegade blows out the lamp while the other buries a dagger into their guest’s heart (Muñoz, Fiesta 110–23; Santa Marina 61–62). While the two renegades are the only presumably North African characters identified as Spanish in Santa Marina’s work, ironically they imitate Hameido’s stereotypically Maghrebian gestures of hospitality and betrayal solely in order to express their inescapable loyalty to Spain. Santa Marina’s exuberant descriptions of animalistic and ritualistic killing and mutilation are also reminiscent of Muñoz’s novels, but here again the legionnaires’ adoption of ostensibly North African practices is of a piece with their extermination of the Riffian enemy and their affirmation of a Spanish identity conceived of as devoid of all “Oriental” influences. After a fierce battle in which the surviving legionnaires stab all of the fallen moros to make sure they are dead, while cutting off their heads and cleaning their bayonets on their djellabas, they return to camp: “The dry earth sucked in the good red blood. The day of death and sun finally ended, and with the fiery crimson clouds of the sunset the Legion entered camp, disordered, like a band of wolves, drunk with triumph (gleaming eyes, carnivorous jaws, hairy chests). Caesar’s scarlet flag waves in the suffocating breeze against a ring of Moors’ heads, some without noses, spiked onto the bayonets” (28). While on the one hand the author’s prose converts the men into ferocious beasts—much as Muñoz’s works constantly emphasize the animal instincts of his characters—Santa Marina’s ongoing association of the legionnaires with Caesar’s troops (evident as well in the work’s title) also attempts to create a genealogy that links Spain directly to a Roman inheritance. Moreover, as Viscarri has shown, throughout his text Santa Marina draws heavily upon an archaic vocabulary and grammatical structures “that accentuate Castilian’s Latinate morphological antecedents, and, by extension, manifest an eminently Eurocentric identity” (Nacionalismo 295). By weaving in myriad quotations from classical texts, Santa Marina places the legionnaires on a par not with the mythically virile North African warriors found in some medieval ballads and other cultural representations (as Isaac Muñoz prefers) but rather with the heroes of the classical world. As Viscarri indicates, Santa Marina emphasizes the Muslims’ otherness in order to “affirm a Hispanic identity” (Nacionalismo 265). At the same time, Santa Marina’s incorporation of frontier ballads alongside other traditional poetry reveals the tremendous anxieties associated with the

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ambiguities of the Spanish nation’s past, as well as related and equally intense anxieties concerning configurations of gender and sexuality. In one horrifying vignette, for example, innumerable legionnaires wreak revenge upon a teenage Moroccan girl who has been found in Nador, where numerous Spaniards have been massacred, with a warm gun by her side: “The entire Company, the entire Battalion afterward, filed by and stabbed her, and soon the bayonets were already wounding other wounds. . . . And they cut off her fingers and ears, coveting her rings and her beautiful earrings” (37; this may have been based upon a factual event that Gustau Nerín has documented in other texts of the period [La guerra 246]). More properly dressed for marriage than for warfare, the girl is repeatedly and savagely penetrated as the soldiers seek both to possess and annihilate her. Santa Marina’s shocking descriptions of sexualized violence against women share some common features with the contemporaneous memoirs and fictional works by and about German Freikorps paramilitary soldiers analyzed by Klaus Theweleit in Male Fantasies (as Viscarri notes with respect to another such passage, discussed below). Theweleit posits that, because they have suffered unsatisfactory relationships with their mothers and have been unable successfully to move beyond the pre-Oedipal stage, the “soldier males” are overwhelmed by both a longing for and a terror of feminine engulfment. They seek to exorcise that terror by affirming their own bodily boundaries through harsh military drills, and by repeatedly reenacting a particular primal scene, in which, upon being confronted with a rifle-bearing enemy woman, they beat, stab, or shoot her into a bloody pulp in order definitively to convert her into a miasma (I: 63–228). It is significant that the enemy woman is frequently figured as Jewish, for she incarnates an abject racial as well as gender difference, although Theweleit tends to emphasize the latter over the former. In Santa Marina’s text, it might be argued that the Moroccan soldier girl is particularly threatening, since for the Spanish legionnaires she represents the very instability of boundaries of gender and race. Unlike the “women warriors” who inspired such revulsion in Carmen de Burgos, and who were described, significantly, as singularly ugly and unfeminine, Santa Marina’s character is adorned with jewelry, a detail that heightens her inversion of gender norms. That inversion is then mirrored, as it were, by one of the legionnaires, who adopts the voice of a “morilla”—a young Muslim woman—as he recites a fragment from a traditional frontier ballad, set in the period of the Reconquest: “I was Moraima the Moor / A little Moorish girl of sweet voice / A Christian came to my door, / Woe is me, to deceive me” (37). As the legionnaire ventriloquizes the morilla, whose literal and metaphorical “door” is breached by a “false” Christian, however, the threshold between any number of binary oppositions—Christian/Moor; Spaniard/Moroccan; man/

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woman; heterosexual/homosexual; betrayer/betrayed—collapses. Theweleit’s paradigms do not appear to explain the range of subject positions that are enacted in Santa Marina’s text, ironically, even as a violently phallocentric coloniality is staked out on the dead body of a teenage Moroccan girl. Furthermore, Theweleit’s theories fail convincingly to account for the negotiation of homosocial/homosexual tensions in the several scenes in which the violation of women is also an affair “between men,” in Sedgwick’s sense of that phrase (Between 1, 21–27). It is their identification with and desire for one another that may emerge with greatest force when men vie for or share the same woman. For example, although Viscarri’s reading of another episode in which several legionnaires terrorize a group of Spanish prostitutes in a bordello, whipping them into submission with their belts before raping them, persuasively explicates Santa Marina’s appropriation of Catholic discourse (Nacionalismo 275), it is perhaps unduly circumscribed by Theweleit’s unique perspective on the sexuality of the “soldier males.” Although Viscarri recognizes that the scene resonates with the common practice in which legionnaires were whipped by their superiors, he argues, following Theweleit, that the phallic symbolism of the belt “is not based on its capacity for penetration but rather on its punitive virtue” (Nacionalismo 274). Yet since the women are in fact “penetrated,” the episode would also appear to rechannel the sexualized impulses of the male-tomale whippings into a more “acceptable” brutal heterosexual rape. Theweleit’s theory, however, strips all scenes of beatings and whippings, as well as all characterizations of male bonding and even male-to-male sexual practices within the military context, of their erotic valence. Indeed, Male Fantasies at times works to erase homosexuality altogether. Within the Freikorps, Theweleit reads homosexuality as strictly a pose, or a ploy for power (II: 319–27), and he argues more generally that “the principal reason [why men desire other men] may well be the exclusion of women, in society as it is currently organized, from the pleasureintensities of public activity” (II: 332). This comment runs surprisingly parallel to the heteronormative claim that lesbianism is only produced out of the failure of heterosexual relationships. If in this chapter I continue to insist upon highlighting the presence of homosexually inflected tensions and practices within the Spanish Africanist milieu, I am also exceptionally wary of simply reifying the decades-old conflation of homosexuality with Nazism. The association of “political and sexual deviance,” in Andrew Hewitt’s phrase (20), is a notable risk here, particularly given the important role that fascism ultimately played in the evolution of Africanism, as evidenced in Santa Marina’s text. Yet I am perhaps equally wary of adopting the opposite theoretical extreme, which forecloses on any discussion whatsoever of the wide variety of sexual desires that may have

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been experienced, articulated, or acted upon within the Moroccan war context, by soldiers and officers who were resistant to, as well as fully in agreement with, Africanist ideologies. Moreover, while, as Sedgwick has noted, “German fascism [. . .] emerged on a social ground in which ‘the homosexual question’ had been made highly salient” (Tendencies 49, n. 14), it should by now be clear that military Africanism was also thoroughly imbricated with the shifting configurations of masculinity and sexuality throughout the larger Spanish society. CRUSADING WITH MOROCCAN MEN, 1936–39

The Spanish Africanist ideologies that developed over the 1920s were not confined to the colonial context; by the 1930s they had been “brought home” to the peninsula in chilling fashion. Sebastian Balfour has shown how the attitudes and practices developed during the course of the conflict in the Rif were essential to the formulation of the Rebels’ “crusade” that culminated in the coup d’état, plotted out by Africanists and launched from Morocco on July 17, 1936, and the ensuing Civil War of 1936–39.²² According to Balfour, Africanists had begun to see the residents of the peninsula as exemplars of degeneration, in need of the strong arm of colonization. As early as 1924, for example, Brigadier General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano racialized the Spanish masses by equating them with Moroccans, asserting that Spaniards suffered from a “truly Muslim indolence” (qtd. in Balfour, Deadly 172). Balfour notes that the Africanists were particularly influenced by the Italian fascist conceptualization of war as revitalizing, believing that only they would be capable of regenerating Spain (Deadly 172). Gustau Nerín has compiled an abundance of references that indicate the full extent to which this rhetoric was carried into the Civil War by other Africanist officers, such as Juan Yagüe, who asserted in 1938, for example, that the “savage reds” needed to be civilized in the same way as the “Moors” had been (La guerra 208). Indeed, Spaniards on the peninsula had begun to suffer the full consequences of this attitude once the Second Republic was established in 1931. When the head of the Civil Guard, the Rif war veteran General José Sanjurjo, sought to justify his men’s killing of Andalusian workers participating in a demonstration in late 1931, for instance, he described the victims as a “Rif nucleus” (Balfour, Deadly 202). More dramatically, the center-right government that held power in October 1934 called in the Army of Africa to put down a large-scale miners’ strike in Asturias, and it is believed that Franco himself was instrumental in promoting the participation of legionnaires and Regulares. Balfour has noted the historical irony of the deployment of Moroccan soldiers against Asturians, since

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Spain’s Reconquest from the Moors is traditionally described as beginning in that region of the peninsula. Through an inversion of colonial discourses and practices, however, the miners were characterized as having committed acts of “savagery,” and the legionnaires and Regulares treated them much as they had the Riffian rebels. Prisoners were subjected to summary executions, civilians were murdered, women were raped, and homes were looted. When the miners’ leader finally capitulated, he attempted to restore the “natural” order of civilization and barbarism by insisting upon the withdrawal of the legionnaires and the Regulares, whose comportment “was not worthy of a civilized nation” (Balfour, Deadly 251–53; Sánchez Ruano 45–47). The moro enemigo (enemy Moor) was already beginning to be reclassified as a moro amigo (friendly Moor) by Spanish Africanists eager to employ North African troops to “pacify” leftist rebels on the peninsula. In Balfour’s words, “What had been the external Other was mobilized against the internal Other” (Deadly 280). Internal colonization, so often invoked metaphorically in the discourse of Spanish peripheral nationalism, would become a reality for Spain’s working-class activists in the 1930s. Balfour has characterized the suppression of the miners’ revolt as a “dress rehearsal” for the Civil War; those responsible for the 1934 operation were affirmed in their “messianic mission to restore Spain to its true identity from the barracks of Spanish Morocco” (Deadly 256). Although it was not until late in the planning stages that the Army of Africa was given a key role in the July 1936 uprising, once the war had begun Rebel propaganda campaigns sought to capitalize on the tremendous fear that the mere mention of Moroccan troops and legionnaires could instill in Spain’s populace after the events in Asturias. General Queipo de Llano, based in Seville, gained infamy for the crazed radio speeches he broadcast in the summer and fall of 1936, in which his characterizations of Moroccan men changed dramatically. Although a dozen years earlier he had compared Spaniards to racially decadent North Africans, now Queipo argued that despite their claims to Aryanism (and here it is important to recall the late nineteenth-century categorizations of Catalan racial identity, discussed in chapter 1), Spanish leftists were racially inferior to Moroccans: “It is an insult to compare the Moorish race with the Aryan one. The majority of the communists who now rule in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid are Aryans. The Moorish race is a select race, a privileged race” (qtd. in Sánchez Ruano 248).²³ Queipo formulated a particularly perverse variation on the moro amigo trope, asserting that Moroccan soldiers would serve as a model of virility for the effeminate “reds” of Spain: “Our valiant legionnaires and Regulares have shown the reds what it is to be a man. While passing through, they have also [shown] the reds’ women, who now, finally, have experienced real men, not castrated militia men.

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Kicking and screaming will not save them” (qtd. in Martín Corrales 176, n. 23; Sánchez Ruano 172). The details have been the subject of much debate, but most historians agree that, as Queipo suggests, legionnaires and Regulares alike were encouraged to engage in war atrocities at the beginning of the Civil War, just as they had done in the Rif and in their operations in Asturias in 1934. In this way, Rebel officers hoped to instill loyalty in their men, and terror in the Republican enemy. It is not clear, however, to what extent common colonial war behaviors were also taken up by other Rebels—and to what extent common prejudices concerning North Africans fueled the propaganda that circulated throughout both camps concerning their sexual voracity and particular propensity to engage in acts of brutality. Documentary evidence, though, leaves little room for dispute concerning the widespread practice of looting, rape, murder, and mutilation on the Rebel side, which Balfour equates with ethnic cleansing (Deadly 291).²⁴ Although Franco reportedly attempted to prohibit the violation of women and, of equal symbolic significance, the castration of dead Republican soldiers (Sánchez Ruano 184, 246–47), he was clearly unable to foreclose on the logical consequences of the colonial war rhetoric that he himself employed. As Balfour astutely states, “The razzias the colonial troops perpetrated as they went along were deeply familiar to the veterans of the colonial war. In a letter to Mola on 11 August [1936], Franco emphasized the need to destroy all resistance in the ‘occupied zones,’ a Freudian slip revealing the deep influence of the Moroccan campaigns” (Deadly 294). It quickly became apparent that troops from the protectorate would be essential to the Rebels’ victory in the war, and an intense operation was set in motion to promote—if not compel—the massive conscription of Moroccan soldiers, whose numbers are difficult to document, but may have exceeded a hundred thousand (Sánchez Ruano 251–52). Local leaders were bribed into encouraging their men to enlist en masse, and the relatively generous salaries offered by the Rebels functioned in tandem with a recent history of poor harvests to provide a powerful economic incentive. The high commissioner for Morocco, General Luis Orgaz, as well as his successor, Colonel Juan Beigbeder, who spoke Arabic and had cultivated friendly relationships with notables, did not hesitate to suggest that cooperation in the war effort might be rewarded with the granting of autonomy to the protectorate (Balfour, Deadly 272–74). Queipo de Llano made a similar claim in an October 11, 1936, radio address (Sánchez Ruano 157), and when Franco himself stated in a speech to pilgrims returning from Mecca in early 1937 that “when the roses of victory bloom, we will grant you the best flowers,” Moroccans took it as another indication that the Rebels would grant them independence after the war (Sánchez Ruano 157, 51; Madariaga, Moros 344).

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At Franco’s suggestion, the Moroccans’ pilgrimage to Mecca that year had in fact been sponsored by the Rebels, who requisitioned a boat and subsidized the cost of the trip. Paradoxical though it may seem, religion was also mobilized to convince Moroccan men to fight for the “Crusade.” The Republicans were represented as godless heathens, as much a threat to the future of Islam as to Christian Spain; as evidence, the Rebels had only to point to the fact that the “reds” had tried to bomb the very boat that carried the Muslim pilgrims. Here, perhaps, we see the logical consequences of the rhetorical move initiated by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón many decades before, discussed in the previous chapter. Alarcón, we recall, came to view the growing influence of “communist atheism” in Spain as far more threatening than the presence of Muslims across the strait, and in some of his writings he expressed a grudging respect for the impassioned religious faith of the Moroccans. For their part, the Rebels sought to convert that respect into an eminently pragmatic policy during the Civil War. For the first time since the end of the Reconquest, Islamic cemeteries and mosques were established in Spain for the use of Moroccan soldiers. The wounded were treated in special hospitals complete with halal meals, interpreters, legal aids, and Muslim chaplains (Sánchez Ruano 237; Madariaga, Moros 277–81). The Rebels continued to sponsor the yearly pilgrimage (Madariaga, Moros 360), and according to historian Francisco Sánchez Ruano, native leaders in the protectorate were even paid to circulate the rumor that Franco himself had been to Mecca and secretly converted to Islam (153). Remarkably, then, by the Civil War, religious affinities would be added to the more customary list of cultural and racial inheritances that presumably tied Moroccans to Spaniards. This is perhaps clearest in an article published in 1940 by the Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios that, as the title itself indicates, seeks to explain “why the Muslim Moroccans fought on our side.” Asín Palacios asserts (pace the conclusions of most modern historians) that they fought not for money or because they hoped to achieve independence, but rather because the Moroccans, like the Rebels, also wished to defend their religious faith, which shared so much in common with Spanish Catholicism. The author details Islam’s basis in Judeo-Christian texts, practices, and values, and he notes the importance of minimizing differences between Muslims and Christians, an attitude that might, he suggests, lead more Moroccans to convert (he apparently does not envision the reverse phenomenon occurring). Not surprisingly, he also draws upon traditional appeals to the legacy of al-Andalus: “It is not in vain that a same ancestral culture has left its subconscious sediment in the soul of the common Hispanic race, to which they and we belong” (149); here the shared race is not simply Ibero-Berber but “Hispanic.” Asín Palacios goes so far as to advocate that Moroccan soldiers who fought in the war be granted citi-

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zenship, arguing that they were much more deserving of declaring themselves Spaniards than were Catalan and Basque separatists (150). Notwithstanding the appeals of Asín Palacios, Moroccans were never thanked in such a materially significant manner for their decisive participation in the war. As María Rosa de Madariaga has noted in her riff on Franco’s famous 1937 speech, after the Rebels’ 1939 victory, North African soldiers were granted thorns instead of roses (Moros 344). Even so, the Moroccans were the subject of an outpouring of flowery rhetoric during the conflict and into the early postwar period. As we shall see in the final section of this chapter and in the subsequent chapter as well, countless texts sought to express gratitude to the noble warriors who had helped to save Spain, and the representation of Moroccans underwent a notable transformation during this period. The homoeroticism that had been so intimately linked to acts of brutality would now be stripped of its openly violent valence, as a less discomfiting discourse of brotherly love moved to center stage. Eventually, however, most signs of “dissident” sexuality would also disappear, as the Franco regime shifted away from fascism and toward National Catholicism, and labored to institute a rigorously heterosexist and patriarchal state. THE FRATERNAL “ORIENTATION” OF SPANIARDS AND MOROCCANS

While a horrifically violent colonial discourse and practice was transferred from the protectorate to the peninsula over the course of the 1930s, Spanish texts set in North Africa during this period became suffused instead with a dreamy Orientalism that exalted and eroticized fraternal relations between Spaniards and Moroccans. Moreover, by the end of the Civil War a number of earlier Rif war texts—remarkably, even those that had been penned by the most hegemonic of figures—were censored or banned. A 1939 edition of Luys Santa Marina’s work was withdrawn from the market out of concern that it would anger Moroccans, and remaining copies of Franco’s own 1922 Diario were also confiscated, to be replaced by a new 1939 edition in which the most offensively xenophobic passages were excised. Dionisio Viscarri has appropriately criticized the Francoist presumption that Moroccans would actually seek out and read these texts (Nacionalismo 143–45), yet it is possible that some members of the new regime may have been as preoccupied with encouraging Spaniards to change their attitudes toward Moroccans as with avoiding offence to the neighbors across the strait, who had contributed so much to the Rebels’ victory. One of the earliest texts to offer thanks for Moroccan participation in the Civil War is the 1936 Por tierras de Marruecos (aroma de recuerdos) (Through

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Moroccan Lands [Aroma of Memories]), José Rojas y Moreno’s intensely poetic (if often kitschy) meditation on religious as well as other cultural and racial affinities between Spaniards and Moroccans. Rojas y Moreno, a lawyer and also the Count of Casa-Rojas, had held a number of diplomatic positions, including several postings to Morocco (as civil secretary to the high commissioner of Morocco in 1918 and as consul general for Tangier from 1934 to 1936). In 1936 he was again working with the high commissioner of Morocco when he joined the entourage of the khalifa (the Moroccan leader of the Spanish protectorate), Muley El-Hassan, during a two-week period in September in which the khalifa traversed the protectorate to confirm his subjects’ support for “the true Spain” (10), and to meet with Rebel military leaders, who were delighted with Moroccan contributions to the war effort. It is particularly surprising that Rojas y Moreno presents himself in this text as a committed fascist, enthusiastically exchanging the “Roman salute” with the Muslims and Jews he encounters in the streets of Morocco (9, 10, 28, 46). He is remembered (and honored) today for his efforts to save the Jewish residents of Bucharest from the Nazis when he was stationed in that city in the early 1940s. Rojas y Moreno effects the same melding of religious identities, so evident in Asín Palacios’s article, through his astonishing description of the khalifa. After praising “the land where our great Crusade was begun and preached” (29), the author details how the khalifa tenderly caresses the head of a dirty boy who runs up to greet him: “The ankle-length tunic, the caressing hand, the solicitous gesture, the voice that inquires, that grants, and that consoles, sweet, hushed, the cedars in the background. An evangelical engraving in the land of the Rif ” (30). Yet the khalifa at whose feet the author throws himself is less the humbly charitable Jesus-like figure described in this “evangelical engraving” than a seductively Orientalized leader whose sensual lifestyle inspires flights of fancy: “Allow me, Lord, to come humbly to offer you these romantic memories when, like the silver platters of unstemmed jasmine in your shadowy mansions, they still preserve their soft perfume; so that the virginal purity of these flowers may never wither, I offer them to you in my bare hands, wet with the dew of gratitude of my people and my heart” (6). Religious devotion and thankfulness are thoroughly intertwined with erotic fascination in Rojas y Moreno’s text, which in its supersensual descriptions appears to reflect as well an obsession with Hispano-Arabic poetry. The author may very well have been captivated by the Spanish Arabist Emilio García Gómez’s famous collection of translations, Poemas arábigoandaluces (Arabo-Andalusi Poems), which first appeared in 1930 and which, as the Arabist James Monroe has noted, influenced a number of writers of the period (203–4).

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Alberto Mira has also emphasized that the volume provoked a scandal, since it outed the homoerotic poetry of al-Andalus, and thus had an impact on debates over homosexuality in modern-day Spain as well as in the Andalusi past (119). In the prologue to his anthology, García Gómez remarks upon the extraordinarily ornamental quality of Andalusi verse, and he also explains some of the more popular Andalusi poetic themes, including the celebration of “Greek love” and the beauty of young men (23–24). It is perhaps doubly significant, then, that while many decades earlier Marià Fortuny had chosen to depict the winded senectitude of a once-vigorous Moroccan man, Rojas y Moreno prefers to allegorize the youthful energies of the khalifa, before whom he prostrates himself, as the scent of traditional wedding blossoms wafts through the air: “A row of slaves who pay homage. The perfume of incense. Soft carpets. Oriental nobility. We refresh our temples with orange flower water, which bears virginal aromas, and the young prince passes, smiling and looking out at a distant horizon with a gaze that reflects the calm of experience and the restlessness of youth” (9). Rojas y Moreno casts an approving eye over any number of men, focusing in particular on the sartorial majesty and theatrical speech and gestures of Moroccans and Spaniards alike as they engage in public ceremonies. His descriptions also recall those of T. E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), which, as Kaja Silverman has noted, reflect the author’s eroticization of dress and his conceptualization of male beauty and splendor as a particularly potent “weapon” (305–6, 318–20). While Rojas y Moreno notes of a man named Abdelkader that “his hands are encased in fine white kid gloves” (45), the Spaniards also demonstrate the “refined tastes” so characteristic of the Muslims (14), such as the “golden embroidery in our consul’s uniform” (45). For his part, the Spanish high commissioner, General Orgaz, appears “impeccable in dress” (15), and takes care to modulate his voice, for “like a skilled artist, he suggests rather than declares” (16). Spaniards and Moroccans alike prefer to avoid the crass display of power or money, and so the chests of coins offered up by the Rebels are discreetly covered with scarves, while gifts of diamond rings, silver tea sets, and ornate perfume atomizers are presented with a flourish (45). Money, of course, can’t buy the genuine fraternity that is everywhere on display in this text. Indeed, Rojas y Moreno repeatedly underlines the similarities between Moroccans and Spaniards, who share the same history and cultural legacy, along with a common nobility, valor, melancholy, and religious fervor (14). As a Valencian, the author recognizes countless points of convergence in his own tastes, as well as in the very language he speaks (3). Moreover, the joint experience of engaging in warfare alongside one another will seal forever the fate of Spaniards and Moroccans. When Queipo de Llano announces on Radio Seville on Sep-

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tember 27, 1936, that Toledo has been taken, joy and celebration ensue among officers and soldiers, and Rojas y Moreno witnesses the birth of a “new Hispanism,” as Spaniards and Moroccans of all regions and classes unite (35). Observing the colorful military parade the following day, a man from Melilla exclaims, “Now it’s truly evident that the Spanish and Moroccan peoples are mixed” (39). For his part, Rojas y Moreno praises the loyalty and generous sacrifice of Moroccan youth, asserting that “our union has been sealed with blood” (5). The rhetoric of shared blood in conjunction with the reference to “hispanismo” is evocative of the traditional emphasis on Spaniards’ practice of mestizaje with their colonial others. But here mixing is accomplished not through heterosexual miscegenation but rather through the blood brotherhood of male bonding, whether that be within a rarified aristocrat setting or the context of warfare. In either case, women are unnecessary to the project, and here the author’s discourse appears to part company with that of the more polysexual Isaac Muñoz. In fact, the Morocco described in Por tierras de Marruecos is an intensely homosocial space. In stark contrast to Spanish documentary films of the era, which show large numbers of veiled figures gathering to view the pomp of the khalifa’s public appearances, women are physically absent from Rojas y Moreno’s descriptions. The female figure is instead only invoked metaphorically in his text, through several commonplace Orientalist clichés that feminize the colonized terrain: Africa is like a captivating woman, and the author finds himself irresistibly drawn to return to her caresses (3; see also 29); Spain will take Morocco like a bride, not a concubine, and as a result their relationship will last forever (19). Yet these few references to heterosexual colonial possession are marginalized by the author’s characterizations of an idealized masculine union, in which even the traditional subordination of native men is upset, as the author expresses his desire that one day Spain might be remade by “hopeful and fertile” men like the khalifa (12). The exclusion of women from the colonial scene of male bonding is even more explicitly effected in the 1941 film ¡Harka!, directed by Carlos Arévalo, based on a script by the former Legionnaire Luis García Ortega, and shot on location with the collaboration of the Moroccan high commissioner and indigenous troops (as a title card at the film’s opening indicates). Rojas y Moreno’s unabashed exaltation of native men is, however, finessed. Rather than a Moroccan, the male protagonist and figure of erotic fascination in Arévalo’s film is a Moroccan surrogate, a Spanish captain of irregular native forces (the harka of the title), played by Alfredo Mayo, a coveted leading man of the era. Mayo’s character is often seen dressed in a djellaba along with his Army of Africa fez and is reported to be steeped in North African culture (fig. 21); he also refuses to take any of the leave time on the peninsula that he has earned. As his superior, Commander

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21. Santiago goes native in ¡Harka! Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

Prada, describes him at the beginning of the film, “No-one better understands the Moroccan psychology, with which he is completely identified [. . .] yet noone is as Spanish as Santiago Valcázar.” Critics such as Dionisio Viscarri have asserted that the last phrase, together with the name Santiago—evocative, of course, of the famous Moor Killer of the Reconquest—function to locate the protagonist squarely on the side of a normative Spanishness (“¡Harka!” 413–14). Yet, as we have seen throughout this book, the notion that one can be thoroughly Spanish as well as in complete syntony with the “Moroccan psychology” is a staple of Africanist thought, which is often as concerned with the strategic assertion of kinship as with establishing a clear line of demarcation between Spaniards and North Africans. Indeed, the film’s opening titles also employ a phrase that would become omnipresent in colonialist texts of the Franco era: “The splendid Hispano-Moroccan fraternity.” That Santiago fails to live up to the expectations that might be generated by his name is also evident from the fact that we never see him kill a “Moor,” as well as from the Arabic moniker by

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22. Charged gazes are exchanged as Santiago makes contact with Riffian men in ¡Harka! Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

which he is known among the natives, Sidi Absalam, or “Lord of Peace.” A significant amount of screen time is devoted to the depiction of his efforts to persuade Riffian forces to join the cause of Spain and the Makhzen, the centralized government of the sultan. In one important scene Santiago meets with a whitebearded enemy leader in the latter’s tent (fig. 22). As is evident from their exchange, Santiago’s relationship with Riffian men is based upon a mutual respect for valor and military skill. While he earns points by coolly offering up his own head as a trophy, he also expresses admiration when he learns that the leader is the same rebel who on one occasion had managed to kill his horse and on another had shot him in the shoulder, a fact that Santiago silently acknowledges by moving his hand toward the site of the wound, as if it still pained him. This slowpaced scene is saturated with charged glances, as Santiago seeks to gauge the intentions of the venerable old leader, who expresses a willingness to negotiate and offers him hospitality for the night. Of more ambiguous valence is his pointed eye contact with the two other Moroccan males in the tent: a young man, whose darkly mysterious gaze is emphasized by the shadow cast across his brow, and a

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boy, whose long rifle—the only weapon on display in this scene—rests across his diminutive lap, recalling earlier Spanish descriptions of the boys who reportedly accompanied Moroccan troops at the front. For Tatjana Pavlović, ¡Harka! is one of several military/Africanist films of the immediate post Civil War period that “problematize the fragile boundary between the homosocial and the homosexual” (33). Santiago is twice described at the beginning of the film as “incomprehensible,” and it is difficult not to associate the term with the code words that have been so commonly employed to characterize those who have “different” sexual proclivities. Indeed, within the British context Virginia Woolf had used the same word—“incomprehensible”— to describe the depictions of what she could only characterize as “some purely masculine orgy” in the homoerotic colonialist texts of Rudyard Kipling (qtd. in Lane 39). For his part, Santiago’s character will become more “comprehensible” after a skirmish with rebel tribes decimates the Spanish leadership and a new group of officers arrives on the scene. Commander Prada informs the newcomers that in order to be effective harka leaders, they must “understand the Moroccan, identifying with him to some extent, and love him.” At this very moment, Santiago arrives as proof of the value of Prada’s advice, announcing his success with the rebel leader as the commander drapes an arm around his shoulder and draws him near. One of the new officers will take Prada’s words to heart, though his love will be directed more toward the hybrid figure of Santiago than toward the Moroccans. In a scene that a number of critics have already identified as particularly homoerotic, Santiago invites Lieutenant Luis Herrera (played by another heartthrob actor of the era, Luis Peña) to join him next to a cozy fire under the nighttime sky (fig. 23).²⁵ While they savor the mint tea served by a native soldier, Santiago presents his subordinate with an “indiscreet [. . .] question.” Alberto Mira finds this turn of phrase “interesting,” implying that it might be an additional example of what I have termed “code,” providing Luis (and the film’s audience) another way of understanding Santiago’s desire to know why Luis has come to Africa. Mira notes that Luis’s vague references to his lack of satisfaction with life on the peninsula might border upon a moment of “homosexual panic” (335), yet given traditional Spanish (and more generalized Orientalist) stereotypes concerning North African sexuality, his response that he seeks to command native soldiers as well as “immerse myself in the customs of these people” might be read as somewhat less than panicked. For their part, Pavlović (32–33), John Hopewell (35–36), and Peter Evans have all focused on the cinematographic techniques that structure this as a love scene, embedded within a melodrama of homosexual longing. As Evans writes: “In making its point about the superiority of the male, in describing the potential tenderness that exists in

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23. Santiago and Luis share an intimate moment in ¡Harka! Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

all relationships between higher types of men, the film strays into extremely dangerous ideological territory where transference of the techniques and resources of melodrama—soft lighting, close-up shots of two officers bonding in the desert night—onto the conventions of the war film leads to the point where, inevitably, the excesses of the former overwhelm the austerities of the latter. The result is that the film astonishingly succeeds in apparently condoning homosexuality” (218–19). In the nighttime scene, the camera moves in to present the two leading men in glamorous closeups, dramatically lit by the glow and smoke of the fire, that recall the presentation of female stars in romantic scenes, and foreground “long eyelashes often lowered in coyness born of a shared but unspoken secret mutual attraction” (Evans 219). But, as Mira observes, the audience is denied the customary kiss at the end (335). When Luis stands up to leave, Santiago tells him he “understands” him, calls him “boy,” and commands him to use the informal “tú” form of address with him. It is not insignificant that later in the film we see that Luis, who was earlier shown sharing a tent with one of the new recruits (a young man interestingly inclined to strike poses and gaze at himself in the mirror), has risen in rank and moved in with Santiago.

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The relationship between Luis and Santiago, however, is subsequently threatened by the unexpected arrival of a woman, the sister-in-law of one of the officers who has been killed in action. Luis offers to show Amparo the “incomparable beauty and poetry” of Tetuán, and after a lengthy montage sequence of their meanderings over a number of days, the two profess their love for one another. Yet Amparo insists that if Luis wishes to marry her he must give up his life in Africa. The mutual exclusivity of Amparo and Africa is subtly underlined through the montage sequence, in which on several occasions the couple appear superimposed over touristic views of the city; Amparo is only capable of skimming over the surface of clichéd images of the North African milieu. By contrast, there is no such cinematic superimposition in the scenes that portray her as anchored in her privileged circumstances in Madrid. Luis subsequently struggles to reconcile the pull of Amparo and her frivolous lifestyle in the Spanish capital with his love for Africa—and for Santiago. In his analysis of the complex figurations of homosexuality in British colonial texts, Christopher Lane has noted that “heterosexual desire characteristically disrupts the intimacy that men foster for each other, compelling same-sex friendship (or homophilia) bitterly to engage with the ‘disloyalty’ that cross-gender interest precipitates” (21). Santiago’s bitterness over Luis’s betrayal—he has decided to marry Amparo and leave Africa, as she has demanded—is evidenced by a dramatic scene in a cabaret in Tetuán that is evocative of any number of classical cinematic depictions of amorous jealousy. Santiago enters the cabaret, rebuffs a woman who wishes to dance with him, and proceeds to work his way through a bottle of Johnny Walker. When Luis arrives, he attempts to defend his decision, noting that he will not be the first officer to abandon Africa. But in another heavily coded conversation, Santiago insists that he always thought Luis was different: “That’s why I have loved you like a brother, almost like a son, because I thought you were like me.” That Luis fails (or pretends that he fails) to comprehend Santiago’s words is evident from the question he directs at him: “But haven’t you ever loved before? Don’t you feel the need for affection, for a bit of tenderness? Or are you made of bronze?” Santiago’s response is immediate and violent: leaping to his feet, he drains his glass before smashing it to the floor, and cuts in on the woman with whom he had previously refused to dance. Ultimately, however, Luis will be unable to betray Santiago. While in Madrid awaiting his wedding day he is crushed to learn of the captain’s death in an ambush, and he rushes back to Africa, where he vows to continue on with Santiago’s mission. After reading a telegram with an ultimatum from Amparo, Luis greets a new group of officers with the some advice he had heard upon his own arrival to the harka, while tearing up Amparo’s photograph. As Mira writes of Luis, “Now

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he will not allow himself to be fooled by the mirage of heterosexual love” (336). It is indeed notable that ¡Harka! does not provide a final recuperation of heterosexuality at the end, which similarly inflected colonialist texts often include. The case of the two endings of the “incomprehensible” Rudyard Kipling’s novel The Light That Failed (1891), analyzed by Lane, is instructive. While Kipling reportedly preferred the version that ends with the male protagonist Heldar dying in the arms of his intimate male friend and colonial war companion, he also published a variation of the text in which Heldar marries the main female character instead (Lane 19). Yet like the “popular” version of Kipling’s novel, ¡Harka! still denies its male protagonists their joint climax; Santiago, it is suggested, dies alongside a faithful Moroccan soldier, rather than in the arms of his beloved Luis. Here viewers may only imagine the thwarted possibility of the homoerotically charged “pietà” that is so prominent in some Spanish Africanist texts. Indeed, the film has already presented two such scenes. In one, Luis runs to the aid of a teenage Morrocan soldier who has been wounded after an imprudent display of fearlessness, carrying him in his arms to a stretcher. In the other, as Amparo’s brotherin-law lies dying of a gunshot wound Santiago cradles his head, gently closes his eyes, and plants a kiss upon his temple; that this is the only kiss depicted in the entire film is significant. ¡Harka!’s privileging of a homoerotic homosociality over heterosexuality is also supported by the advertising campaign that would have shaped audience expectations. The photograph of Luis cradling the fallen Moroccan youth in his arms, for example, is featured in the production company CIFESA’s promotional magazine, which includes no shots of or references to Amparo (“¡Harka!”). The main publicity poster portrays the heads of Santiago, Luis, and Amparo in superimposition over the six-point star that symbolizes the Moroccan sultanate, which appears throughout the film on military standards as well as in the opening and closing titles. Amparo’s head is smaller in size and situated in the lower half of the image, completely out of the line of sight of the men above her. While she looks off beyond the frame of the poster, Santiago and Luis, by contrast, are pointedly directing sidelong glances toward one another. It would be difficult to imagine a clearer visualization of the dynamic “between men” analyzed by Sedgwick, for Amparo’s exclusion from the charged interplay of gazes, inscribed within an iconic Moroccan space, is absolute. A similar dynamic plays out in the 1946 novel Ramadán de paz (Ramadan of Peace), though here the “Moroccan” representative of the “Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood” that is so insistently exalted is not a surrogate figure (as Santiago is) but rather a “genuine” Riffian, Feddul, who becomes the closest companion of Captain Urrutia, a colonial official. Urrutia, much like the novel’s author,

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Tomás García Figueras, is a fervent Africanist who believes that Spaniards and Moroccans are destined to live side by side. As the novel opens in 1923, his insistence that Spaniards seek to win over the Moroccans by peaceful means is signaled by his refusal to carry a pistol while working in Tetuán. Urrutia forms a curious relationship with Feddul after a street skirmish in which he discovers the rebel leader wounded outside his door, and he decides surreptitiously to take him in and nurse him back to health. Their mutual status as widowers and fathers of young daughters intensifies their bond, and Urrutia’s generosity—he has Feddul’s daughter Erhimo brought to Tetuán to be raised as a sister to his own child Ana Mari—gradually leads the Riffian to embrace the Spanish cause. Feddul’s ideological transformation is carefully detailed over many pages, in which the two men engage in an extensive debate, their disagreements softened by their growing affection for one another. Much as in ¡Harka!, it is in moments shared next to a cozy fire that “Feddul and Urrutia recognized the closeness of their hearts” (109). Over the course of their four-year domestic partnership, the once-fierce warrior Feddul occupies the “feminine” position, tenderly caring for the two girls as Urrutia continues to exercise his official duties; each time Urrutia leaves home, Feddul longs for his return, and anxiety ensues when the Spaniard is sent off to fight the last battle of the war in the Rif. Urrutia returns unscathed from the Spanish victory and is reunited with Feddul, as well as with Ana Mari and Erhimo, who have also become “buds from the same rosebush,” united in their love for one another and their fascination with the history and poetry of al-Andalus (145–46). This first section of the novel ends happily, as the two men confess their (political) transgressions and are pardoned by a fictionalized General Sanjurjo (the real-life Africanist and Rebel conspirator who died in a plane crash at the beginning of the Civil War). As in ¡Harka!, however, a seductive cosmopolitan woman comes briefly to disturb the peace of this idealized homosocial Hispano-Moroccan realm. In a chapter significantly entitled “Interferencia” (Interference), the mysterious Ivonne, who claims to be an Egyptian married to a foreign service worker stationed in a distant colony, insinuates her way into Urrutia’s life. Another of Urrutia’s passionate admirers, his underling Lieutenant Vega (whose nickname is the diminutive “Veguita”), attempts to dissuade Urrutia from spending time with the woman, but he denies that he is motivated by concern over her marital status, arguing, in a curious turn of phrase, “I am, in effect, something else” (193). The statement is somewhat “incomprehensible,” and it is again tempting to read it as code, especially since Veguita’s thinly disguised jealousy drives him to expose Ivonne as a spy. He admits that the political consequences are of less concern to him than the personal ones: “It was much more difficult for me to think that she

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was playing with his great heart, prompting the birth of an affection for which she was undeserving” (200). Veguita’s investigation uncovers a report in which Ivonne has characterized Urrutia’s ideas about the fraternity of Spaniards and Moroccans as a dangerous “fanaticism” that might lead to the establishment of a powerful new world power (199). Much like in ¡Harka!, then, in Ramadán de paz the woman’s disruption of profoundly felt relationships between men is coextensive with her disruption of the transcendent relationship between Spaniards and Moroccans. Urrutia responds to this unsavory episode by returning with Ana Mari to Spain, where he settles in Córdoba, a city that reminds him of his nation’s close ties to Africa. For his part, Feddul in the ensuing years struggles with the separation from his beloved Spanish “brother,” as well as with the disturbing changes he witnesses in Morocco after the collapse of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Feddul’s sense of proper hierarchy is perturbed by the rise to power of the lower classes, by the newfound assertiveness of the Jews (García Figueras’s work is riddled with the anti-Semitism that sometimes characterizes Africanist texts [Nerín, La guerra 82–83]), and by the fact that in the office of the local colonial officer Urrutia’s photograph has been replaced by a female image: the red-capped figure of the Republic (238–39, 243). Once again, a “woman” has threatened the sacred brotherhood of Spain and Morocco. That brotherhood is restored, however, with the Rebel uprising. When Urrutia writes him to express pride that the Civil War has been launched from Africa (285), and that Moroccan soldiers are now marching through the streets of Córdoba, Feddul decides that it is his turn to repay Urrutia and his fellow Spaniards for the gift of civilization they have bestowed upon his people. In an intriguing gesture of rhetorical reappropriation, García Figueras reworks the famous speech in which Franco had promised the “best roses” to the Moroccans who aided the Rebel cause, for Feddul’s enlistment is conceived of as an expression of “the best and most aromatic flowers of gratitude” (171). The veracity of Feddul’s earlier assertion that he would give his life for Urrutia is confirmed (164), as the Moroccan leads his compatriot soldiers in a maneuver to rescue the Spanish officer and his men from the “reds.” Mortally wounded in the battle, Feddul dies as soon as he has had the opportunity to embrace Urrutia one last time (338–39). Here, the male protagonists are indeed allowed the climactic and emotionally charged pietà moment that is denied to their counterparts in ¡Harka! Urrutia will soon follow him to the grave, and on his deathbed, he enjoins his daughter Ana Mari to return to Tetuán, even though he could not bear to return there himself, knowing that he would never again see Feddul (345). While Feddul had rejected the image of the Republic as Woman, Ramadán

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de paz will in fact end with an alternative feminine allegory. In his last days, Urrutia tells his daughter that she will soon witness “the matrimony of Spain and Morocco [. . .] one can already smell the orange blossoms” (346). In accordance with her father’s last wishes, Ana Mari returns to Tetuán to live with her long-lost “sister” Erhimo. The two young women reestablish the domestic partnership begun many years earlier by their fathers by residing in “fraternal union,” and as they are seen traversing the city together, they are greeted with cries of “Spain and Morocco!” (356). And when in 1942, the thirtieth anniversary of the protectorate, the end of the thirty days of Ramadan also coincides with Holy Week, Ana Mari and Erhimo blissfully dream that at last the wedding has been celebrated (368). While García Figueras may have assumed that the female figure was better able to bear the weight of such an allegory, his decision to represent the marriage of Spain and Morocco through two women—whose same-sex union, moreover, recalls that of their fathers before them—is nonetheless an audacious one. Although Ramadán de paz might be considered the quintessential Africanist articulation of a homoerotic rhetoric of fraternity, by the time of the novel’s publication that rhetoric was already being eclipsed by more heteronormative discourses of coloniality. It is significant that while the novel ends with a multivalent celebration of the union of Ana Mari and Erhimo, the final pages also include the briefest of references to a certain Spanish military captain whose interest in Ana Mari is remarked upon by Erhimo. In 1945—just one year before García Figueras’s text, dated 1942, appeared in print—a new Code of Military Justice took effect in Spain, in which “indecent acts with individuals of the same sex” became punishable by up to six years in prison (Mira 332). The Franco regime’s newfound concern for the strict regulation of homosexuality, after an initial period of apparently greater tolerance for male-to-male sexual practices, might be seen as mirroring the similar crackdown within German Nazism, signaled by Hitler’s call for the 1934 assassination of Ernst Roehm, and the subsequent explicit persecution of homosexuals, many thousands of whom would later perish in concentration camps (Sedgwick, Tendencies 49–50, n. 14; Mosse, Nationalism 158–62). Although as a group gays in Spain were not the victims of a concerted campaign of genocide, their lives were increasingly circumscribed after the Civil War, and homoerotic cultural expressions were repressed, if not completely eliminated (Mira 287–328). In the Spanish case, however, the change in attitude toward homosexuality actually coincided with the shift away from fascism as World War II drew to a close, as well as with the concomitant emergence of the discourse of National Catholicism. As is detailed in the next

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chapter, although Africanist discourse continued apace in the postwar years, it would reflect the new demands for the imposition of a rigorously heterosexist culture, as well as the anxieties that inevitably accompanied the ambivalence of Spain’s racialized positioning, as the nation sought to move away from its isolation and regain a place on the world stage.

5

U F V  F’ A C

It is a critical commonplace that the Rebels represented the Civil War as a new Reconquest, but in reality the rhetoric of the Franco regime was much more complex, since, as discussed in the previous chapter, Spanish Christians had fought alongside North African Muslims to overcome the Republicans, who were deemed the true “foreign infidels.” While it is indeed the case that Francoist mythification of history would compare the dictator’s regime to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella—both ushered in the (re)birth of the nation—the Moorish past required finessing, so as not to offend the loyal Moroccan “brothers” who had fought so bravely for the Rebels’ cause. Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste is one of the few historians to have captured the profoundly contradictory—and instrumentalist—character of Francoist discourse concerning the nation’s history and identity (Moro 58–59, 151), and in this chapter I seek to expand upon his analysis, moving as well into an exploration of the era’s cultural production. One intriguing film that mobilizes the idea of historical parallelisms while acknowledging the “collaboration” of North Africans in the Civil War is the box office hit Locura de amor (Love Crazy, 1948), directed by Juan de Orduña and bankrolled by CIFESA, a major production company allied with the regime. The film centers on the trials and tribulations of the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, Queen Joan the Mad, as she struggles against the foreign schemers (including the very husband she madly loves) who seek to wrest her kingdom from Spanish control. As her faithful protector Alvar faces death at the hands of one of those foreigners, he is saved by an unlikely heroine: the vampy Moorish princess Aldara (played by a very young Sara Montiel), the daughter of a conquered king of Granada. As Aldara evolves from a scheming mora enemiga (enemy Moor), whose only goal is to bring down the queen, into a lovelorn mora amiga (friendly

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24. After killing his enemy, Aldara tells Alvar she will go “home” to North Africa in Locura de amor. Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

Moor), who protects the queen by murdering one of her foes, the film constructs a thinly veiled allegorical narration of the transformation of Moroccans from ruthless rebels against authority, who must be “pacified” in the Rif wars, to faithful defenders of Spain’s national essence against “red” invaders. Despite her service to the crown, however, there is no danger that Aldara will be incorporated into the nation: Alvar’s unrequited love for the queen would never permit him to pursue a relationship with the beautiful Moorish princess. Aldara, inspired by the example of Alvar’s higher spiritual values, recognizes that now that she has rescued her beloved from danger, it is her destiny to return “home” to North Africa; no expulsion is necessary here (fig. 24). Nevertheless, Alvar assures her that her actions will not be forgotten, for every morning as the light enters his room he will remember that it was “the most beautiful daughter of Islam” who saved him from certain demise. Like Locura de amor, many of the literary and cinematographic texts that communicate gratitude for the Moroccan soldiers who traveled to the peninsula to fight for the Rebels traffic in poetically Orientalized heterosexual love relationships while attempting to manage the anxieties concerning the possibility that “interracial” affairs might arise from increased opportunities for contact.

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Notwithstanding the unique ambiguity that questions of racial identity held within the Spanish context, similar anxieties also emerge in the growing number of cultural texts set in Morocco, the Spanish Sahara, and Spanish Guinea, as the nation finally embarks upon concerted colonial development projects there. Although the homosexual subtexts discussed in the previous chapter do not fully disappear, postwar works (many of which enjoyed great popularity among readers and filmgoers) tend to be heavily inflected by the Franco regime’s new obsession with containing the gender fluidity and sexual “perversions” now attributed to the excesses of the Second Republic, and with reestablishing the traditional patriarchal family as normative. In several of the narratives I consider in this chapter, an idealized “native” family, shown reverently maintaining a strictly gendered division of labor, comes to serve as a model for family life on the peninsula; the symbolic valence of the central couple is bolstered by the implicit or explicit reference to their blood ties to Spaniards. Not infrequently, a shift in emphasis toward “family values” also draws attention to the children who may result from sexual relationships between Spanish men and native women (or, less commonly, between native men and Spanish women). The complexities and contradictions of Francoist views on race and national identity emerge with particular force in these works. It is also crucial to recognize that a familial trope subtended the entire colonial project: the idea of “blood brotherhood” was heavily mobilized during the Franco regime in the construction of a colonial philosophy that literalized the common European metaphor of the fraternally benevolent colonizer, with Spain imaged as playing the role of older and wiser brother to the developmentally delayed younger African siblings. Spain’s presumed blood ties to Africa explained the Iberian nation’s greater suitability for the colonization of the neighboring continent: who better to raise an orphaned child than an elder member of his or her own family? Spanish colonial rhetoric and policy during the Franco years confirm Ann Laura Stoler’s astute observation that “race was a primary and protean category for colonial capitalism and [. . .] managing the domestic was crucial to it” (13). Indeed, although the obsession with race, so characteristic of late nineteenthcentury Spanish national discourse, had fallen out of favor among the majority of academic Arabists during this time, the Africanists who were Franco’s most fervent supporters continued to champion the rhetoric of blood brotherhood, which found its way as well into many cultural texts of the era.¹ Juan Beigbeder, who left his position as high commissioner for Morocco in 1939 to become minister of foreign affairs, expressed the idea most baldly when he asserted to Britain’s ambassador to Spain, “We are all Moors” (qtd. in Elena, “Romancero” 109). But in fact all of the previous centuries’ Africanist commonplaces, discussed in

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chapter 1, were dusted off and placed prominently on display during the Franco regime, in public discourse and through officially sanctioned books and journals. Many of these volumes were published by the CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas [High Council of Scientific Research]) or by its later subdivisions, the IDEA (Instituto de Estudios Africanos [Institute for African Studies]), founded in 1945 and directed by José Díaz de Villegas, and the Instituto Miguel Asín y Palacios (Miguel Asín y Palacios Institute), founded in 1946 (Nogué and Villanova 216–17). The dozens of works penned by Tomás García Figueras, Franco’s right-hand man in Africa, are shot through with myriad variations on the words “fraternal” and “brother,” and the author laments that prejudice has impeded an open recognition of the family ties that unite Moroccans and Spaniards (see, for example, “Mística” 242). But some of the Africanists were clearly worried that amid all of this brotherly rhetoric Spaniards might be confused with black Africans. Rodolfo Gil Benumeya, like Joaquín Costa before him, emphasized that Spaniards as well as Moroccans belonged to the (essentially white) “Hispano-Berber” race, asserting that “the Iberian type, also called Berber, is still today the essence of the Spanish race in the majority of peninsular regions” (33). However, Gil Benumeya went one step beyond Costa’s clarification, adding that it was possible to identify two separate Berber races, one pure and the other not. Spaniards, of course, pertained to the pure line, unsullied by the intermarriage with sub-Saharan groups practiced by the Berber inhabitants of southern Morocco (36–38). (As we shall see later in this chapter, Franco’s Africanists would also feel compelled to modify their rhetoric of brotherhood when discussing and setting policy for blacks in Spanish Guinea, as well as for the more “racially mixed” Saharawi.) Other authors extended the earlier efforts to locate fundamental characteristics of identity in the prehistoric era; in the pages of the journal África, for instance, Julio Martínez Santa-Olalla argued that cave paintings discovered in northern Morocco proved the “Spanishness” of the region: they must have been made by Neolithic “Spanish” hunters, the original colonizers of the neighboring continent. Geographical determinism also returned in full force, with authors such as Gil Benumeya and Tomás Borrás arguing anew that Spain and Morocco were meant to be united, since they were mirror images of one another: each of the two zones included vast tablelands bounded on opposite ends by a major mountain range and traversed by precisely five rivers (Gil Benumeya 11–13; Borrás 8). Their ideas were far from novel—though they rarely acknowledged their illustrious nineteenth-century predecessors—but the Francoists did strive to contribute a fresh set of images to this discourse. Gil Benumeya, for example, described Spain and North Africa as “the two halves of a sliced fruit” (12). For his

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part, the Falangist writer Ernesto Giménez Caballero offered a modern variation on the traditional geographical arguments, employing a characteristically imaginative metaphor to argue that any rent between Spain and Morocco that might be represented by the strait had now been permanently sutured by Franco’s airplanes (26). In fact, from the Francoist perspective, more such “suturing” was in order; as will be clear later in this chapter, after the Civil War, Africanist discourse was soon marshaled to legitimize the dictator’s immoderate expansionist agenda in Africa. Foreign policy plays a surprisingly significant role in a number of the romantic narratives analyzed in this chapter. While the focus on heterosexual relationships enables these literary and filmic texts to engage with questions of micro- and macropolitical forms of “domestic policy” (with the individual family mirroring the national family, headed by the patriarch Franco), the position of privilege afforded to military or militarized characters and conflicts also facilitates treatment of the Spanish nation’s shifting position within a new world order. During World War II, Franco initially sought covert alliance with Hitler in an effort to expand his empire in North and Equatorial Africa, drawing upon customary Africanist commonplaces regarding Spain’s ties to the neighboring continent. After Hitler’s defeat, distancing the regime from German fascism was of crucial importance for overcoming the ostracism of postwar Europe and the United States. Yet the Spanish dictator continued to emphasize the inheritance of al-Andalus, and even fomented the development of Moroccan nationalism, in order to cultivate relationships with Arab states and garner their support for Spain’s entry into the United Nations. Later, when the United Nations called upon Spain to relinquish its remaining colonies in Africa, Franco claimed that the Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea were integral parts of the nation, and he converted them into provinces characterized as akin to all of Spain’s other historical regions. Over the course of his dictatorship, Franco sought to leverage Spain’s Islamic/African connections, increasingly with an eye toward securing a place within the Western world. COMING HOME: THE CIVIL WAR AND SPANISH-MOROCCAN RELATIONS

Spain’s close ties to Nazi Germany are evident from the first two Africanist films of the Franco regime, Romancero marroquí and La canción de Aixa (Moroccan Ballad Book; Aixa’s Song; released in the spring and summer of 1939, respectively), which were partially or entirely produced in Berlin studios. In the 1930s, Spain’s major film production facilities were located in Madrid and Bar-

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celona, and consequently they had remained under Republican control during the Civil War. However, German film companies were more than eager to share their state-of-the-art studios and personnel with the Rebels, for they hoped to expand into the lucrative markets of the Spanish-speaking world (Álvarez Berciano and Sala Noguer 206). While La canción de Aixa, which I discuss in the next section, even enjoyed the support of Hitler and his propaganda minister Goebbels, German involvement in Romancero marroquí was more limited: postproduction took place in Berlin, and Tobis Filmkunst also distributed a specially edited German-language version of the film, which appears to have been quite well received (Elena, Romancero 39, 77–89). Romancero was the first cinematic work to be conceived of as an expression of gratitude to the Moroccan soldiers who had fought in the Civil War. It exalts the notion of shared blood—the film begins with the postcredits message, “May the blood ties that unite our two peoples bear fruit for both in a luminous future”—while disavowing any possibility of sexual mixing by centering on a Moroccan family man who spends only the briefest of time fighting valiantly on the peninsula before returning home to his loving wife and children. The film was the brainchild of Juan Beigbeder, then high commissioner for Morocco, whose negotiations with local caids had been overwhelmingly successful in garnering Moroccan recruits for the war, as I mentioned at the end of chapter 4. Beigbeder’s office bankrolled the production, and he hired the Axis sympathizer Enrique Domíngez Rodiño, a representative of CEA Film Studios, to prepare a script and gather together a team of filmmakers (Elena, Romancero 27–29). How Carlos Velo, a celebrated director of documentaries—and a committed leftist—came to direct this film is still a matter of some speculation, despite the several vague interviews Velo granted years later and the painstaking research undertaken by Spanish film historian Alberto Elena. Caught in Rebel territory at the start of the war, Velo apparently failed in his efforts to pass incognito, for Domínguez Rodiño (with whom Velo had worked at CEA before the war) approached him about directing Romancero, and he was whisked off to Morocco in the spring of 1938. Velo has indicated, furthermore, that Beigbeder was a relative, and that may also explain his invitation to participate in the project (Gubern 125). Working from Domínguez Rodiño’s script, Velo and his brilliant cinematographers Cecilio Paniagua and Ricardo Torres spent some eight months shooting the film. Their work was closely supervised throughout by Spanish Africanist officials (including, among others, Beigbeder and Tomás García Figueras), who periodically screened the rough cuts produced by Velo on a makeshift editing table set up in his hotel room (Elena, Romancero 35–37). By late fall of 1938, Velo was scheduled to leave for Berlin to undertake postpro-

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duction, when he and his wife managed to shake off their two German “escorts” in Tangier and seek refuge in the Spanish Republican embassy. From there they eventually made their way to Paris, as well as Barcelona, before heading off into exile in Mexico (Gubern 126; Elena, Romancero 27–37). After this episode, Velo’s name was removed from the film’s credits, and there is still debate as to how much Romancero was reworked once the director had abandoned the project, since a new cut was produced by Marcel Cleinow and Ricardo Torres in Berlin in the spring of 1939 (Elena, Romancero 15–17, 39; Elena, “Políticas” 21, n. 18). It seems likely that ideological differences among the work’s various creators and supervisors contributed to the heterogeneous and in some cases contradictory nature of the film’s scenes.² For example, Romancero is much less effective at providing a coherent and convincing explanation for the massive participation of Moroccan soldiers in the Spanish Civil War than is Tomás García Figueras’s novel Ramadán de paz, discussed in the previous chapter. The film opens with many lyrically shot scenes of the Moroccan countryside, with an emphasis on the mosques from which the faithful are called to prayer, and then we witness the daily activities of the farmer Aalami, his beautiful wife Fatma, and their children. A male voiceover narrator subsequently informs us that every year Aalami must seek out additional work to sustain his family, an indirect reference to the several years of poor harvests and widespread hunger that have been cited by historians as the principal reason why Moroccan men were enticed by the opportunity to fight for pay in Spain (Madariaga, Moros 166–67; Mateo Dieste, Hermandad 165). Indeed, it is during his journey in search of employment that Aalami learns of the war in Spain and decides to enlist. Unlike García Figueras’s novel, however, where many pages are devoted to a careful exposition of Feddul’s conversion to the Rebel cause, here we have no access to Aalami’s reasoning process. Rather, a jarring montage sequence melds together images of airplanes, of flags, of the Falangist yoke and arrows, of the initial dates of the Rebel uprising, of Spanish and Moroccan civilian men, and of soldiers marching crisply in formation. Franco’s voice is heard on the soundtrack, calling Spaniards to arms in defense of the nation, while a quick shot of the famed Giralda Tower in Seville (formerly a minaret) dissolves to a closeup of a handshake between a Spanish military leader and a Moroccan official (fig. 25). Finally, as if responding to this almost subliminally suggested historical tie between Spaniards and Moroccans, Aalami is shown stepping forward with a determined look on his face. In subsequent scenes the narrator tendentiously asserts that Aalami as well as the other Moroccan men have now heard “the voice of their blood,” and have signed up “of their own volition [. . .] by heart’s mandate,” reiterating the claims made through title cards at the beginning of the film: “Like the hero

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25. The Giralda as backdrop to the Spanish-Moroccan handshake in Romancero marroquí. Photograph courtesy of Filmoteca Española, Madrid.

of this film, noble and simple, valiant and pure, a volunteer for Spain from the very beginning, of his own volition, as if obeying an ancestral mandate, this is how the Moroccan people took part in our Holy Crusade, voluntarily and with heroic vigor.” Yet the film’s depiction of Aalami’s economic circumstances is likely to lead viewers to believe that money has in fact won out over blood, a suspicion that is only confirmed later in the film when we see Fatma picking up her husband’s pay, signing for it with a thumbprint (fig. 26). Moreover, another scene even suggests that, as historians have asserted, as well as being bribed with money or promised that Morocco would be granted independence or would even regain control of al-Andalus, many were simply forced to fight in the war (Madariaga, Moros 167–69; Mateo Dieste, Hermandad 162–67). Velo himself has taken credit for having managed to shoot the scene, retained in the final film, in which Moroccan men, one accompanied by a sheep, are literally herded onto the airplane that will transport them to Spain (fig. 27; Gubern 126; Álvarez Berciano and Sala Noguer 92). That several different and conflicting ideological agendas impacted the making of this work is also evident from the two editorials published, while Romancero was being filmed, in July 1938 in Unidad Marroquí, the Spanish-

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26. While her husband fights in the Spanish Civil War, Fatma delightedly collects his paycheck in Romancero marroquí. Photograph courtesy of Filmoteca Española, Madrid.

language weekly supplement to the Moroccan nationalist newspaper Al-Wahda al-Maghribiya, which Alberto Elena has brought to light (and reprinted in his Romancero 94–100). The first editorial certainly attests to Beigbeder’s strategy of allowing some factions of Moroccan nationalists an unusual degree of freedom in exchange for their support for Franco (while marginalizing other groups of nationalists, in a classic “divide and conquer” scheme). Relying upon an unnamed source who has described some of the scenes that have been shot, the author condemns the filmmakers for focusing on the least attractive members of Moroccan society, such as religious fanatics, beggars, and the mentally ill, and for having recruited actresses from bordellos (a prostitute named Tahera was indeed hired to play the role of Fatma [Gubern 125]). He speculates that by including such images the filmmakers intend to show that Spaniards are much more civilized than Moroccans, but their efforts will fail, for the movie will only serve to demonstrate that Spain has accomplished nothing in a quarter century of tutelage. The author argues, furthermore, that such misery is to be found everywhere, and in a slyly indirect reference to Luis Buñuel’s infamous film Land Without Bread (1933), which was banned by the Republic, he questions whether Spaniards would allow a film of Las Hurdes to represent their nation.

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27. Moroccan men—and sheep—are herded onto the airplanes to Spain in Romancero marroquí. Photograph courtesy of Filmoteca Española, Madrid.

The piece ends with a pointed threat to boycott Romancero, and is followed immediately with a quote by Franco in which he insists that Spain’s only purpose in Morocco is to “return to that people the civilization that they once brought us here.” In the next issue, the editors share with their readers the response of the film’s producer, most likely Domínguez Rodiño, according to Elena. In condescending fashion, the producer implies that Moroccans don’t comprehend film technology, attributing the misunderstanding to “a possibly erroneous interpretation of modern cinematographic technique, whose secrets are numerous and complicated.” For his part, Elena also discounts the editorial’s “superficial” criticism of the film, arguing that the author’s “virulent invective” was simply another means to protest against the ambivalence of the official Spanish position concerning the Moroccan nationalist cause. In the summer of 1938 that protest was becoming increasingly more violent, as several Africanists, including García Figueras and Tomás Borrás, made imprudent public references to Spain’s “empire” and Morocco’s “integration” within it. There were rumors of insurrection in the protectorate, and several nationalist youths even interrupted a theatrical performance in Tetuán attended by the khalifa (the sultan’s representative in

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the Spanish protectorate) and other local authorities with shouts of “Death to Franco! Death to the traitors!” (Romancero 41–51). At the same time, the complaints lodged against the film itself seem eminently justified. As Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste has explained in his illuminating analysis of the manipulation of religious sectarianism in the protectorate, Moroccan nationalists were convinced that Spanish officials were interested in promoting the more gory rites of certain mystical Islamic brotherhoods (such as self-flagellation or the consumption of live animals) “to demonstrate the savage character of Moroccans and the irrationality of their religion.” Later in the 1940s, Moroccan nationalists worried—not without reason, according to Mateo Dieste—that Franco would show film footage of such practices at the United Nations in order to argue that Morocco was not yet ready for independence (Hermandad 291). Thus it is understandable that the editorialist would condemn the shots of “aberrant” Sufi brotherhoods—briefly included in the section of the film devoted to the Festival of Mouloud, where we glimpse one penitent being paraded in a cage—as well as other images of marginal figures in Moroccan society. Yet the filmmakers do seem to respond directly to the challenges raised in the editorial by including a number of sections that endeavor to highlight the advances that have been accomplished in Morocco thanks to Spain’s “protection.” When Fatma’s baby falls sick, for example, she tries to cure him with traditional Moroccan remedies, but after that fails she turns to a Spanish doctor. As she leaves the clinic, her beaming face reflects her newfound faith in the power of modern medicine. This scene is followed by a sort of minidocumentary demonstrating how, as the narrator intones, “the industrial activities of the protectorate expand and intensify with every passing day.” We witness children attending school, pupils at the celebrated Arts and Crafts Academy in Tetuán, founded by Spain, and work in progress at the Rif mines, whose productivity, we are told, has contributed to the Rebel victory. Although contemporary historians have argued that the protectorate was plagued by scarcity and rampant inflation during the war (Madariaga, Moros 186), other sections of the film show local markets replete with goods and money, and the narrator insists: “Just as in well-ruled and well-run National [Rebel] Spain, of which Morocco is a faithful reflection, nothing is lacking in any of the zones of the protectorate.” It is not surprising that the khalifa, who is immortalized as a popular ruler and faithful friend of Spain in several scenes of the film, gave his enthusiastic approval to Romancero; although in a “concessionary” gesture to the Moroccan nationalists Domínguez Rodiño had promised in his editorial to make the khalifa’s approval a condition for release of the film, the leader’s opinion was clearly a foregone conclusion. Franco also reacted extremely favorably to the film, which was premiered at a

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gala screening in Spain on July 17, the anniversary of the beginning of the Rebel uprising in Morocco (Elena, Romancero 39–41). Besides promoting Spaniards’ “protection” of the welfare of their Moroccan “brothers,” Romancero marroquí is most successful at presenting, through exquisitely wrought scenes, an idealized depiction of Moroccan family values. Velo himself has confessed that he was inspired by the stunning ethnographic films of Robert Flaherty (Gubern 125), and Romancero’s much-praised image track begins with panoramic views of the countryside, followed by luminous and artfully framed glimpses into the daily activities of Aalami, Fatma, and their children, as the needs of the household are tended to and seeds are planted for the new season. Fatma is shown in her modest but tidy whitewashed home caring tenderly for her children and for Aalami’s elderly father. Although she must undertake rough chores, such as carrying heavy jugs of water and gathering firewood, the narrator is careful to point out that the able-bodied male members of the family are also hard at work during the day. After his prayers, Aalami plows the fields, while their young son watches over the flock. In this way, the film extols the domestic industriousness of the Moroccan woman, while countering the stereotypical imagery, common since the nineteenth century (Martín Corrales 105–6; Marín, “Mujeres” 92–93), that depicted her overburdened with children and heavy bundles, trudging behind a husband who is the only one to enjoy the privilege of riding comfortably on the family donkey. Aalami, by contrast, is clearly concerned for the well-being of Fatma and his children, and once he arrives in Spain his thoughts are completely occupied with them. By shifting to a presentation of Aalami’s subjectivity at this point, the film neatly avoids the portrayal of violent Civil War battle scenes; instead, it has another lengthy series of images featuring daily life in the Moroccan protectorate, framed by shots of Aalami’s smiling family and ending with Fatma hiring a scribe in order to send a love letter to her husband that will tell him “I only desire to see your beloved face.” Finally, we witness the sole war scene of the film (just one minute in length), which depicts a battle in which Aalami helps capture an enemy hilltop. The Moroccan then returns home a sergeant, bearing three wounds, a medal, and a music box filled with jewelry for Fatma (presumably attained through the war plundering encouraged by Spanish military officials [Madariaga, Moros 303–5]). Aalami has arrived just in time for the harvest, and beautifully rhythmical scenes depict the gathering of grain that quickly turns into a celebratory dance. Eliding the impact that the massive recruitment of men had on the agricultural crisis in the protectorate (Madariaga, Moros 186), the film thus asserts that Aalami’s participation in the war, like that of the other “fraternal friends of Spain,” has not interrupted the rhythm of his life. Similar photographic images

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of a harmonious rural existence would later be incorporated into the Africanist Tomás Borrás’s book La España completa (The Complete Spain), together with a caption underlining the same idea of shared family values: “The Moroccan family, the authentic sister of the Spanish family, in tranquil life scenes under Franco’s peace.” Throughout the 1940s, a number of Spanish cultural texts would express gratitude for Moroccan contributions to the Rebels’ victory, while furthering Romancero marroquí’s emphasis on the strong sentimental ties that drew Moroccan soldiers back home to their families and loved ones after the war. Luis Antonio de Vega, who had served as director of Arabic schools in Larache and Tetuán before the war, and who was a prolific author of Orientalist verse and best-selling novels of romance and intrigue set in the protectorate (Carrasco González, Novela 154–55), devoted both prose and poetry to the subject. His novel Sirena de pólvora (Siren of Dust, ca. 1941) centers on a young Moroccan man, Hamido, who joins the Rebels, not simply because he is persuaded that the communist “pigs” must be destroyed (96–97) but, more important, to earn money to pay for a dowry for his intended, Arkeía (136). Even Arkeía desires to enlist for love, but her remarkable attempt to disguise herself as a man, don a soldier’s uniform, and follow her beloved to Spain fails miserably: she is unable even to leave the confines of her home once she realizes that her henna-stained heels will instantly betray her femininity. For his part Hamido is prevented from returning to Arkeía, since he is captured and buried alive; nor will he find a home in paradise after death, for his body is profanely turned away from Mecca by “the enemy of his race and of ours” (174; that the “reds” were considered a “race apart,” a subject taken up again later in this chapter, is evident from this passage). The women in Vega’s novel spend languorous days composing love songs, and Sirena de pólvora ends with Arkeía, ignorant of Hamido’s cruel fate, singing a new piece celebrating the return of her heroic soldier. Arkeia’s song is just one of a series Vega wrote during these years. His “Moroccan songs,” anthologized by Tomás García Figueras, were likely influenced by the translations of Hispano-Arabic poetry published in 1930 and again in 1940 by the eminent Arabist Emilio García Gómez, which had a notable impact on writers of the time. Unlike José Rojas y Moreno’s similarly inspired but more homoerotic text, discussed at the end of the previous chapter, however, Vega’s imitations do not stray from the more heteronormative readings of HispanoArabic poetry that were preferred, as Anthony Espósito has argued, by some Spanish Arabists (although not, it must be noted, by García Gómez himself ) (Espósito 467–71). In each of his free-form pieces Vega adopts the voice of a Moroccan woman who anxiously awaits the return of her beloved. An unmar-

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ried woman vows that she will not paint her hands with henna (a Moroccan wedding custom) for as long as the man who has captured her heart remains in Spain; several other female voices, presumably married women, fantasize about the night they will spend together with their heroic men upon their return. Although Franco is exalted as the “man of Goodness,” the poems make clear that, after they have served the Caudillo, Moroccan men will not tarry in Spain, despite the notable distractions to be found there: “Once the war ends no garden or palace or Christian woman’s arms will detain you” (reproduced in García Figueras, “Mística” 260–65). Curiously, in 1943 Vega published an article in África: Revista de Acción Española, entitled “Así cantan nuestras moras” (This Is What Our Moorish Women Sing), in which he passed these same verses off as popular songs sung by Moroccan women whose lovers and husbands were fighting in Spain. Here Vega would appear to be simulating the fulfillment of a wish expressed in the epilogue of his earlier collection of poetry, Romancero colonial (Colonial Ballad-Book, 1934), where he wrote: “May my romances [popular medieval ballads] enter the Arabic medinas, the Jewish quarters, and the Christian neighborhoods of Morocco, and, one day, may a young feminine mouth recite them, even though she may not know that it was I who wrote them beneath the high grapevines of the Moorish tea shop or the leafy shade of the fig trees ripe with fruit” (n.p.). Of course, the desire by men to put words in women’s mouths is hardly exclusive to the colonial context, but Vega’s efforts to “ventriloquize” Moroccan women must be read alongside Ann Laura Stoler’s lucid analysis of the fundamental importance of the regulation of gendered identities and sexual desire for the colonial project: “It was how women’s needs were defined, not by but for them, that most directly shaped specific policies” (42).³ Antonio Fernández-Caro engages in similar forms of ventriloquism in several of the poems of his Tambor africano: Andanzas líricas de un cristiano por Marruecos y musulmán por España (African Drum: Lyrical Wanderings of a Christian Through Morocco and a Muslim Through Spain; Tangier, 1935–39), a volume which also finds inspiration in Hispano-Arabic verse (and which he claims in the opening dedication was originally written in Arabic). But rather than featuring the Moroccan girlfriends and wives to whom Franco’s mercenaries would faithfully return, a number of Fernández-Caro’s poems suggest that the experience of “Hispano-Arabic brotherhood” could be intensified by the opportunities for contact between Spanish men and Moroccan women— and Moroccan men and Spanish women—afforded by the Spanish Civil War, as well as by life in the protectorate. In one (“Por mi cruz y su corán” [For My Cross and Her Koran]), the poetic speaker, a Christian man, sighs over the forbidden love he shares with the Muslim woman who lives next door, and who is fated to

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marry a Muslim man: “I nailed to my cross / she captive of her Koran / Both of us—drinking in love— / on the neighboring terraces / every evening at sunset . . . / longing and fear in our eyes.” Another poem about a Moroccan prostitute (“A una Laila de portal” [To an Entryway Laila]), however, indicates that not all such “loves” are impossible; in the poem’s dedication Fernández Caro observes, “You know her, Raúl Sánchez, poet of the zocos.” Another piece, dedicated, significantly, to a Spanish military officer (Colonel José Bermejo López), describes a stroll through the medina, which ends at the “old café / lost in the old quarter / which open to the long night / of the Moroccan walkways/ lives a sinful fever / of almehs and adventurers.” But the most interesting poems are located at the end of the book, in a section that bears the resonant title “Impresiones líricas de la Guerra Mudéjar 1936–39” (Lyrical Impressions of the Mudéjar War 1936–39; the term “mudéjar” describes those Muslims residing in the Christian zone in medieval Spain). In one of the pieces a wounded “morito” woos the Spanish nurse who has revived his flesh; he will take her back to his land, where she will be surrounded by cushions and tapestries of silk and gold, suffering the jealous gazes of the “moras” whom he has forgotten, as he plays kassidas for her on his Moroccan lute. Significantly less “delicate” is the poem in which a Moroccan comes to Spain to seek out the object of his passion: “If Allah understands / the entire force of my burning love / I shall find you naked / kissing the light of my minaret / of the mosque which my dream drags / through the bloody fields of this Spain / that battles fiercely / to the sound of cannon fire” (“Si es que Alah comprende / toda la fuerza de mi amor en llamas / te encontraré desnuda / besándome la luz del minarete / de la mezquita que mi sueño arrastra / por los campos sangrientos de esta España / que a toque de cañón / se lidia fuerte”; n.p.). Surrealist pretensions aside, the singularly unsubtle use of body/building metaphors in this poem presents a particularly explicit image of sexual contact between a Moroccan man and a Spanish woman, at a time in which the war was indeed facilitating such relationships. As we shall see later in this chapter, Franco’s government would soon intervene; much as Vega had co-opted the desires of Moroccan women, the sentimental and sexual needs of Spanish women would also be defined for them, but in this case they would be enforced as well through a (top secret) regime of surveillance and control. CONTROLLING PASSION IN FRANCO’S HAREM: LA CANCIÓN DE AIXA

The film La canción de Aixa (1939) also appears initially to enter into this more taboo erotic terrain by representing the attraction that a half-Spanish

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woman feels for two Moroccan men, one of whom she will marry. The film eventually resolves the question of Aixa’s mixed identity, however, by redefining her as unproblematically Moroccan, thus diminishing the anxiety that might be provoked by her alliance with an “other” man. Aixa’s classification as Moroccan also coincides with Spanish colonialist practice in Africa, according to which mixed children were customarily incorporated into the local community and denied the legal, economic, and educational privileges enjoyed by Spaniards. Even so, Juan Beigbeder’s assertion that “we are all Moors” resonates with La canción de Aixa, for although the central characters are mostly Moroccans, they also function to represent Spaniards in the work’s allegorical treatment of political conflicts and gender roles on the peninsula. Shot in the UFA studios in Nazi Berlin, with exteriors filmed on location in Morocco in late 1938 (coinciding for a time with work on Romancero marroquí), La canción de Aixa was the first Rebel-allied production to be released after the end of the Civil War. The film benefited from an extensive marketing campaign; photographs from the era show a cinema in Palencia, for example, decked out with a false “Moorish” façade (rpt. in Álvarez Berciano and Sala Noguer 120). After premiering in the protectorate itself (in Tetuán and Larache, as well as Ceuta and Melilla), Aixa opened in twenty-two cities on the peninsula and enjoyed a robust twelve-week run in Madrid; the film’s theme song, composed by Federico Moreno Torroba, also became quite popular (Elena, “Canción” 29). The script had been written by the poet, playwright, and operetta librettist Manuel de Góngora, who had worked as an archivist at the Alhambra and was known for his Orientalist tendencies (Elena, “Canción” 26–27). Florián Rey, the film’s acclaimed director, was also well suited to take on a project of this nature: he had served in Morocco from 1915 to 1918, and in the 1920s had appeared as an actor in one of the earliest Spanish feature films set in the protectorate, Alma rifeña (Riffian Soul, 1922; directed by José Buchs), before directing a movie of his own shot on location in Morocco, Águilas de acero o los misterios de Tánger (Steel Eagles, or The Mysteries of Tangier, 1927). Although the latter film offered up a heady mix of romance, espionage, and betrayal, the exciting aviation scenes and the protagonist’s final stand in favor of Spain’s interests in the Rif wars contributed to the work’s characterization as unequivocally “patriotic” (Sánchez Vidal, Cine 20, 89–91). Rey’s “patriotism” would eventually lead him to the direction of La canción de Aixa. As an impassioned Rebel sympathizer, the director had become embroiled in a violent encounter with a Republican officer shortly before the outbreak of the war, a circumstance that prevented him from continuing to produce films in the Spanish studios in Republican-controlled Madrid and Barcelona. Rey,

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together with his wife and collaborator, the immensely popular film actress and singer Imperio Argentina, traveled first to Paris and then to the United States, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, seeking opportunities for moviemaking. While in Cuba, Rey and Argentina were invited to work on a series of films for Hispano Film Produktion in the UFA studios (Sánchez Vidal, Cine 226–28). The Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels was particularly interested in capitalizing on Germany’s alliance with the Rebels in order to penetrate the Latin American film market (Álvarez Berciano and Sala Noguer 206). For his part, Hitler himself was reputedly an enthusiastic fan of Imperio Argentina, having viewed her performance as a charming but chaste Aragonese peasant in Rey’s Nobleza baturra (Aragonese Virtue, 1935) on repeated occasions.⁴ According to Argentina, Goebbels wished her to star in a new version of the Lola Montes story in which the revolutionary lover of Franz Liszt and King Ludwig of Bavaria would be converted into an agitator for the Hitler Youth movement, an idea which she flatly rejected. Curiously, Rey claims that it was Hitler who insisted that Argentina play Carmen, a character who presumably in racial terms would have been anathema to the dictator, given his persecution of the Roma (qtd. in Sánchez Vidal, Cine 228). Moreover, after the couple had completed Carmen la de Triana, they embarked on yet another film in which Argentina incarnated a racially suspect character: Aixa, the orphaned daughter of a Spanish father and a Moroccan mother. Yet, as we shall see, La canción de Aixa devotes considerable energy to negotiating the peculiar intersections between race and ideology that would characterize both fascist and Francoist formulations of the era. Aixa is a singer whose career is managed by her paternal uncle José (Pedro Barreto), a somewhat clownish renegado (a Spanish convert to Islam) originally from Valladolid. While performing in Tetuán, she meets two Moroccan men, cousins from warring families. From their own first chance encounter in a luxurious hotel bar at the beginning of the film, the cousins are presented as diametrically opposed. Hamed (Ricardo Merino) sports a white tuxedo, drinks whisky, listens to European music, dances with women, drives a car (and carelessly accumulates parking tickets), is disrespectful of his father, and voices his preference for the diversions of city life, insisting that Moroccans must embrace modernity. Abslam (Manuel Luna) wears a turban with his military uniform, refuses to touch alcohol, avoids the company of women, reveres the paternal legacy, and is anxious to return to his home in the provinces. Despite their profound differences, the two men pledge their friendship and vow to resolve their ancestral family disputes. Their relationship, however, will be severely tested when both men fall in love with Aixa. Aixa’s early preference for Hamed might initially appear to align the film with

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Moroccan modernity. Hamed is continually associated with Western mores and technological advances: when Abslam comes to greet him in his sumptuous encampment in the country, for example, his cousin turns on his radio, clearly a novelty, to a station playing festive “music from Paris.” Once he arrives home, Hamed surrounds himself with friends who smoke, drink (in obvious violation of Islamic codes), and pore over books as they listen to Aixa’s songs on a record player. As soon as his father draws near, however, the music stops, and the books and alcohol are squirreled away; intellectual pursuits are thus associated with filial disobedience and a dissolute lifestyle. While this might reflect the Rebels’ notorious disdain for intellectuals, vividly exemplified in the bitter exchange between José Millán Astray and Miguel de Unamuno at the 1936 celebration of the Day of the Race at the University of Salamanca, in which the military officer shouted, “Death to intelligence!,” it also anticipates Miguel Asín Palacios’ description of the proper context for Spanish tutelage of Moroccans. In his 1940 article exalting the Regulares’ contributions to the Civil War, discussed in the previous chapter, Asín Palacios asserts that in the postwar era Moroccans should study alongside Spaniards, but far away from the influence of major cities, in which “the culture of traditional Spain has almost been absorbed by that European and cosmopolitan pseudocivilization of the bar and the Yankee foxtrot and the French cabaret” (151). Much as Asín Palacios will do in his article, La canción de Aixa continues to question the value of modernity in subsequent scenes. The most humorous concern a subplot involving Aixa’s efforts to travel through the Moroccan interior. The singer’s bone-rattling trips in her uncle’s newly acquired bargain basement automobile, accompanied on the soundtrack by a lumbering musical refrain, form an important leitmotif, which reaches a resolution of sorts when the jalopy, after several breakdowns, finally runs out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Aixa and her uncle José are then saved by Abslam’s men, who employ horses to tow the useless vehicle to their master’s estate. The not-so-subtle valorization of tradition over modernity in this film might be interpreted in several different ways, all of which reveal anxiety concerning Spain’s relative backwardness during this period.⁵ Spain’s precarious position visà-vis modernity might appear strengthened through comparison with Morocco: that is, the only way to figure Spain as modern is by figuring the protectorate as even less so. As we have seen, this is precisely the strategy condemned by the Moroccan nationalist editorialist who objected to some of the images that had been shot for the film Romancero marroquí. It is hardly surprising that many Spanish cultural texts (like colonialist works in general) preferred to represent the colonies as picturesque archives of premodern customs. For example, the brilliant photographer and military aviator José Ortiz Echagüe (a descendant of

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the General Echagüe of Spanish-Moroccan War fame), whose pioneering aerial images of the Rif as well as his bombing runs had aided the war effort, also “shot” Moroccans of both sexes and all ages with his camera, highlighting the persistence of traditional ways of life. Widely acclaimed for his technical manipulations that produced gauzy, dreamlike, or painterly images, Ortiz Echagüe was so concerned with concealing the inroads that modernity had made in Morocco that in at least one later photograph of an urban street scene with a Moorish arch he airbrushed out an offending traffic sign and replaced the Western clothing worn by some passers-by with djellabas (Domeño Martínez de Morentín 137– 39).⁶ Yet Ortiz Echagüe’s celebrated photographs of both Moroccans and Spaniards in fact expose the astonishing similarities between lifestyle and culture on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Stark landscapes, humble whitewashed abodes, fanciful remnants of “Moorish” architecture, and ruined fortresses appear in Spanish and Moroccan pictures alike. Elaborate feminine costumes are omnipresent, and his camera is as likely to capture veiled women in Spain as in Morocco. And who wouldn’t mistake his photograph of a (Moroccan) blind man guided by a young boy dressed in rags for an illustration right out of the (Spanish) picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes? Notwithstanding his own obsession with aviation and automobiles (beginning in the 1920s, Ortiz Echagüe manufactured airplanes and later founded SEAT, which produced the first Spanish-made cars), neither the Spain nor the Morocco depicted by the photographer pertains to the modern world. Unlike Ortiz Echagüe, however, many Spanish leftists offered a different perspective on the “archaic” quality of Moroccan and Spanish life. Prior to the Franco era, numerous public figures had questioned Spain’s efforts to bring civilization to the African colonies when it hadn’t even managed to bring civilization to its own citizens. The Catalan travel writer Aurora Bertrana’s 1936 critique of Spanish colonialism in Morocco casts a radically different spin on the discourse of “blood brotherhood” marshaled by the Africanists. Citing “our racial incapacity for colonization,” particularly notable when contrasted with the racial pride and superiority exhibited by the French in their sector, she argued that Spaniards would do better to focus on “Occidentalizing” themselves first, so they might become “less [like] Moors” (90). Other writers underlined in particular Spain’s lack of economic development. In 1913 the Basque Socialist poet Tomás Meabe wrote sardonically: “Schools, highways, industry, a thousand things which we are lacking here in our lives, but which we are not able or don’t desire to create, we shall create abroad. We Spaniards shall civilize ourselves, not in Spain but in Africa” (qtd. in López García, “Marruecos” 4). A nation as impoverished and embattled as Spain would be hard pressed to offer Morocco what it could hardly

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claim for itself, and as Bernabé López García has confirmed, “colonization did not produce the ‘modernization’ effect that the very Protectorate Declaration intended” (“Marruecos” 5). Later in the 1940s, out of sheer economic necessity, the Franco regime would finally devote more significant resources to the development of the previously neglected colonies (Nerín and Bosch 172–73), and Hermic Films would carry on the tradition timidly initiated in a few scenes of Romancero marroquí, by producing a plethora of beautifully filmed documentaries designed to publicize the fruits of Spain’s “civilizing mission” in Africa (Elena, “Cámaras” 121–22: F.-Figares Romero de la Cruz 234–48). At this earlier point, however, there were few accomplishments for La canción de Aixa to flaunt, and the filmmakers opted for a different strategy. By insisting that Moroccan traditions function better in Morocco than do modern technological advances—as in the scenes in which literal horsepower is shown to be more effective than automobiles—the film works to justify Spain’s presumably more “hands-off ” policy, which contrasts with France’s imposition of Western education, technology, and industrial development within its portion of the protectorate (Ybarra Enríquez de la Orden 33). Ever since the French had colonized Algeria in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Spaniards had felt pressed to compete with their neighbor across the Pyrenees, and that competition reached a feverish pitch during these years, when Spanish rhetoric and military maneuvers openly challenged the existence of the French protectorate (Nerín and Bosch 44, 145, 148–51). Even though many of Spain’s institutions and policies within the protectorate were in fact copied directly from French practices in Algeria and southern Morocco (Mateo Dieste, Hermandad 58–59), and even though the French were called upon to bail Spain out of several disastrous military conflicts (at the end of the Rif wars, and during the Ifni War of 1958), for decades Spaniards sought to assert that their nation was a radically different and more respectful “protector” of Moroccan values than France was. As Abel Albet i Mas has asserted, that discourse was designed to “cover over the complete ineffectiveness of [Spain’s] colonization activities and proposals” (379). While the two colonizing forces were even pitted against one another in Spanish fiction of the era (Carrasco González, Novela 148), their confrontation is especially evident in the pages of África: Revista de Acción Española, where article after article compares the French and Spanish styles of colonization, to the detriment of the former. Some of the pieces are penned by Germans, who were present in significant numbers in the Spanish protectorate during the Spanish Civil War and the early years of World War II. The more extreme Nazi perspective on race is evident in Diedrich Westermann’s article “La política

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colonial indígena” (Colonial Indigenous Policies), which condemns the French practice of assimilation, arguing that different racial groups must be kept apart, and that blacks in particular must adopt a “healthy realism” and accept the superiority of Europeans (13). And indeed, as Lotfi Sayahi has argued, a focus on the educational system shows that while the French encouraged the widespread adoption of their language and allowed the Moroccan elite to aspire to advanced learning and high-level positions in government and society, Spanish educational policies in the protectorate might in fact be described as segregationist. Separate schools and curricula were established for Spanish (Catholic), Moroccan Jewish, and Moroccan Muslim students. Together with the emphasis on religious and vocational training, the extensive Arabization campaign instituted in 1937 also functioned to discourage Moroccans from learning Spanish. Yet Spaniards claimed that their protectorate’s school system, rather than promoting racial hierarchies, simply reflected respect for local cultural mores (Sayahi; see also G. Jensen, “Toward”). More in tune with the Spanish Africanists’ ostensibly “antiracist” rhetoric is Heinz Barth’s article “Punto de vista alemán sobre el porvenir de Marruecos” (A German Point of View on the Future of Morocco). Barth also disapproves of France’s “liberal” system of colonization, which only brings hunger, disorder, violence, and materialism to the native population, and he insists that “Spain rules in another manner” (16). Indeed, because of their “blood instinct,” Spaniards are uniquely suited for the colonization project in Morocco: “On few occasions has a nation contributed such favorable conditions for colonization as have the Spaniards in Morocco. Their affinity of blood and cultural basis make it easier for them to understand the Moroccan world. And for that reason, it is not difficult for Spain to follow a colonial policy based on national equality” (16). Thus, paradoxically, it is precisely because of their racial and cultural ties to Moroccans that Spaniards have devised “separate but equal” policies in the protectorate. This juxtaposition of Spanish to French colonial practices is also played out in symbolic fashion in La canción de Aixa. It is particularly fitting that Hamed listens to Parisian music on the radio, since he is aligned with the French style of colonization and is eager to reject his own traditions in favor of European culture and technology. Abslam, by contrast, has served as an officer in Spain’s Army of Africa, an institution that has clearly allowed him to maintain his own cultural inheritance, and once he returns home and takes on the position of caid he is depicted as operating altogether independently of the Spanish colonial system. In fact the Interventores, as the Spanish colonial officers were called, were stationed along with a small support staff in rural areas in order to keep strict

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tabs on the local caids and their subjects. However, by completely screening off this figure (no Interventores appear in the film) La canción de Aixa complies with the mandates of an official manual, which explicitly describes the caid’s puppetlike status in the colonial theater: “Let him be the one who gives orders, but behind the screen is the Interventor” (qtd. in Mateo Dieste, Hermandad 76, n. 28). In this way the film furthers the rhetoric that opposed Spanish to French colonial practices by implying that Spain was much more respectful of local sovereignty than in fact was the case. As well as representing ostensibly divergent Spanish and French colonial philosophies, in allegorical terms Abslam and Hamed might also be viewed as figuring the “warring cousins” (Rebels and Republicans) on the peninsula and, by extension, correct and incorrect models of masculine behavior according to the latest version of Francoist ideology. While in La canción de Aixa Morocco signifies, logically, Morocco, it also symbolizes Spain, a nation set to embark upon a period of autarchy, characterized on the cultural front by the Franco regime’s rejection of a modernity now deemed “foreign” and its exaltation of timeworn national traditions. Unlike the increasingly vilified Hamed, who disobeys and deceives his father, Abslam maintains supreme respect for the paternal legacy, placing duty and the upholding of patriarchal values over the satisfaction of his own desires. Once his father dies, under suspicious circumstances that aggravate the tensions between the cousins, he accepts the mantle of caid. Hamed, for his part, schemes to spend time alone with Aixa, bribing her uncle José to bring his niece to visit him in the country, and lying about their identity to members of the household when they arrive. His father Amar is forced to avoid any improprieties by expelling the young woman from his land once he discovers the ruse. It is then that Abslam’s men rescue Aixa and her uncle from their disabled auto, and Abslam offers the singer honorable refuge in his harem alongside his sister Zohira. Despite his love for Aixa, Abslam never violates traditional mores, and at home he scrupulously avoids any contact with his honored guest. Even when he overhears her singing within the harem, Abslam overcomes his urge to enter upon that space or even peek in through the latticework; he simply walks away. In a following scene, after resolving important political matters, Abslam calmly prepares to send a marriage proposal to Aixa’s uncle. Like the male citizen promulgated by wartime and postwar Francoist ideology, Abslam sublimates his desire into sacrifice for the good of his people before channeling any remaining sexual energy into monogamous marriage. Moreover, once they are married Abslam will not consummate the union until his reluctant bride consents to it, despite the film’s notable eroticization of Imperio Argentina in the scene de-

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picting the wedding preparations, where backlighting outlines the actress’s body through her filmy robes as she approaches the perfumed bath, and a reverse shot allows us to catch a glimpse of her bare back as her gown slips off her shoulders. Abslam’s characterization thus runs counter to the Orientalist stereotype of the lascivious Moor, which as we have seen had dominated Spanish discourse on North African men for many centuries, and had most recently been seized upon by the Republicans who condemned the Rebels’ reliance upon Moroccan mercenaries, recounting horrific stories of the rape and murder of women during the war (Madariaga, Moros 296–318). Official Francoist expressions of gratitude required that the Moroccan “brothers” be portrayed as Abslam is, as sober upholders of patriarchal family values and eminently respectful of women’s virtue. Perhaps the most outrageous such attempt was penned by the Falangist Ernesto Giménez Caballero, who claimed in an article published in África that the Moroccan soldier countered the dehumanization and prostitution of women effected by the “reds” by reminding Spaniards of their traditional sense of honor— a tradition the author attributes in part to an earlier “Germanic” influence: “On July 18 the Moor contributed his Calderonian zeal, his virile idea, inherited from classic and Christian, Romano-Germanic Spain, that woman is something private, intimate, affectionate, chaste, a mother of sons and of warriors; but never merchandise for exchange” (25–26). Like Giménez Caballero’s article, La canción de Aixa rejects the stereotypes that associated North African men with the reduction of women to sexual objects to be bought and sold, in an astonishing scene in which Hamed himself mimics colonialist discourse. Toward the end of the film, Hamed shouts to Aixa that Abslam “has bought you like a market slave, in order to force you to follow him into the wickedness of his evil race.” On the one hand the insult reveals Hamed’s complete assimilation of a racist colonialist perspective, again marking off his association with French colonial practice; that he characterizes his own cousin as representing an “evil race” is revelatory. On the other hand, Hamed’s accusation functions ironically to underline the fact that it is he who has treated Aixa like a market slave, since earlier in the film he is shown imperiously throwing a gold chain at her uncle’s feet in a (successful) attempt to “persuade” him to bring Aixa to his country residence. Abslam, by contrast, does not attempt to bribe Aixa or her uncle José with expensive gifts in order to secure her favors. Money only enters the discussion once he has made an honorable proposal of marriage, and with noble intent Abslam then insists, much to José’s glee, that Aixa merits the dowry of a princess. As suggested in Giménez Caballero’s article, it is the modern European(ized) man and not the traditional Moroccan who dishonors women. At the same time, however, the film also indicates that both Hamed and Ab-

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slam are dangerously diminished by their obsession with Aixa. Hamed’s selfish fixation on the singer seriously threatens the newfound peace between the two families. He refuses the marriage his father has arranged for him with Abslam’s sister Zohira, designed to seal their truce (no doubt assuming, incorrectly, that it was simply Abslam’s ploy to win Aixa for himself ). Once Aixa has been wed to Abslam, Hamed appears outside their palace at night and serenades his beloved with her favorite song, before tossing a dagger onto the roof so that she might kill herself rather than succumb to his rival. Although it is a dramatically romantic scene, there is also something disturbing about the fact that Hamed chooses to sing the very song with which Aixa is so clearly identified throughout the film (she is heard singing it on four occasions), as if his passion had driven him to mimic her voice and adopt her persona. While with his own songs Luis Antonio de Vega had ventured to put words in Moroccan women’s mouths, here it is a woman who has “ventriloquized” Hamed. Not inconsequentially, in this section the film also reveals the potentially dire consequences of Hamed’s preference for reading and listening to Aixa’s music over riding and marksmanship lessons, for after declaring that his performance in a competition will bring honor to his father he is initially unable to hit a bull’s-eye while on horseback, and the men of the estate laugh uproariously. The film reaffirms the traditional association between North African masculinity and firearms, despite the fact that Spain’s “pacification” of the protectorate had mandated the complete disarmament of the “natives” (Madariaga, Moros 177). More surprising, however, is that even the upright Abslam is feminized by his obsession with Aixa. While early on Abslam is shown personally attending to his subjects, generously granting tax relief to the poor and an amnesty to the men of Amar’s kabila, in the first days of his marriage, as he attempts to win the affections of his disconsolate bride, he neglects all of his political duties. When he fails to preside over an adjudication, the men of the kabila refuse to accept the rulings of his proxies, and his adviser must call an open meeting of the elders’ council in an attempt to head off an insurrection. Yet Abslam, embroiled in another jealous conflict with Hamed, misses the start of the meeting, and the two women Aixa and Zohira are forced to attend in his place—hidden within latticework compartments and unable to rule over the proceedings—thus symbolizing the shamefully impotent feminization of authority. In the film’s climactic scene, Abslam even consents to be called a coward by Hamed, for he knows that if he were to kill his rival in a duel he would cause Aixa pain. It is only at this moment that Aixa recognizes the depth of Abslam’s love for her, and she restores order (and “proper” gender relations) by giving herself over to her husband; Aixa must submit so that Abslam may regain his manhood.

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28. Aixa performs in public before Europeanized Hamed and traditional Abslam in La canción de Aixa. Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

Indeed, with respect to Aixa, gendered Orientalist clichés are first deconstructed and then reconstructed over the course of the film, and she, too, comes to function as a model for Moroccan and Spanish femininity alike. Here Imperio Argentina’s peculiar star image resonates with force, for, beginning in the 1930s, the Argentine-born actress’s incarnation of a quintessential Spanish womanhood is increasingly marked by signs of difference, as she is transformed from Aragonese peasant to Andalusian Gypsy to Spanish-Moroccan hybrid (and in a later film, Bambú, she will play a Cuban mulata). It is also significant that Aixa is a singer, as it is through her performances that the film comments upon the traditional commerce in cultural images. Early on, we witness Aixa singing in public on stage at the posh Trocadero Theater in Tetuán; Hamed and Abslam look on, rapt, from their box seats (fig. 28). Against the backdrop of a painted tent, camel, and palm trees—and surrounded by a group of equally wooden veiled women in Moroccan garb—Aixa, in a low-cut, jeweled gown, sings of unrequited love, coyly drawing a filmy veil over her face at the end; her deployment of the veil during this number bears no relationship to past or present Islamic practice. After her performance, when Hamed slips away to speak with her, we are provided with a privileged backstage perspective: as they converse, Aixa and Hamed lean against opposite sides of a portion of setting, whose bare support

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29. Aixa learns to love needlework and life in the harem in La canción de Aixa. Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

ribs are now exposed to our view. In this brief moment, the falseness of Aixa’s Orientalist number is starkly revealed, seemingly preparing the way for a more “authentic” representation of Moroccan culture later on in the film. As Aixa travels away from the city and into the Moroccan interior, she also gravitates toward a performance of the “true” national culture. Gradually, Aixa is folded into the protective cocoon of Abslam’s harem, where, after an initial period of rebelliousness, she eventually flourishes, much like the beautiful flowers enclosed in the harem garden (fig. 29). Contemplating the blooms, Aixa admits aloud that “it will make me very sad to leave here.” Somewhat paradoxically, however, the depiction of Abslam’s “real” harem often corresponds even more closely to Orientalist stereotypes than did Aixa’s stage show (Labanyi, “Race” 223). While the typical Moroccan domestic harem would be inhabited by women of all stages of life, from adolescence to old age, as well as by children of both sexes, Abslam’s harem is populated exclusively by young, beautiful, and nameless odalisques, who, when they are not engaged in the more probable activity of embroidery, seem to spend an inordinate amount of time running about giggling. At one point when Aixa sings, they spontaneously rise to perform a “Dance of the Veils,” whose inspiration is clearly more Hollywood than Moroccan, bearing a notable resemblance to the choreography of Busby Berkeley—a

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choreography whose structure, not incidentally, Ella Shohat has compared to that of the harem, with its infinitely interchangeable females subject to the control of a central male gaze (164). This scene, which occurs near the end of the film, well after Abslam has wed Aixa but before he has managed to win his new wife over and consummate the marriage, is presented as partially authorized by Abslam’s gaze: the camera is occasionally positioned behind Abslam as he observes the women through the latticework. The spectacle ends abruptly when Abslam decides to enter the harem; he adopts a domineering pose while framed in the doorway, and the tittering dancers flee. By associating the power to look and to possess with Abslam, this scene works to reinstall certain Orientalist stereotypes. Francoist gender ideology would again appear to be the driving force behind the film’s seemingly contradictory treatment of such stereotypes, working, in this case, to signal Aixa’s proper place within the dominant system. At the beginning of the film Aixa is represented as intrepid and independent, taking an active role in the public sphere and wearing the veil indiscriminately, if at all. Her life might be compared to that of Spanish women during the Second Republic, who enjoyed new freedoms, including the right to vote and to divorce. Moreover, Aixa appears to carry on the tradition of her namesake, the wife of the prophet Mohammed who led an entire army into battle, and whose example has been invoked by contemporary Muslim feminists such as Fatima Mernissi (Forgotten 66–67; Veil). It is tempting, then, to draw a parallel between the historical Aixa, who exercised a crucial agency within the military context, and the legions of Spanish women who contributed their talents and energy during the Spanish Civil War. By film’s end, however, the fictional Aixa has been completely enclosed within the harem; her musical performances take place strictly within domestic space, and she is careful to cover her face and body when coming into contact with men other than her husband. Aixa’s creativity, like Zohira’s, will now be delimited by an embroidery frame; the scenes of the two women sewing together might recall Tomás García Figueras’s story of the magnificent gift Franco bestowed (via a dedicated Interventor) upon a group of Moroccan girls: a sewing machine (“Mística” 252). By “respecting” Moroccan (patriarchal) tradition, Spain simply sought to affirm the essentially domestic role of women, soon to be imparted on the peninsula through required courses in sewing and cooking taught by the Sección Femenina de Falange (Women’s Section of the Falange).⁷ The film’s final image of husband and wife is most eloquent: while Abslam stands erect upon a dais, declaring his political leadership, Aixa kneels at his feet, kisses his hand, and professes her love for him (fig. 30). As Aixa finally embraces the role traditionally relegated to the Moroccan woman, she comes to

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30. Aixa submits to Abslam at the end of La canción de Aixa. Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

incarnate the Francoist feminine ideal as well, renouncing any previous claim to the public realm, and submitting dutifully to the will of her husband. Abslam will now assert his potency on both the public and the private stage: in the final shot of the film a maid places two pairs of slippers at the foot of the elevated platform upon which the marital bed stands. The film’s treatment of gender is also thoroughly imbricated with the shifting characterization of Aixa’s racial identity. In a conversation in Tetuán at the beginning of the film, when Abslam asks Hamed if Aixa is “of our race,”’ Hamed responds, “Not completely, I believe her father is Spanish”; by referring specifically to her European ancestry, Hamed pointedly emphasizes her “whiteness.” By contrast, after seeing her perform at the Trocadero, an enthralled Abslam asks Hamed (who has already slipped out of the box to pursue Aixa), “Her mother is of our race, isn’t she?”; Abslam, unlike Hamed, prefers to emphasize the racial identity that has been passed on to her through her mother. Halfway through the film, when Aixa’s modern ways shock Hamed’s country bumpkin teachers, Aixa’s renegado uncle, who himself clearly attempts to pass for Moroccan, explains that “although through her mother she is of our race, I have educated her in the European manner”; Aixa’s racial identity has now undergone a complete

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metamorphosis, but her European-style upbringing is emphasized. Later, when Abslam offers a contrite Aixa sanctuary in his domestic harem, he gives this response to his sister’s query about whether their guest is an infidel: “Yes and no; she is of our race.” Thus, while Aixa’s racial hybridity or alterity is highlighted at first, by the end of the film she is redefined as a racially pure Moroccan. But “race” is conceived of by the different characters as a complex amalgam of biological and more properly ideological characteristics. This is fully of a piece with the racial discourse circulating at the time of the Civil War and afterward, which only coincides in part with fascist formulations. As historian of medicine Isabel Jiménez Lucena has noted of early Francoist rhetoric, “On many occasions it is difficult to distinguish if terms such as ‘race,’ ‘racial,’ and other equivalents refer to biological or to moral and ideological aspects” (121). It is not unusual, for example, to find the “enemy” referred to as the “red race,” a phrase that was apt to cause confusion, especially among children, who might come to associate Spanish leftists with native American “redskins” (an idea articulated in a novel I analyze at the end of this chapter). Yet even though they were considered a race apart, the “reds” might be brought back into the fold through a process of reeducation, through which they could demonstrate their participation in what Francoists would come to term, significantly, “the spirit of the race.”⁸ The influential psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera, for example, believed that patriotism was the essence of race, and he promoted the notion of a “eugenics of conduct” (Álvarez Peláez 93–94): family and church could exert pressure on individuals so that they might abandon their state of moral degradation, thus improving racial hygiene. Moreover, for Vallejo Nágera, strict gender differentiation was crucial to this process: “Society needs robust mothers and prolific females, who are supported by vigorous men, well equipped for war and hunting” (qtd in Jiménez Lucena 124). La canción de Aixa promotes this slippage between biological and ideological notions of race, as well as strictly distinguished gender roles. From Abslam’s perspective, for the hybrid Aixa to be deemed fully “of our race” she must simply embrace the traditional nationalist and patriarchal values he upholds, renouncing her former “modern” lifestyle. The conceptualization of race as ideological as much as biological also reinforces the film’s allegorical resonance, as Morocco and traditionalist Moroccans come to symbolize Spain and Rebel values. La canción de Aixa, produced as it was at the tail end of the Civil War and premiering just afterward, already anticipates the roles that Francoist citizens would be required to play at the end of the conflict. Thus as a spokesman for the Rebels Abslam is richly rewarded for having sublimated his sexual desire into a defense of family values and ancient customs, but now he must also condescend to forgive his erring cousin Hamed,

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a representative of the Republicans, in order to live alongside him. Aixa, like many Spanish women on both sides of the conflict, must abandon her earlier public life and learn to enjoy the sweet domesticity of the harem. This exaltation of “harem values” might also be read more broadly as foreshadowing the politics of autarchy that would eventually be promulgated by Franco in response to Spain’s position within a new and more hostile world order during and after World War II. In this sense, the refusal to enter into modernity figured by this film, together with the absolute affirmation of traditional values, unites Spaniards with their North African “blood brothers”; both groups manifest the proper “racial spirit.” Even though La canción de Aixa quite strategically avoids engaging in overblown imperialist declarations, one of the many enthusiastic reviews that appeared throughout Spain (in this case, in Málaga) described it somewhat incongruously as the “first film of what from now on should be the cinema production of an imperial State that aspires to become more magnificent and excel in all of its manifestations as a future great power” (“La canción de Aixa y la prensa”). Indeed, after the end of the Civil War the Rebel sympathizers, buoyed by their victory, began to set their sights on territorial expansion, and the outbreak of World War II was viewed as an ideal opportunity for extending the influence of Spain’s new regime (Riudor 258–59). That Franco and his supporters had begun to conceptualize an ambitious expansionist program, particularly in Africa, was evident from the astounding surge in Spanish imperialist rhetoric, transmitted through channels as modest as provincial film reviews as well as through numerous high-profile books, newspaper and magazine articles, and public speeches, that provoked angry reactions among several European powers. The French protectorate was a particular target in many of these works, and Aixa’s comparatively discreet valorization of Spanish over French colonization in North Africa would now be supplanted by bold calls for “one Morocco. United fraternally to Spain,” as Tomás García Figueras proclaimed in a speech to an overflow crowd at a trade fair in Barcelona in 1942, which was protested by the French ambassador and the Resident General of the French protectorate (Nerín and Bosch 44, 145– 46). Political and intellectual figures such as José Díaz de Villegas, Luis Carrero Blanco, José María Cordero Torres, Enrique Arqués, and Alberto Cavanna all weighed in with books on the subject, and Costa, Ganivet, Iradier, Gatell, and other earlier Africanists and African explorers were cited as authorities. Some of the most sweeping claims to territory were detailed in Reivindicaciones de España (Spain’s Revindications, 1941), written jointly by the Falangists Fernando María Castiella, a professor of international law, and José María Areilza, a politician and diplomat, both of whom would later serve as minister of foreign af-

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fairs (the first under Franco, in 1957–69, and the second during the transition, in 1975–76). This lengthy book, which was widely read and quickly went into a second edition, detailed Spain’s history of foreign conquest and demanded restitution of lands that had subsequently been usurped by Great Britain and France. These included Gibraltar, the port city of Oran in Algeria, the remainder of Morocco (the French protectorate and the international city of Tangier), Mauritania, and Equatorial Africa (comprising portions of Nigeria, the French Congo, and Gabon, but not Cameroon, which the authors recommended be ceded to Germany in recognition of shared interests). Other writers, somewhat less solicitous of German concerns, did add Cameroon to their wish lists (Nerín and Bosch 41–66). Historians such as Charles and Carolyn Halstead, Javier Tusell, Manuel Ros Agudo, Gustau Nerín, and Alfred Bosch have revealed the extent to which this expansionist rhetoric actually coincided with Spanish governmental policies and procedures during this time; as Nerín and Bosch have explained, “The great colonial chimera, what was meant to have been a glorious second Spanish empire, was a much more solid and realistic project than it might seem today” (22). Spain’s official declaration of neutrality at the beginning of World War II, never taken fully at face value by the Allies, is completely belied by the discovery that as early as the fall of 1939 the regime had formulated secret plans to attack British Gibraltar and French Morocco, in order to restore the nation’s geographical integrity (conceived of in broadly Africanist terms), gain control over the strait, and earn a place alongside the victors at war’s end. Spain’s “defensive” military buildup around Gibraltar, along the southern border of the Moroccan protectorate, and even on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees also functioned to divert significant numbers of British and French troops away from active war fronts with the Axis (Ros Agudo 21, 34–44, 49, 135–36). Hitler fully expected such cooperation from Franco, and throughout the first half of the war Spain did indeed provide a variety of forms of covert support, provisioning Axis submarines in the ports of Vigo, Cádiz, and Las Palmas, smuggling military personnel, secret documents, ammunition, and other supplies aboard Spanish merchant marine ships, and collaborating with the Gestapo and the Abwehr (Ros Agudo 72–270). At the same time, Franco continued to prepare for even more aggressive action in North Africa. Spain’s smoothly orchestrated occupation of Tangier, not coincidentally on the same date in June of 1940 on which the fall of Paris was made public, was justified as necessary to maintain the city’s neutrality during wartime, but Franco’s cronies soon began to show their cards, much to the alarm of France and Great Britain, admitting that the true motivation had been to annex the city. Indeed, aggressive “Hispanization” of Tangier ensued, and Span-

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ish occupation would last until September 1945 (Halstead and Halstead 55–60). Furthermore, as France lost ground to Germany, Spanish Africanists worked to stir up indigenous sentiment within the French protectorate, seeking to foment the insurrection that would justify Spain’s invasion and “pacification.” Franco’s military officers drew up plans for offensive maneuvers that included the seizing of Fez and possible incursions into Mauritania and Oran as well. But all of these schemes were abandoned when first Mussolini and then Hitler expressed opposition to Spain’s neo-imperialist designs, and when some of Franco’s own military leaders questioned the war-ravaged nation’s ability to prevail in a protracted engagement with France (Tusell 85–123; Nerín and Bosch 82–102). Pursuing alternative means to realize his Africanist dream, in the summer of 1940 the Spanish dictator had also initiated more intensive negotiations with Hitler, pledging two million Civil War veterans to the Axis if Germany would grant Spain control of Gibraltar and most of northwest Africa, and expand the nation’s possessions in the Gulf of Guinea to include significant portions of Gabon, Nigeria, and Cameroon. However, Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and chief negotiator with Germany at the time, did not succeed in persuading the Führer to agree to the disproportionate territorial requests. Moreover, Hitler had few illusions about Spain’s ability to commit substantial numbers of troops to the war. At their famous meeting in Hendaya, France, on October 23, 1940, Franco personally sought to convince Hitler of Spain’s destiny to guide the neighboring continent toward civilization by expounding upon impassioned Africanist texts prepared by Tomás García Figueras and by Juan Fontán, then governor of Spanish Guinea. But Hitler reportedly yawned his way through the first presentation, showing so little interest in the material that Franco never even broached the subject of Fontán’s document. Although he was canny enough not to dash Franco’s hopes completely, the Führer wished to reserve an African empire for himself, and he was anxious not to jeopardize future negotiations with Italy and France, who were equally eager to maintain their outposts on the continent. Hitler offered Franco Gibraltar and the possibility of some of France’s African possessions, but he also made it clear that in exchange Germany would seek control of one of the Canary Islands, as well as several port cities in Morocco and Spanish Guinea. The Spanish dictator was absolutely unwilling to cede part of the archipelago, however, and he became so suspicious of Germany’s litany of insubstantial promises and imperious demands that when in late 1940 Hitler requested Spain’s help with the conquest of Gibraltar, Franco balked, citing among other reasons the desperate lack of food on the peninsula; the mission was then called off. Although subsequently Franco continued to press his expansionist agenda, he no longer trusted Hitler to recognize Spain’s

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divine right to an African empire (Tusell 131–72; Nerín and Bosch 109–40). And in fact Franco’s characteristically Africanist strategy of claiming “blood brotherhood” to justify Spanish colonization of Africa may very well have backfired with the German dictator. After all, as Stanley Payne has argued, Hitler believed that Spaniards were “inevitably compromised by their historical contacts with the Islamic world, and they could never rank high on his racial hierarchy” (334; see also Vidal, Intrépidos). Nerín and Bosch have asserted that “it is obvious that Nationalist Spain’s foreign policy depended upon Franco’s African obsession, and that for many years the colonies played an essential role in Spanish political life” (67). During World War II, Franco had sought to expand Spain’s zone of influence in Africa through collaboration with the Axis. Once it became clear that Germany and Italy would lose the war, however, the Spanish dictator scrambled to distance his regime from its fascist ties, hoping to ameliorate Spain’s political isolation, even as he pursued new alliances that would enable him to shore up his position in Africa. Although Franco’s defascistization program involved repackaging his regime as fervently aligned with National Catholicism, Spain’s dictator did not abandon the discourse of “Hispano-Arabic brotherhood,” which he would now marshal to cultivate strong ties with the Arab world. His strategy would eventually help him to garner the votes necessary to gain admission into the United Nations (Riudor 271; Elena, “Cine” 157), if not necessarily support for an indefinite colonial presence in Africa. REVISING HISTORY AND PERFORMING RACE: LA LLAMADA DE ÁFRICA

The defascistization of Spain required that the Falange’s ties to fascism be suppressed, that its role in Franco’s government be greatly reduced, and that its ideology be replaced by the tenets of National Catholicism (Payne 363–430). Defascistization also required, significantly, that history be rewritten, and a wide range of cultural texts would contribute to this endeavor. The film La llamada de África (The Call of Africa, 1952) is a fascinating case in point, for it works to present a very different version of the role played by Africanism in the relationship between Spain and Germany during World War II, while also laboring to condemn the racism associated with fascist regimes. That the message was deemed politically expedient is evident from the fact that the cinema censorship board in Madrid was pressured to reconvene after it failed to declare the film of “national interest” in an initial round of voting (Zumalde Arregi 310). Duly recategorized, La llamada went on to enjoy forty-three days in a major first-

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run theater in Madrid (the Callao), becoming the third-longest-running Spanish film of the year (Camporesi 120–21). Its director, César Fernández Ardavín, has asserted that La llamada de África’s immediate antecedent was the film he scripted and codirected with his uncle Eusebio Fernández Ardavín in 1949, the pointedly titled Neutralidad (Neutrality; Fernández Ardavín). In this earlier film, set in 1945, a Spanish merchant marine ship rescues survivors from warring American and German submarines; though tensions emerge between those rescued, the arrival of Christmas enables all to set aside their political differences. The film thus erases the collaborative relationship between Spain’s merchant marine and the Axis, figuring Spaniards as impartial ambassadors of Christian charity during World War II. La llamada de África moves one step beyond Neutralidad by portraying Spain not simply as a neutral presence during the war but as openly threatened by German aggression. In a bizarre casting twist, though, both films prominently feature Gerard Tichy, a former German army officer and fugitive from a French prisoner-of-war camp, in principal roles. Tichy had managed to cross into Spain but was subsequently imprisoned in San Sebastian. After his release, a German cinematographer introduced him to Eusebio Fernández Ardavín, who was looking for an actor to play the commander of the German submarine in Neutralidad (Aguilar and Jenover 402). In La llamada de África, however, Tichy is cast radically against type: rather than one of the enemy soldiers, he plays the film’s hero, the half-Spanish, half-Moroccan military officer Captain Andrade, who vacillates between his Saharawi lover, Halima, and Magda, the Spanish niece of Andrade’s commander, who pursues him as soon as she arrives in the territory. Set in the Spanish Sahara in 1940 and very early 1941, the film’s adventure plot depicts the efforts of Spain’s Nomadic Troops (Spanish and Saharawi camel brigades) to track and eventually defeat a group of native insurgents led by “white agents” who wish to destroy a Spanish airdrome.⁹ At the beginning of the film the Spanish commander informs his men that France has just surrendered to the Germans—thus locating the start of the action in June 1940— and that as a result a good deal of “intrigue” can be expected in the French zone. As construction work on the new airdrome progresses through the summer and fall, the commander and his officers uncover a plot to eliminate the facility, which is described as essential to protect the peninsula—and the Canary Islands. Later, the commander informs his men that a Spanish ship from Las Palmas has been bombed, a shocking violation of Spain’s neutrality that could have been prevented had the airdrome been up and running. These pointed references to the vulnerability of the Canaries link the film to Hitler’s persistent claims on the archipelago. The film implies, without ever stating explicitly, that

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Germany intended to capture the Canary Islands (and from there perhaps the peninsula itself ) after taking out Spain’s line of defense in the Spanish Sahara. Franco’s self-interested negotiations with the German dictator are thus elided as the film works to present Spain not as Germany’s covert ally but rather as a nation under immediate threat by the Axis. It is also revealing that the climax of the film takes place in late 1940 and early 1941, precisely when Franco spurned Hitler’s request for aid in conquering Gibraltar: that temporary “turning away” now functions to underpin the film’s assertion of the enmity between Spain and Germany. The film is most canny in its representation of the white agents, however. Never directly identified as German, they are nonetheless described in the script as speaking French (to their Francophone Saharawi insurgents) “with a Nordic accent” (F[ernández] Ardavín y Ruiz 156), and in the film itself during the attack scenes we hear them shout to one another in a garbled language that sounds much like German. It is not surprising, then, that the only recent critic to have analyzed the film in some depth simply states that they are Nazis, though without pausing to consider the significance of that detail (Zumalde Arregi 310). The film also manages to incorporate several characteristic sideswipes at France, when the Spanish officers discover the body of a Saharawi man murdered for having served as a translator to the French, and when the commander explains to his men that the enemy forces have managed to rally Saharawi soldiers to their cause by convincing them that the new airdrome must be destroyed because it is being built for France. Although the post-credits disclaimer reassures the film’s audience that all of the events depicted are fictional, and that peace has always reigned in the Spanish Sahara, the political thrust of the military conflict is undeniable. It is also significant that a Spanish Saharan airdrome takes center stage in this film, for two such facilities would be instrumental to Franco’s earliest efforts to curry favor with the United States, as he began to comprehend the imprudence of his alliance with Germany. At the end of World War II the dictator again compromised his presumed neutrality, this time in order to provide aid to the Allied powers: in late 1944 and early 1945 he entered into secret pacts permitting the United States to make use of Spanish airports and most particularly the Saharan coastal installations at Cabo Jubi and Villa Cisneros. Though the bases were ultimately not needed for decisive military maneuvers, when the United States began the transfer or repatriation of three million soldiers in May 1945, many were flown along this route. Indeed, the United States established branch bases in the two Saharan cities, staffed with American military personnel. Relations between the Spanish Africanists and American officers and soldiers were reportedly very friendly, and once the mission was over in May 1946 the Spanish

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commander wrote to the U.S. head of operations in Casablanca: “Be assured, my Colonel, that this year of sincere and loyal collaboration of the three Spanish Armies with the detachment of forces under your command is the affectionate and sincere demonstration of camaraderie and friendship toward your nation.” This joint operation in the Spanish Sahara would lay a foundation for the extensive negotiations that culminated in the 1953 agreement between Franco and President Eisenhower to establish American military bases in Spain (Mariñas Romero 181–86; see also Tusell 552–65). Those talks were well under way when La llamada de África was produced, and it seems fair to say that the film’s affirmation of the strategic importance of Spanish military outposts works not only to distance the Franco regime from Germany but also to allude, in much more veiled fashion, to Spain’s nascent relationship with the United States. The film’s post-credits prologue includes a subtle but meaningful shift in Africanist rhetoric, characterizing La llamada as “the first national film to exalt Hispano-Muslim friendship.” By replacing the usual phrase “HispanoMoroccan” with “Hispano-Muslim,” the film seeks to broaden Spain’s area of influence beyond the protectorate, not only to the Saharan territory but also to the larger Arabic/Muslim world, where Franco would labor to garner support during the postwar years of political isolation from the West. In addition, the shift from the more customary word “brotherhood” to “friendship” begins to uncouple Spain’s mission in Africa (as well as its alliances with Middle Eastern powers) from the trope of blood ties, as we shall see later on. The prologue also gives thanks to a long list of Spanish colonial officials. The film’s military adviser was Luis Riera Ferrer, who had served as an aid to the governor of the Spanish Sahara, and Fernández Ardavín and his team were provided every possible advantage for completing La llamada, the first feature film ever to be shot in the territory (Zumalde Arregi 310). It was an eminently challenging task. The brilliant cinematographer Juan Mariné has documented the difficulties he and the rest of the film crew faced, including fierce windstorms and an unexpected flood that required emergency evacuation; the constantly blowing sand clogged the camera at every turn (Soria 62). But unconditional military support enabled the director to undertake a month-long preproduction orientation trip to the territory, an experience that guided the later filming of documentary footage which would be incorporated into the film. It also enabled Fernández Ardavín to draw on a significant number of Saharawi extras, further enhancing the verisimilitude of the work (Fernández Ardavín). Indeed, in the film’s tense final scenes there are a number of exchanges in Hassaniya, the language spoken by the Saharawi, which, quite remarkably, remain unsubtitled onscreen, even though translations are provided in the original script.

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These dialogues, together with the unsubtitled “Germanic” commands and conversations of the enemy soldiers, immerse viewers in a foreign context, requiring them actively to seek out visual cues in order to decipher the action. The film’s refusal to provide linguistic guidance may have provoked one member of the censorship board in Madrid to criticize La llamada for its “lack of clarity in the plot” (qtd. in Zumalde Arregi 310). One of these scenes also works to foreground the visibility of race, a central theme throughout the film. Lieutenant Ochoa intercepts a caravan of Saharawi insurgents being led by the white agents who plan to attack the new airdrome. In order to ascertain whether or not all the heavily veiled travelers are legitimate nomads simply going about their daily business, as one member of the group claims, Ochoa orders them to ride by him on their camels and show their hands. Dark-skinned Saharawi men display both sides of their hands to Ochoa, but when one of the white agents pauses before him, he feigns ignorance of both Spanish and Hassaniya and remains tightly enveloped in his black robes. At that moment, the enemy’s reinforcements arrive, killing Ochoa and his men in a rain of machine-gun fire. While this scene educates viewers in how to scrutinize hands for racial signs, it also encourages us to associate whiteness with evil; it is a phenomenon that is reinforced by the repeated reference to the white agents who threaten the Spanish airdrome. Even so, when the mestizo Captain Andrade, who has infiltrated the caravan, passes by Ochoa, we are forced to confront the profound ambivalence of racial signs: his hands, shown from several different angles, glow under the relentless desert sun, and we struggle to “read” them properly. Indeed, as La llamada de África works to disassociate Spain completely from Germany and from fascist values, it also confronts racism directly in a number of pointed scenes that, even as they serve to anchor racial identity in skin color, begin to suggest that race might also be viewed as a social construct, or even a performance. Here it is important to note that, as might be evident from the exaltation of Hispano-Muslim friendship at the beginning of the film, it was more difficult for Africanists to negotiate the idea of Spanish-Saharawi “blood brotherhood” than the Spanish-Moroccan equivalent. Historical ties between the two communities were considerably looser, and the nomadic desert traditions of the Saharawi, unlike Moroccan urban and rural culture, bore little resemblance to Spanish ways of life. Moreover, the fact that the Saharawi had intermarried with sub-Saharan Africans over the centuries meant that they would have been deemed closer to the “impure” branch of southern Moroccan Berbers that Rodolfo Gil Benumeya had attempted to differentiate from the “Ibero-Berbers.”¹⁰ It is not surprising, then, that the film begins with a clear delineation of racial

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identities and hierarchies. The engineer Alfageme (Tomás Blanco) directs the unloading of airdrome equipment from a boat in very choppy seas, and two Saharawi men under his command struggle unsuccessfully to ease the equipment onto a raft. Meanwhile, two of the Spanish military officers, Ochoa (Ángel Picazo) and Lieutenant Hurtado (Gustavo Re), protest that the task is far too dangerous. But Alfageme dismisses their concerns, arguing of the Saharawi men that “they are colored men.” While Hurtado insists that “they are men, simply men like you and me,” Ochoa retorts, “Bah, this racial argument is ridiculous.” Hurtado orders the Saharawi men up onto the boat, and he and Ochoa strip off their shirts and climb down to undertake the mission themselves. While on the one hand Hurtado appears to counter more virulently racist forms of colonial discourse by emphasizing the humanity of the natives—they are men, he insists—the scene makes clear that they are not as “manly” as the Spanish men. This is a typical colonialist rhetorical gesture: the feminization of all natives, so that they might be opened up to a more complete exploitation or, alternatively, cast as victims in particular need of protection by the benevolent colonizers, as is ultimately the case in this scene. A number of cinematographic strategies support this structuring of power. The Saharawi are reduced in stature through high-angle medium long shots as they are visually trapped by the equipment that dangles over their heads and are knocked to their feet by the intense waves. The Spaniards, by contrast, tend to be privileged by low-angle frontal closeups as they bear their heavy and unwieldy burdens—the “Atlas shots”—which, combined with a careful use of lighting, highlight the intense mental concentration that enables them to channel their muscular strength effectively and complete what had initially seemed an impossible task. Within the strict censorship norms of the Francoist cinema, this type of display of the masculine body is somewhat unusual, and here that body serves, in part, to prop up a colonialist ideology that—once again, despite Hurtado’s seemingly egalitarian rhetoric—is based upon notions of racial difference. As Richard Dyer has argued with respect to Hollywood and Italian “peplum” films of the same period, the muscular white body incarnates and justifies imperial authority: “The built white body is not the body that white men are born with, it is the body made possible by their natural mental superiority. [. . .] It is the sense of the mind at work behind the production of this body that most defines its whiteness. This makes the white man better able to handle his body, to improvise with what is at hand, to size up situations. [. . .] In short, the built body and the imperial enterprise are analogous” (164– 65). From the dynamic at play in this scene, it might appear that La llamada de África simply replicates the racial dichotomies predominant in the colonialist

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cinema produced outside Spain and analyzed by theorists such as Dyer. That is to say, the Spanish colonizers are ultimately opposed to the natives and figured as “essentially” white—with all of the corresponding connotations of mental and moral superiority. Yet, as was evident from the caravan scene discussed earlier, other moments in the film that depict corporeality and race are much more ambivalent, working to invert customary hierarchies or even to challenge the “legibility” of color. Moreover, biologically based forms of racism are juxtaposed in this film to a deprecation grounded in cultural difference, and the effects of nature and nurture are both called into question. A number of theorists, such as Paul Gilroy and Etienne Balibar, have viewed “cultural racism”—the allegation of presumably irreconcilable cultural differences, rather than racial alterity, as justification for the exclusion or discrimination of particular communities—as a newly prevalent if not entirely new phenomenon, the product of a postcolonial era in which “scientific racism” has been discredited (Gilroy, Ain’t 43; Balibar and Wallerstein 21–26). But as Ann Laura Stoler has observed, a “collusion between race and culture” has always characterized modern colonial situations, and is particularly apparent in matters concerning the regulation of Europeans who live among local populations or the status of “mixed-race” children (97). In these contexts, biological conceptualizations of race may be “recoded” through the naturalization of cultural differences (Stoler 99). La llamada de África is especially fascinating because in its exploration of the occasionally intimate ties between Spaniards and Saharawis it manages to interrogate the presumption that “racial” characteristics determine intellectual and moral qualities, while challenging as well the idea that it is culture that is essentially immutable. In another scene situated toward the beginning of the film, for example, Hurtado converses in the military barracks with the brother of Andrade’s Saharawi lover Halima, a young bugle boy named Ahmed, who has befriended the Spanish soldiers and will eventually facilitate their victory at film’s end. Ahmed (Tony Hernández) contemplates the photo of a wife of one of the military officers and then asks about that officer’s other wives. While the earlier scene indicates that Hurtado avoids making distinctions based upon color, here we observe that he prefers to emphasize cultural differences. Thus Hurtado responds to Ahmed’s question by informing him that Spaniards have only one wife. It is significant that this scene contrasts notably with the treatment of the same issue in a number of earlier Spanish texts—such as Benito Pérez Galdós’s Carlos VI en la Rápita, discussed in chapter 3—which tend to highlight the similarity between Moroccan men’s domestic harems and Spanish men’s penchant for “keeping” women in addition to their spouses. Hurtado refuses to articulate an explicitly racist perspective, but he is quick to identify cultural divergences between Spaniards and

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North Africans. Interestingly, it is the Saharawi boy who shifts the emphasis back to more traditional questions of race, although he presents a radically different perspective on the issue. Ahmed remarks that the woman in the photograph is beautiful, but would be more so if she had darker skin: “She is white; too white [. . .] if she could be dyed like sheep’s hides.” The Saharawi boy’s image is disturbingly graphic. By forcing us to visualize human skin as removable and dyable, just like leather, Ahmed suggests that the concept of race is indeed only “skin deep,” and perhaps as subject to the vagaries of fashion or the individual sense of aesthetics as a pair of sandals, a belt, or a bag (traditional Saharawi arts). At the same time, of course, the true horror of the act described in his contraryto-fact statement—“if she could be dyed”—reminds us that in fact death would be the result of dyeing human skin. For the Spanish viewer, Ahmed’s comparison resonates on other levels as well, resonances that will be amplified by the map of Spain and Africa that adorns the wall of the barracks and comes to dominate in this scene. The boy’s reference to the “piel de carnero” calls to mind the “piel de toro,” or bull’s hide, that cartographic representations of Spain are imagined to trace out. The notion that geographical form may reveal the essential character and destiny of a nation, we recall, shapes many of the texts that, beginning in the modern era, seek to define Spain’s ties to Africa and justify neocolonialist interventions. It is a notion that, intimately linked to questions of race, can be found early in the twentieth century in the work of the Africanist and Orientalist writer Isaac Muñoz, discussed in the previous chapter, and that reappears decades later in the work of Rodolfo Gil Benumeya and the African war correspondent and award-winning novelist Tomás Borrás (recipient of the National Literature Prize in 1966). For example, in La España completa (The Complete Spain, 1950), which was published just two years before the release of La llamada de África (and which not coincidentally begins by condemning Germany and affirming Spain’s neutrality during World War II [7]), Borrás, borrowing heavily from Gil Benumeya and other earlier Africanists, argues: “If you trace out the map of Spain and Morocco and you fold the paper in two along the Strait of Calpe [Gibraltar], you’ll find that the tectonic systems of both sides coincide exactly. God has commanded that unity be formed out of this geographical space. And the fatum is doubly asserted, since the two tablelands that are defined by the fortified walls of the Pyrenees and the Atlas [Mountains] are inhabited by the same race” (11). It is precisely this “georacial unity” (13), as Borrás terms it, that justifies—indeed, that characterizes as divinely ordained—Spain’s colonization of North Africa. And Spain’s modern-day “projection” over the region can be traced back to a key battle of the Reconquest: “Since the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, Spain begins to project

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31. The measure of his own body proves to Ahmed that the Sahara is more imposing than Spain in La llamada de África. Photograph courtesy of César Fernández Ardavín.

itself over the Maghreb with decisive influence” (16). However, even though the omnipresent Africanist trope that describes Spain’s “mirror relationship” with the Maghreb is bounded by the Atlas Mountains, the Spanish Sahara (which clearly lies beyond the Atlas) is never excluded from the Iberian nation’s presumably natural zone of “projection.” Thus it is notable that in La llamada de África, after first marking the significance of racial difference between Spaniards and Saharawis in his conversation with Hurtado, Ahmed chooses to provide his own measure of the “georacial” relationship between Spain and the Spanish Sahara by placing his hand over both regions on the map on the wall. In fact, since the hard light from the barrack’s window washes out exactly those areas, it is only when Ahmed’s arm casts a shadow over the map that the features of the underlying geography are revealed, confirming the boy’s initial observation that, in comparison to the “Great Desert,” Spain is quite tiny: “How small!” (fig. 31). Here, curiously, it is not the light but rather the darkness that Ahmed “projects” over the map that illuminates the truth, as he shakes his head in evident disillusionment. Ahmed’s pointed “politics of reversal” in this scene—dark skin is more beau-

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tiful than light, the Sahara is more imposing than Spain—prepares the way for a number of later scenes that serve to relativize racial and national categorizations, or that begin to expose the mechanics of their production. As in La canción de Aixa, it is a mestizo character who facilitates the exploration of questions of race—in this case the military hero Andrade, reportedly the son of a Moroccan woman from Tetuán and a Spanish colonel who died in Annual. Even though the original act of “miscegenation” is displaced in both films, the protagonists embody the effects of a common Spanish colonial practice in North Africa, amply documented in Africanists’ memoirs: consensual, coerced, or forced sexual relationships between Spanish men, customarily military officers, and native women. The D.A.I. (Delegation of Indigenous Affairs) explicitly warned Interventores stationed in Morocco of the “absolute necessity of abstaining from any kind of contact with the indigenous woman,” and recommended that they never hold meetings with unaccompanied females without the presence of a witness (qtd. in Mateo Dieste, Hermandad 125). However, Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste cites an interview with a former officer who describes frequent sexual encounters with beautiful but prematurely aged Moroccan women: “That made you feel kind of funny, but even so, you were hungry” (Mateo Dieste, Hermandad 86). Official prohibitions aside, in some settings—perhaps more often in the remote areas of the Spanish Sahara than in the Moroccan protectorate—such relationships might be considered effective for the advancement of Spain’s colonialist goals. In La llamada de África, when Ochoa’s brother arrives in the Sahara to take up his new post he is surprised by Ensign Gelmírez’s fluency in Hassaniya; Gelmírez advises him to seek out knowledge of the Sahara and the Saharawi, appropriating the words of Saint Augustine “the African” to envelope his message of earthly love in a divine glow: “Banish the shadows cast over the abyss of my understanding, so that understanding I may see you, and comprehending I may know you, and knowing you I may love you, for anyone who knows you, loves you.” Impassioned Africanists exalted their “saintly” mission by insisting that Spaniards better understood and were more respectful of autochthonous culture and traditions. Yet ironically, that “understanding” and that “respect” were sometimes associated with the presumed proximity afforded through intimate relations with North African women. Spaniards’ differentialist rhetoric notwithstanding, here the Africanists closely resembled their French counterparts in West Africa, whose liaisons with native women were considered of benefit for matters of health and hygiene as well as for the acquisition of linguistic competence and the maintenance of colonial authority (Hyam 157). Stoler has noted that the practice of concubinage in Asian colonies was viewed in a simi-

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larly favorable light (48–49). Thus when in his fictionalized memoirs Mariano Fernández Aceytuno, a former officer of the Saharan Nomadic Troops, describes a sergeant who perfects his knowledge of Hassaniya “between his bed sheets with the favors that some young Saharawi women bestowed upon him” (39), he is describing a common colonialist strategy. For his part, the Spanish Sahara’s first governor, Colonel Francisco Bens, was considered particularly effective at “winning over” the native population by gaining the trust of the women, “whom he treated with gallantry and affection. [. . .] He had a way with the women, who informed him about everything, becoming his best confidants” (Perote Pellón). However, Bens clearly exceeded the call of duty in his “gallant” treatment of Saharawi women. In fact, La llamada de África’s director César Fernández Ardavín has underlined the parallels between his character Andrade and Paquito, the son of a Saharawi woman and Colonel Bens (Fernández Ardavín).¹¹ In a photograph of Fernández Ardavín and Paquito, taken on location in Tan Tan during the production of La llamada de África, Bens’s son appears proudly to embrace a Saharawi identity: centered in the frame, wearing the derrah, or traditional layered tunic, and with a medium-length Afro, he directs an unwavering gaze at the camera, seemingly oblivious to the (paternal or big-brotherly?) arm that the director, with eyes averted, has draped around his shoulders. It is perhaps impossible to know if any other identity was ever available to the darkercomplexioned Paquito; his fictional double, however, is much more ambivalently portrayed, for Andrade’s “race” is read in multivalent ways by other characters over the course of the film. Like Aixa before him, he functions as a shifter, but here, unlike in the earlier film, the notion of race is most explicitly tied to skin color. For example, his European love interest Magda, who apparently remains unaware of his family background, sees Andrade as white (perhaps not surprisingly, since he is played by a German actor), yet his Saharawi lover Halima views him as dark. At the same time, Andrade himself attempts to negotiate his identity by whitening the racial makeup of his lovers. In his brief review Alberto Elena argues that the film “presents mestizaje as free from the stigma with which it was habitually associated within the framework of colonial cinema” (“Llamada” 257). It is true that the film exalts Andrade as a heroic patriot, beloved by Saharawi and Spaniard alike, and the climax, in which he martyrs himself by riding his white camel directly into enemy fire, has even prompted the critic Imanol Zumalde Arregi to compare Andrade with Franco, mythologized for his fearless demeanor while astride a white horse (311). That theory is further supported by the fact that the protagonist’s Galician name is identical to the pseudonym (Jaime de Andrade) with which Franco signed his script for the film Raza (Race). Despite this otherwise impeccable symbolic lineage, however, it is

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clear from a number of the film’s romantic scenes that Andrade’s mestizaje is for him, personally, anything but “free from stigma.” Rather, several moments illuminating the color of the hands of his lovers—which reverse the dynamic operating in the military hand inspection scene, discussed above—reveal his particular obsession with what Etienne Balibar has termed “the stigmata of otherness” (Balibar and Wallerstein 18). Andrade’s obsession with the color of his lovers’ hands is evident from a pair of back-to-back scenes in which he meets with the two women. First, Andrade converses with Magda (Mayrata O’Wisiedo), the recently arrived niece of the commander, on a moonlit terrace on the military base. Although Magda is Spanish, her name evokes a Germanic pallor, and she is made to signify whiteness from her first appearance in the film, when, fair-skinned, blond, and dressed in a snow-white suit, she is further washed out by a glaring midday sun as Ochoa carries her from a dinghy to the shore. For his part, Andrade finds Magda whiter even than the whitest woman of his fantasies, and it is this characteristic that he finds mesmerizing. Contemplating her hands, now bathed in moonlight, he confesses, “I didn’t believe there could be such white hands.” In the scene immediately following this one, Andrade arrives at the tent of his Saharawi lover, Halima (whose otherness is signaled by the fact that she is played by the Mexican actress Irma Torres), and an artfully composed shot frames their faces, upside down, within a small mirror on the floor of the tent (fig. 32). But Andrade is cold and withdrawn, even when the joyful Halima reveals that she is pregnant. When she imagines that she sees the child’s face in her own reflection in the mirror, Andrade anxiously speculates about the child’s likely color. Halima responds by holding out her hands and then turning them over to reveal the color of her palms, somewhat lighter than the rest of her skin: “It will be my color, a bit less dark, like this.” When Andrade muses aloud that the child might perhaps be even whiter than that, Halima insists, “Scarcely. Only a little bit.” Working against Andrade’s efforts to whiten the child, Halima insists on the measure afforded by her own body, much as her brother Ahmed did when using his hand to compare the size of Spain to that of the Sahara. This exchange will be reworked in a subsequent scene between Magda and Halima that reaffirms the ambivalence of such racial constructs, while exposing their complete imbrication with colonial power relations. The dramatically filmed scene that portrays the encounter between the two women is also the meeting point for the divergent metaphors and discourses on race and culture that have circulated throughout the film: the hand as bearer of the stigmata of race is subjected one more time to the politics of reversal; the cast shadow again works to illuminate colonial relations, while racial difference

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32. Halima rejoices in her pregnancy while Andrade worries that the color of their child’s face will not mirror his own in La llamada de África. Photograph courtesy of César Fernández Ardavín.

is ultimately displaced by cultural difference, or perhaps even performance. During a night of celebration among the Saharawi, Magda enters Halima’s tent and asks her rival to read her palm (fig. 33). With her brother Ahmed observing, Halima refuses, claiming that she doesn’t know how to read such white hands, adding defiantly, “You have no strength other than the color of your skin.” When the Spanish woman counters that her skin is the same color as Andrade’s, Halima disagrees, and their exchange echoes Halima’s earlier negotiations with Andrade concerning the likely color of their child. In the dialogue that ensues, it is clear that Magda remains ignorant of (or chooses to ignore) Andrade’s mixed background, for she attempts to convince Halima that sooner or later her lover will abandon her and the Sahara in order to return to the very different world of his origins. Magda’s attire in this scene contrasts dramatically with the typically feminine dress she prefers elsewhere in the film: here, her striped vest, jodhpurs, riding boots, and crop clearly associate her with the masculine authority of colonial discourse, as do the pronounced low-angle shots of her standing over the Saharawi brother and sister, which magnify her dominant position within

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33. Ahmed schemes to perform the cultural difference demanded by an imperiously white Magda in La llamada de África. Photograph courtesy of César Fernández Ardavín.

the space of the tent. And nowhere in the film is she more excessively coded as white. The lighting strategies are particularly notable: while Halima and Ahmed are illuminated by firelight, which continuously tattoos their faces with patterns of light and dark, Magda’s pale flesh is persistently lit by a nonflickering hard frontal light. It is precisely this construction of Magda as absolute whiteness that fixes Halima as racial other, eliding her subjectivity: literally, it is the shadow cast by Magda upon the Saharawi woman that obscures her image toward the end of this scene. Yet Halima, too, tries to seize upon Magda’s whiteness in order to cast her rival into the realm of absolute darkness: embroidering upon her brother’s earlier expression of distaste for women who are “too white,” Halima recoils from Magda’s pallor: “I’ve never seen such white hands. They are the color of death.” Once again, it is Ahmed who articulates a surprisingly oppositional perspective on questions of identity in this scene, although here he abandons his customary terrain of race for that of culture. While in her conversation with Halima

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Magda has worked to isolate the Saharawi woman from Western subjectivity, toward the end of their encounter she also seeks to strip her of the only coordinates that remain to her as an “other” woman, by insisting that she prove her famed magical abilities. Imperiously wielding her riding crop, Magda gestures toward a music-box that Andrade has given Halima, commanding her, “Make it play.” Ahmed, reclining near the device, sits up slightly and gazes expectantly at Halima, who casts down her eyes in apparent frustration and rage. After a smugly satisfied Magda leaves the tent, Ahmed asks his sister if she could indeed have turned on the music with the magic word; as a boy who has spent considerable time among Spanish military men, he is perhaps beginning to doubt the legitimacy of some of his native beliefs. But while Halima simply collapses before the denigration of her culture— “It’s not possible to lie to Christians. Magic words lose all their power with them,” she sobs to her brother—Ahmed advocates a different strategy. Chiding Halima for not having at least attempted to fake a show of Saharawi “magic” for Magda, Ahmed asserts: “You should have said the word, Halima. Why were you afraid? I would have lifted the lid [of the music box]. She wouldn’t have seen me.” In this remarkable moment, by proposing a subversive “performance” of cultural difference, Ahmed begins to clear a space for a newly politicized reconstruction of otherness. Although his assimilation of Spanish military culture reveals that he may be well on his way to claiming power by mimicking the ways of the colonizer (albeit not unproblematically, as Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha have made clear), Ahmed also suggests here that some degree of resistance may be achieved by mimicking precisely those characteristics that the colonizer projects onto the colonized. It is a phenomenon that Michael Taussig has identified in his exploration of the Cuna, an indigenous group of Panama, whose women construct the alterity that affords them a place of relative privilege within the hierarchies of colonial power (153–54, 182–86). Indeed, over the course of this film, the precocious Ahmed demonstrates a keen understanding of the ways in which “subjects connive in their subjecthood,” as Taussig describes it (153). Despite her own imperious performance in this scene, Magda ultimately does not prevail over Halima, nor is she able to find a place for herself among the Spanish soldiers of the Saharan outpost. Initially her arrival is greatly anticipated by the Spaniards, who are starved for the company of women. Indeed, the first scene of the film indicates that men may go mad and even perish from the severe conditions of deprivation, hinting that, as colonial authorities often feared, a lack of female companionship might be fatal for some (Hyam 90). Magda’s early obsession with Andrade, however, quickly obviates the need for rivalry for her affections among the others, who soon return to cultivating their intimately homo-

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social relationships.¹² But Magda’s open expressions of disdain for the Saharawi will also lead Andrade to abandon his own brief fascination with her. A dramatically shot beach-side conversation is definitive. Magda bluntly reveals her prejudice: “I don’t understand how you’ve been won over in this way. What do you see in these miserable lands, in these people who are so different from us, so incomprehensible? How can you love a woman who is just like the rest of them, who is indistinguishable from the others?” Andrade responds with equal bluntness by encouraging Magda to leave soon, affirming, “We would never come to understand each other.” Magda embodies the stereotype of the metropolitan woman who arrives with her baggage of racist views, working to disrupt the strategies of cultural approximation and drive a wedge between colonizers and colonized. A number of theorists have unpacked this stereotype, arguing that while many women who moved to the colonies from the metropole bore no resemblance to it, those who did were often pawns (though not always passively so) in the hands of colonial authorities, who sought allies whenever the political climate dictated a retreat from policies of cultural proximity (Hyam 118–20; Stoler 55–57). In La llamada de África, however, Magda is clearly represented as contrary to Spanish interests; as is the case with the Saharan military officers described by Fernández Aceytuno in his memoirs (97), Andrade’s ability to further the Spanish colonialist cause depends precisely upon his freedom from the “conventionalism” that union with a woman like Magda would impose on his life in the desert. That Magda is sent packing by film’s end, however, also reflects the need to protect the “purity” of the metropolitan woman. While Andrade’s exotic qualities undoubtedly explain Magda’s attraction to him, her apparent ignorance of his mixed background also excuses that attraction. But once Ochoa informs her of the rumors concerning the identity of Andrade’s parents—prefacing his revelation with the comment, “There’s something dark about his birth”—everything changes. The tears that she sheds during this conversation reflect her newfound understanding that Andrade has always been, and will always be, off limits for her. In fact, as I show in the next section, during the 1940s and 1950s women like Magda were subject to a covert Francoist policy designed to destroy their romantic relationships with North African men. The government surreptitiously enlisted male family members and associates to convince or coerce the women in question to abandon their imprudent alliances. Considered within this context, Ochoa’s reference to Andrade’s “dark” family history could be viewed as an interventionist remark designed to dissuade Magda from further pursuing Andrade. Indeed, he specifically advises her, “Forget about him and return to the Peninsula before it’s too late.” The film’s script clarifies what Ochoa’s “too late” was meant to imply: the last image of Magda, seen in profile as she prepares

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to board the boat that will whisk her away from Africa, was originally meant to be juxtaposed with an image of Halima, also shot in profile to emphasize her swollen belly (F[ernández] Ardavín y Ruiz 188–89). Had Magda, like Halima, become pregnant with Andrade’s child, she would have been deemed beyond salvation. (BLOOD) BROTHERS AND THE PURITY OF SPANISH WOMEN

La llamada de África’s Magda is a unique case, as few Spanish women would have been seen in the rural areas of North Africa. Their presence in the nonurban zones of the colonies was tightly controlled, and in the Moroccan countryside, for example, generally the only Spanish women to be found were the wives of Interventores. However, significant numbers of Spanish men and women, including a fair amount of Civil War exiles, resided in North African urban centers, which offered an attractive alternative to life in the metropole. By 1954, there were some one hundred thousand Spanish officers and soldiers and ninety thousand Spanish civilians in Morocco, nearly 90 percent of whom lived in the five major cities (Tetuán, Larache, Alcazarquivir, Xauen, and Arcila [Salafranca Ortega 251]). In Tangier there were thirty-five thousand Spaniards, by far the largest non-Moroccan community in that city (Ybarra Enríquez de la Orden 162–63), despite the fact that after 1945 it had returned to its internationalized status. Military personnel were provided housing and commissary privileges, and along with civil servants they received wages that were 50 percent higher than those of their counterparts in Spain. In general, Spaniards enjoyed a better standard of living in Morocco than on the peninsula, and throughout the 1940s funds were diverted away from the war-ravaged mainland toward development projects in the protectorate (Salafranca Ortega 252–55; Ybarra Enríquez de la Orden 71). Prosperity was all but guaranteed, as civilians wishing to emigrate to Africa were required to provide proof of property ownership or a contract to work in a relatively high-prestige job. Moroccans were not to see poor or unemployed Spaniards (Salafranca Ortega 255–56), a common preoccupation of European colonial powers interested in maintaining their authority, as Stoler points out (25). Before the Civil War Spanish health officers were concerned that, as sanitation inspector Eduardo Delgado expressed it in a confidential memo from 1927, European civilians lived in “dangerous promiscuity with the indigenous population”; Delgado recommended that economical suburban housing be built so that Spaniards might live apart from Moroccans (Molero Mesa, Jiménez Lucena, and Martínez Antonio 194–95). But such “promiscuity” was viewed as much more threatening among poor Spaniards, whose numbers decreased after

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the war. According to historian and former Moroccan resident Jesús Salafranca Ortega, by the postwar period Spanish civilians routinely lived in the same neighborhoods and even the same buildings as middle-class Moroccan Muslims and Jews, which facilitated friendly relationships between the three groups (255). In their oral history of Spaniards who lived in the protectorate during this period, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano and Helena de Felipe relate that many of their informants employed the term convivencia, associated with the coexistence of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Spain, and emphasized the spaces shared by the different communities, who socialized together in restaurants and cafés and at private parties and weddings (224). Such characterizations of the ample opportunities for contact in the urban context, together with the overwhelming and omnipresent rhetoric of HispanoMoroccan brotherhood during the 1940s and 1950s, might suggest that relationships between Spanish women and Moroccan men would have been common during this time period. Yet former residents of the protectorate insist that such was not the case. Salafranca Ortega claims that one could count on the fingers of one hand the number of mixed marriages, which he defines, significantly, as “Spanish [men] with Moorish women”; the author seems incapable of conceiving of the reverse scenario (256). Rodríguez Mediano and de Felipe’s informants admitted the existence of mixed couples but described them as transgressors of the system, subject to ostracism by their respective communities; Spanish women in particular tended to be considered “whores” if they took up with Jewish or Muslim men (224–26). This apparent revulsion of mixed relationships within the protectorate, despite the official discourse of racial unity, would have been exacerbated by the secret Francoist policy that has recently been brought to light. Rodríguez Mediano has found that as early as 1938 the D.A.I. was classifying as undesirable the mixed relationships resulting from the participation of Moroccan soldiers in the Civil War, offering some incipient strategies for breaking them up (179, 189); we recall that these were precisely the sorts of liaisons that Antonio FernándezCaro had exalted in his book of poetry, Tambor africano. The policy against such relationships was fully formed by 1945–46—ironically, when Franco was most preoccupied with distancing his regime from fascist ideology. In a document from Tetuán dated July 1946, the D.A.I. noted that the presence in Spain of Franco’s Moorish Guard, other Moroccan troops, and Moroccan businessmen attending trade fairs, along with the educational, cultural, and recreational trips to Morocco organized for young Spanish women, had also facilitated the formation of disreputable relationships. The document summarized the segregationist measures that had gradually been instituted, and requested the collaboration

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of Madrid’s Junta Nacional del Patronato de Protección a la Mujer (National Council for the Protection of Women) in the effort, arguing that “the Race hardly gains with these contacts, due to the degeneration, sexual perversion, and lamentable sanitary condition of the Moroccans.” A particularly subversive intent was attributed to Moroccan men, who were drawn to Spanish women “because of the instinctive impulse of their racial inferiority, and because of the morbid and complex pleasure of producing, at the same time, injury and an affront to the Nation that protects them.” The council was called upon to educate Spanish women concerning the dangers of Moroccan men, and to warn them that when in the protectorate they would be subject to constant surveillance by the authorities. The council was also urged to exercise strict control over the activities of Moroccan men in Spain (Delegación, “Memoria”; also reproduced in Rodríguez Mediano 197–203). The D.A.I. worked together with the Office of the High Commissioner for Morocco as well as with the National Council for the Protection of Women in Madrid to put the policy into practice. As soon as the existence of an undesirable relationship was suspected, a secret file was opened and local authorities were contacted for details concerning the character of the man and woman in question and the nature of their ties. Although the D.A.I. acknowledged that only a small percentage of such relationships would come to their attention (Delegación, “Memoria”), Rodríguez Mediano estimates that at least 615 files were opened (175, n. 5; it is not yet possible to provide a precise number or accounting due to Spain’s privacy protection law, which prohibits access to certain documents less than fifty years old). If the couple was found to be romantically involved, any letters sent through the mail were intercepted and archived, the two were prevented from traveling to see each other, and male family members, close friends, and local priests were contacted to pressure the woman into terminating the relationship (Rodríguez Mediano 173–75). A document from April 1946 indicated that if persuasive tactics failed, recalicitrant women would be subject to more serious forms of coercion, including registration and prosecution as prostitutes. (Interestingly, this document bears the title “Racismo” [literally, Racism], a term that is clearly not perceived as negative, and that is used throughout the files to refer to the D.A.I.’s segregation policies [Delegación, “Racismo”].) The authorities even aspired to break up marriages, and there are numerous D.A.I. memos from this period condemning protectorate judges for failing rigorously to apply the March 1941 law that prohibited Catholics—that is to say, anyone who had ever been baptized—from contracting civil marriages. Generally, only mixed marriages that were considered irreversible because they had produced children would be left undisturbed (Rodríguez Mediano 188).

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That sexual contacts deemed illicit provoked as much anxiety as any possible reproductive consequences is evident from the fact that homosexual relationships were also subject to obstruction, even if both parties were Spaniards. An October 1945 document recommended the “expulsion of inverts for whom Morocco is a paradise and for that reason they flock to or remain in the Zone without any justification” (qtd. in Rodríguez Mediano 185; see also 192–93). Even so, the predominant fear of sexual contamination was classically racist; as Rodríguez Mediano has concluded from his analysis of the archive, “In practice, the ‘racial’ concept sustained by the Spanish administration was basically biological” (190). The D.A.I.’s policy of confiscating letters before they reached their intended destination may have led Spanish women to form a negative impression of Moroccan men as classic Don Juans. File after file makes clear that the women were mystified, concerned, hurt, or angered by the abruptness of the apparent abandonment by their lovers, and a number of the Moroccan men express similar emotions. Because of the mechanics of the system, which relied upon the absolute discretion as well as the powers of persuasion of male family members in particular, many Spanish women would have perceived their relationships with Moroccan men as simply “destined” to failure, or impossible because of traditional familial or societal opposition; they would never have known that their liaisons were in fact terminated by their own government. This is evident from one woman’s letter to her soon-to-be ex-lover: “Thus we are among many victims of the incomprehension of families, and their antiquated system” (qtd. in Rodríguez Mediano 174). The policy in effect institutionalized the revival (or perhaps simply the continuation) of the centuries-old Spanish honor system, according to which fathers and brothers strictly controlled the sexual conduct of female members of their household, meting out swift punishment for any infraction. The proliferation of these prohibited relationships was attributed to the influence on impressionable young women of seductive literary works, and here authors such as Luis Antonio de Vega were singled out for excoriation, despite their otherwise impeccable Francoist credentials. Vega, we recall, had penned Sirena de pólvora, a novel that exalted the Moroccan soldiers who had helped the Rebels crush the enemy “pigs,” and his poetic works had co-opted the voice of Moroccan women anxiously awaiting the return from Spain of their brave menfolk. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Vega continued to publish fictional works set in the protectorate, blending romance with intrigue while occasionally venturing to focus on mixed couples, and his writings enjoyed great popularity on the peninsula. Yet an employee of the Office of the High Commissioner in

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Morocco, who wrote to his friend in Zaragoza warning him about his sister’s relationship with a Moroccan, explained that the government’s secret policy “is a very logical defense of our women [. . .] deceived by a more or less well-meaning propaganda from our irresponsible journalists (Luis A. de Vega, for example).” The friend agrees: “I view as extremely laudable the steps that you in the D.A.I. are taking in defense of our women, who so innocently allow themselves to be influenced by totally ominous literary works” (qtd. in Rodríguez Mediano 173– 74). The tremendous irony, of course, is that romantic novels such as Vega’s simply carried the rhetoric of brotherhood that sustained the Regime’s colonialist policy in North Africa to its natural conclusions. That censorship norms may have shifted in accordance with the new policy is suggested, however, by the fact that when in 1952 Antonio Fernández-Caro republished the poems from his earlier Tambor africano in a new volume entitled En el país de las kassidas (In the Land of the Kassidas), the final section of poems, which featured explicitly sexual liaisons between Moroccan soldiers and Spanish women, was omitted. Yet one remarkable novel from this period also criticizes the frivolous literature that foments such relationships, even as it condemns the “atavistic” cultural mores that make genuinely loving relationships between Spanish women and Moroccan men impossible to sustain: Zoco Grande. Written by the novelist and professional journalist Carmen Nonell (whose articles appeared in venues as diverse as popular women’s magazines and the Madrid daily ABC), Zoco Grande won Colenda Press’s “Fémina” prize and was published in Madrid in 1956. A significant subplot of this novel, set principally in Tangier, involves the marriage between the Moroccan Hassan and the Spaniard Clara, prompted by their contact during the Spanish Civil War. A flashback focalized through Clara details how she met Hassan while serving as a maid in the household of a doctor in Seville who treated wounded soldiers. As Clara becomes enamored of the Moroccan patient, the doctor’s cook convinces her that it is clear from the many novels she has read that most Moors are caids; if Clara marries Hassan, she will undoubtedly live like a princess (209). Clara is dismayed to discover once she arrives in Morocco that Hassan is only a simple farmer. Although her new husband treats her with great tenderness and attempts to please her—even moving to Tangier and acquiring a flower stand for her to manage in the city’s central square—Clara will eventually betray him with Carlos Alcázar, a Spanish playboy and black marketeer. By novel’s end, the disconsolate Hassan is reduced to killing the two lovers. Like the D.A.I. and other Spanish governmental authorities, Nonell’s novel suggests that working-class women in particular are dangerously susceptible to the illusions propagated by romantic Orientalist literature.

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Ironically, however, Zoco Grande itself indulges in Orientalist excesses at several points, as we shall see. Carlos’s equally ill-fated half-sister Isabel is the heroine of Zoco Grande. Unlike the novel’s other female characters, whose class backgrounds condemn them to misery and marginality, Isabel has enjoyed a life of privilege, despite having lost her mother at a tender age. Raised in Madrid by her globe-trotting journalist aunt, educated as if she were a man (as her father characterizes it [223]), she has earned a doctorate in chemistry and works for her aunt’s former lover, Dr. Fontán. Openly and explicitly rejecting all of the gendered Francoist discourse that consigns women to the home, Isabel scorns Spanish men, for they treat women like objects and are incapable of understanding the concept of companionate marriage (14). When her aunt dies, however, Isabel is pressured to move to Tangier to live with her father and stepfamily. She does so only on the condition that she be allowed to continue working, and Fontán contacts a former pupil, Dr. Abdel-lah Seddek, to secure her a position in Tangier’s Spanish Hospital. Abdel-lah, a black man whose family originally hails from Senegal, will soon vie with his co-worker Dr. Elhamid Tahar, a “pure” Arab (82), for Isabel’s affections. Initially, we are led to presume that Abdel-lah might win out, for he is heavily eroticized in several daring scenes early in the novel. Indeed, it is difficult to understand how these passages, as well as Isabel’s and the narrator’s feminist declarations, survived Franco’s censors. In one heady and classically Orientalist chapter, we are made privy to Abdel-lah’s evening ritual: returning home from work, he greets his hashish-smoking mother, before heading to his luxurious bathroom, where he disrobes and slips into a warm perfumed bath. When he emerges, naked, an elderly black slave massages him, and the narrator coyly observes that “there was no part of Abdel-lah’s body that was forbidden to her hands” (46). Subsequently, an adolescent servant girl dressed in silk and adorned with silver bracelets arrives, offering up tea, a pipe, and her own body to Abdellah (48). Isabel’s sensuality is first awakened later that same night when Abdellah takes her for a moonlit walk through the Arab quarter and to dinner on a rooftop restaurant overlooking the sea, with live Andalusi music; when she sighs that she could spend the rest of her life on that terrace, Abdel-lah informs her that his own house is nearby (58). Yet much to Abdel-lah’s dismay, the young woman soon fixes her libido on Elhamid, described as “a beautiful example of his race” (86). Isabel’s preference for Elhamid is undoubtedly influenced by her discovery that Abdel-lah has a capacity for cruelty; she protests when he orders that his jealous servant girl be whipped and turned out onto the street after she attempts to poison Isabel (129). Furthermore, the omniscient narrator reveals

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that although Abdel-lah appreciates exceptional women such as Isabel, he has a low opinion of most of the female sex and cannot resist his paternalistic impulses (39, 139). Elhamid, by contrast, is a more romantic, gentle soul, who is attracted to Isabel precisely because of her intrepid and independent character. Even though Isabel’s choice of Elhamid over Abdel-lah is fully justified by the novel’s decidedly feminist perspective and the two men’s radically divergent personal traits, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that race also influences her decision to become engaged to Elhamid. Abdel-lah’s disadvantaged position as a black man within a racially stratified society is emphasized by the narrator, who suggests that despite his brilliant professional achievements the doctor feels compelled to show deference to others (40–41). Again, as in La llamada de África, there is a curious obsession with hands that bear the stigmata of race: the first glimpse we catch of Abdel-lah, who is hidden behind a surgical gown and mask, is of his black hands, which are revealed when a nurse removes his gloves (37). Later in the novel, Carlos will discover that he has killed the wrong man (Elhamid, instead of Abdel-lah) when he sees the color of his victim’s hand: “It was not the hand of a black man” (250). Although Elhamid is not described as white, he is certainly less dark than Abdel-lah. Curiously, however, when he thinks of Isabel while driving, the knuckles of his brown hands turn white (96), and Isabel also notes the pallor of his brown face when they first kiss (149). Most important, on repeated occasions the novel underscores the idea that Isabel and Elhamid belong to the same race. On the very first page, as she flies over the Moroccan countryside, Isabel affirms the truth of the oft-cited slogan “Africa begins in the Pyrenees” (9), and her impression is soon confirmed when she finds it impossible to distinguish Moroccan from Spanish faces in the central plazas of Tetuán (12). Isabel also echoes the Africanist emphasis on the religious proximity of Christians and Muslims, and finds her spirituality reinforced upon her arrival in Morocco; when she first hears the call of a muezzin, she instinctively begins praying, noting, “I have never felt such a complete emotion” (23). Later, defending his plans to marry Isabel, Elhamid also insists to his family that they worship the same God as she does and share a common heritage with her: “They and we have the same origin.” After his father interjects, “Separated by eight centuries of war,” Elhamid counters, “And united by eight centuries of love, of unions, of convivencia” (182–83). When, by novel’s end, Carlos mistakenly kills Elhamid and Isabel finds herself pregnant with her dead lover’s child, she rejects Abdellah’s offer of a sexless marriage of convenience that would enable her child to enjoy economic stability and the protection of a father. Isabel accepts Abdellah’s support but vows to raise the child on her own, affirming, “I want him to be worthy of Elhamid and his race which is, after all, the root of my own” (287).

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Despite Elhamid and Isabel’s passionate articulation of an Africanist rhetoric of Spanish-Moroccan unity, the couple encounter opposition to their relationship on all fronts. Both Tangier and Tetuán, where Isabel spends a few days upon her arrival in Morocco, are described as cities in which Christians, Jews, and Muslims work and live alongside each other, yet fail ever to mix. The cities’ central plazas, and most especially Tangier’s own Zoco Grande, function as metaphors for the simultaneous appearance and avoidance of genuine convivencia. Mixed marriages are explicitly characterized as uncommon, and when Elhamid and Isabel enter a bar together they are viewed as a curiosity (188). The novel thus confirms recent historical and anthropological studies of life in the protectorate as well as in Spain’s Moroccan enclaves, which note that, despite the official discourse of proximity, among middle- and upper-class groups convivencia was—and continues to be—staged exclusively during elaborate social rituals. The weddings and dinners mentioned by the former protectorate residents interviewed by Fernando Rodríguez Mediano and Helena de Felipe, for example, function to confirm the incommensurability and inequality of the different communities. As the anthropologist Henk Driessen has written of formal suppers in Melilla, “the solidarity and intimacy asserted in the gatherings sharply contrast with the avoidance behavior prevalent in everyday life. Notwithstanding the pervasive rhetoric of convivencia, a subtle and benign condescension can be detected in the pantomime of the Catholic participants, who, in fact, dictate the terms of peaceful co-existence” (146). Furthermore, Driessen has found that in Melilla mixed relationships have been common only among the most impoverished and marginalized groups (177–88). As the rhetoric of “dangerous promiscuity” cited earlier suggests, unions between Moroccans and Spaniards are perhaps as threatening for their persistent association with the lower classes as for their facilitation of racial or religious “contamination.” It is true that Elhamid’s family is less than thrilled at the prospect of his marriage to Isabel, and, as we have seen, his father cites the Reconquest to express his disapproval of the relationship. But the resistance of Isabel’s family receives the greatest attention in the novel, and questions of social status and economic advantage are not inconsequential. In fact, Isabel’s father is initially delighted at the prospect of establishing ties with Elhamid’s highly prestigious family. When he learns that the Moroccan man has no intention of converting to Catholicism, however, his attitude quickly changes. Isabel’s half-brother Carlos works to inflame his prejudices, for he suspects that Elhamid is somehow involved in a plot to intercept a dangerous chemical—nitrogen mustard—he is smuggling into Morocco. Although Carlos himself is predisposed to invoking a Calderonian honor code—when he first meets Isabel and she expresses the desire to enter a

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Moroccan tea shop, he berates her: “The stain that falls upon you will spread to the entire family” (22)—he is most interested in manipulating the family dynamic to his own advantage. Thus when Isabel insists that she will marry Elhamid with or without her family’s approval, Carlos histrionically threatens to kill himself or kill Elhamid, and Isabel’s father asks his daughter, “So you are ready to become the moral and material ruin of the family? [. . .] I have given you the education of a man, and you must understand the concept of honor” (223). Here father and son echo the inflated rhetoric of the D.A.I. while implementing the organization’s tactics for controlling Spanish women’s sexuality. Interestingly, Isabel also confides in a liberal priest, who departs significantly from D.A.I. policies by supporting her relationship with Elhamid and harshly criticizing Spaniards’ arrogant understanding of their relationship to God. As a representative of the Catholic Church, though, he hopes to prevent Isabel from “living in sin” with the Moroccan, as she is ultimately forced to do (174–75). Isabel is understandably astonished at the outdated rhetoric of her father and half-brother, which she associates with medieval times, not with life in the modern world (22, 223). The novel’s narrator underlines Isabel’s pointed reversal of colonialist discourse, which normally attributes backwardness and irrationality to the colonized, by observing of the situation that “the atavistic Spanish temperament, whose irrational caprice is law, was imposed” (174). Alongside this excoriation of Spanish colonialist attitudes, Nonell presents a somewhat conflicted view of the Moroccan nationalist cause in her novel, which was published in 1956, precisely the year Morocco gained independence from both France and Spain. Since the early 1950s, Spain’s high commissioner for Morocco, Rafael García Valiño, had adopted a risky strategy for bolstering Spain’s support from the Arab League, deemed crucial both for gaining admission into the United Nations and for retaining influence over Morocco: aiding and abetting the Moroccan nationalist movement, most particularly uprisings in the French zone. As terrorism increased there, France responded by condemning Spain for supplying arms to the enemy, and it orchestrated a coup that replaced the sultan Mohammed ben Yusuf with Mohammed ben Arafa. The Franco regime refused to recognize ben Arafa’s legitimacy, but when ben Yusuf was finally restored to the throne, he failed to express gratitude for Spain’s loyalty and immediately initiated negotiations with France for Moroccan independence. Consequently, as soon as Spain was admitted into the United Nations in 1955—and Arab League support was no longer so essential—Franco began to declare that Morocco was not yet ready to become independent. Meanwhile, the Spanish consul in Rabat sought to “remind” the restored ben Yusuf of the historical lesson that North African Muslim civilization could only flourish in

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partnership with Spain, inviting him to visit Córdoba and Granada, where he might “relax amidst memories of a glorious era for Islam” (qtd. in Ybarra Enríquez de la Orden 255). The sultan declined the offer, and as soon as France granted Morocco independence on March 2, 1956, Spain was quickly compelled to follow suit (Ybarra Enríquez de la Orden 42, 135, 187–88, 239–59). Nonell’s novel includes brief references to the escalation of violence in both protectorates. The “dark political events, which, initiated in the French zone, were starting to reverberate in Tangier,” are associated in symbolic fashion with opposition to the union between Elhamid and Isabel: when a Galician professor retiring from his job at the hospital warns the couple that difficult days lie ahead for them, Elhamid comes to understand that he is concerned for both their personal and political fate (145). Elhamid will also underline the connection between Moroccan nationalism and the discrimination he and Isabel face later in the novel. Although Elhamid’s father had fought with Abd-el Krim during the Rif wars, he is troubled when his oldest sons become actively involved in the nationalist movement, and he moves the family from Fez to Tangier precisely to try to separate them from politics. For the same reasons, he sends his youngest son to study in Europe, but Elhamid only returns to Morocco with a different understanding of freedom, one that presupposes individual liberty (177–79). Thus when his brothers condemn his relationship with Isabel, Elhamid accuses them of fanaticism, arguing, “You who rebel against the imposition of a foreign state and dream of a free nation, ruled by yourselves, you reproach me my rebellious attitude. You’re crazy! You’re foolish! How can you make your own land free, if you yourselves don’t even know how to be free?” (184). Although Zoco Grande questions Moroccans’ ability to form a free and democratic nation— much as Franco himself did at the time, in a last desperate attempt to retain the protectorate—the novel also emphasizes that the Spaniards who reside in the region are no better versed than Moroccans in the concept of individual freedom and responsibility. In this sense, Isabel’s first-page affirmation of the slogan “Africa begins in the Pyrenees” regains its negative valence over the course of the novel, for, excepting Isabel and Elhamid, neither Spaniards nor Moroccans are shown to exemplify modern values. Nonell thus presents a radically different view of Spain and Morocco’s shared isolation from modernity, which had been so clearly exalted in La canción de Aixa. While a major element of the novel’s plot involves the provisioning of chemical weapons to the Moroccan nationalists, curiously the two characters most associated with the activity are not motivated by nationalist concerns. Carlos never expresses the least preoccupation with the consequences of his smuggling nitrogen mustard into the country (precisely the sort of arms trafficking by Span-

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iards that France had so bitterly protested, evocative as well of Spain’s earlier albeit suppressed involvement in chemical warfare in Morocco). His amorality is most evident when he begins to murder those he suspects of having intercepted the shipment. It is Abdel-lah who prevents the nitrogen mustard from reaching its intended destination, though he does so not out of political conviction but rather in order to pursue a personal and professional obsession. Here Zoco Grande, like La llamada de África, works to expose the profound psychological costs of racism, even as racist attitudes are articulated by the white protagonists. Abdel-lah (like Andrade) struggles with his own sense of racial inferiority, which is symbolized by his single-minded pursuit of a cure for skin lymphoma. The metaphorical resonance of the illness is obvious: those who are afflicted suffer from dark patches that spread across the skin, and the cancer may become fatal once it metastasizes to the lymph nodes and internal organs. Abdel-lah hopes to test out a new treatment on Ruth, a beautiful Jewish prostitute, whose cancer has begun to spread from her neck across her back. Growth of the skin lesions may be retarded with topical application of nitrogen mustard, and in order to obtain the illegal substance, Abdel-lah must conspire with Hassan and Elhamid to steal Carlos’s shipment. But Ruth has mixed feelings about Abdel-lah’s machinations on her behalf. She is horrified by the disease that has marred her delicate skin, but she is also repulsed by the black doctor who has offered to cure her, instead of sleep with her: “I make you sick! My scar makes you sick, but it doesn’t occur to you to think that you may also make me sick!” (71). That Abdel-lah does indeed suffer from the same sickening “scar” as Ruth becomes apparent later in the novel, when it is revealed that skin lymphoma runs in Abdel-lah’s family, and that his own mother is in fact terminally ill. Thus Abdel-lah himself is both literally and figuratively in danger of dying from a dark stain on his skin. In this novel, Abdel-lah functions to mark out the limits of the ostensibly most liberal interpretations of the Africanist rhetoric of “blood brotherhood.” While Zoco Grande unequivocally furthers the idea that Spaniards share a cultural and racial legacy with Moroccans, black Moroccans are excluded from that legacy. Ironically, however, Abdel-lah’s exclusion is signaled by his characterization as Isabel’s surrogate “brother.” When Isabel’s employer in Madrid, Dr. Fontán, contacts his former student Abdel-lah and asks him to find Isabel a position at the hospital in Tangier, he also places the young woman in his care: “She and you have been something like my professional children. I think that allows me to ask you to be a bit like a brother to her. The brother that Carlos Alcázar will never be” (17). While the novel plays with the erotic frisson of Abdel-lah’s attraction to Isabel, and her blossoming sensuality, from Isabel’s perspective the black man is never a viable romantic option—and as her “brother,” he is also forbidden to her.

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By novel’s end, Abdel-lah is forced to specify that his proposal of marriage would involve no sexual contact, reminding Isabel: “I promised to be your brother and I begged you to never forget it. Now I am begging you again” (287). Zoco Grande makes clear that when it comes to black Africans, the omnipresent rhetoric of brotherhood in reality signals not intimacy but unbridgeable distance. FROM BLACK CHRIST TO HOLLOW CHRIST

There was no need for a secret segregationist policy in Spanish Guinea, as strict laws and social norms conspired to regulate liaisons between Spaniards and Guineans; gone were the days in which a Spaniard might propose racial mixing as the surest path to civilizing the native inhabitants without destroying their culture, as the nineteenth-century explorer Amado Osorio (Manuel Iradier’s successor) had done (qtd. in F.-Fígares Romero de la Cruz 143). During the Franco era, single women were prohibited from entering the colony unless they had family members residing there who would agree to take responsibility for their behavior (Fleitas Alonso 61). Agricultural firms based in Spanish Guinea (devoted to logging, coffee, and cacao plantations) initially refrained from hiring married Europeans to fill administrative positions, in order to avoid the burden of providing suitable accommodations for their wives and children (Fleitas Alonso 72–73; García Gimeno 46). Not surprisingly, then, for many years only 10 percent of Spaniards in Guinea were women (Nerín, Guinea 108). Officially, both Spanish male civilians (often on two-year work contracts) and Spanish soldiers were expected to remain celibate during their stay. Young men on their way to the colony were advised: “Eat a lot. Quinine daily. Careful with the sun! A bit of exercise. Sleep with a mosquito net. Avoid dampness. Love, outlawed. (Countries without love!)” (qtd. in Nerín, Guinea 121). Theoretically, love was indeed outlawed, for the notorious “Article Five” mandate allowed the governor of Spanish Guinea to expel anyone whose comportment was considered unbecoming to Spain. While drunks and loafers were occasionally sent packing, usually it was Spaniards embroiled in extramarital relationships and/or homo- or heterosexual liaisons with Guineans who were shipped back to the metropole (Fleitas Alonso 111–14). Yet in practice, just as in North Africa, sexual relations between Spanish men and native women—often physically or economically coerced—were not uncommon. Spanish soldiers stationed in the colony sang of the hardships of their post, including cohabitation with mosquitoes and monkeys, and the necessity of resorting to Guinean women, who were termed “miningas”: “I’ll no longer gaze upon those Spanish girls / Instead I’ll have to resign myself to a mininga” (“Aquellas chicas de España, ya no las podré

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contemplar / Y a cambio de una mininga me tendré que conformar”; qtd. in García Gimeno 72). Guinean-based companies advised their employees strictly to avoid relationships with white women, married or single, but sex with native women, when carried on with discretion, was not discouraged (Fleitas Alonso 63, 73). Even so, as discretion sometimes gave way to license, and the threat of expulsion loomed large, some companies began to reconsider the wisdom of hiring married men. Consequently, the proportion of Spanish women in Guinea began to grow—by 1962 they made up roughly a third of the colonialist population—and, especially in the more urban capital city of Santa Isabel (on the island of Fernando Po), new schools, cinemas, and other social venues were established in accordance with the shifting demographics (García Gimeno 46; Nerín, Guinea 109). In Spanish Guinea sexual politics were inflected very differently from the way they were in North Africa, not only because of the more commonly acknowledged conceptualization of the racial incommensurability of (white) Spaniards and (black) Guineans but also because of the radically divergent religious status of the colony. Franco’s regime had recognized the imprudence of proseletizing in the Moroccan protectorate and the Spanish Sahara, instituting a strict policy of respect for Islam. Priests and other representatives of the church were present there only to minister to Spanish Catholics, not to work to convert the Muslim population (or the Jewish minority). By contrast, the autochthonous religious beliefs of sub-Saharan Africa were never deemed worthy of consideration, and conversion of the native population was always one of the principal stated goals of Spain’s colonization of Guinea, which was explicitly modeled after the conquest of the Americas (Negrín Fajardo 18, 144–45; Mateo Dieste, Moro 85–86). Moreover, as with Spain’s participation in the slave trade, exploitation of Africans was deemed justifiable so long as it was accompanied by efforts to bestow upon them the greater good of God’s salvation. From the 1880s on, the Claretian missionaries and Conceptionist nuns engaged in fierce competition with their Protestant counterparts in the Gulf of Guinea to win over the souls of the natives and guide them into monogamous patriarchal marriages, in order to convert them into more productive and docile workers for Spanish colonial interests (Negrín Fajardo 35, 78, 83). Under Francoism, all native men were obliged to work, although most preferred subsistence family farming to serving as contract laborers on colonial plantations (where thousands of Nigerian guest workers toiled). They were also obliged to contribute to governmental infrastructure projects through the euphemistically named Prestaciones Personales, a forced-labor program. The mandatory elementary education prepared boys for those tasks, and girls for domestic chores, while emphasizing Spanish literacy

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and religious training; the Educational Statute of 1943 declared that “the concepts of Christian and Spaniard coincide so exactly in our colonial school that they constitute the ideal mission of this social institution” (reproduced in Negrín Fajardo 227). Demonstration of orthodoxy became essential for those Guineans who might aspire to advancement within the colonial system. Until 1958, when the two largest geographical territories of the colony were declared provinces and all native-born residents theoretically became Spanish citizens, the vast majority of Guineans were “protected” by the Patronato de Indígenas. First formulated in 1904, and revised on a number of occasions over successive decades, the patronato characterized natives as legal minors; even venerable tribal elders were considered overgrown children, unable to buy or sell land, testify in court, purchase alcohol, or carry firearms. However, a 1944 property law allowed practiced farmers who had married in the church and were good Christians to acquire slightly larger plots of land, so long as they cultivated crops needed on the Iberian Peninsula (Ndongo-Bidyogo, “Guineanos” 115–30). A few select Guineans could also be declared “emancipados” (emancipated) and enjoy a range of legal rights and responsibilities equivalent to those of whites. Initially only the wealthy Fernandinos (descendents of the English-speaking free blacks who rose to prominence on the island of Fernando Po beginning in the late nineteenth century) were considered emancipated. Later, other Guineans were permitted to join their ranks if they demonstrated the religious and moral qualities essential for a higher “mission” and obtained the advanced training and degrees needed to fill administrative, medical, and educational positions (Negrín Fajardo 106–7, 233; Ndongo-Bidyogo, “Guineanos” 120). Thus it was precisely by embracing Catholic values, by becoming “brothers in Christ” (an option generally not available to local populations in Spain’s colonies in North Africa), that some Guineans might attain a status more on a par with, if never equal to, that of the white colonizers—if only they accepted, or feigned to accept, the Spaniards’ denigration of their traditional religious and cultural practices. Even so, there were few emancipated Guineans, and until the late 1950s and early 1960s the colony resembled an apartheid society, with separate elementary schools, separate library reading rooms, separate hospital wards, separate seating in buses, at sporting events, in cinemas, and even in churches, and separate social clubs for the white and black elites (García Gimeno 123; Ndongo-Bidyogo, “Guineanos” 118, 200; Negrín Fajardo 147; Nerín, Guinea 48–49). It is not surprising, then, that the two most popular films set in Spanish Guinea (unlike Franco-era films set in North Africa) emphasize Spain’s Christianizing mission while foregrounding questions of racial contact and conflict, a focus that

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is clear from their titles: Misión blanca (White Mission, 1946; directed by Juan de Orduña) and Cristo negro (Black Christ, 1963; directed by Román Torrado). The first is explicitly dedicated to missionaries in Guinea, but as Jo Labanyi has observed, conversion of the natives is upstaged by a narrative centered on Javier, a young Spanish priest who has come to the colony to redeem his estranged father, the ruthless colonizer Brisco, described as a white man with a black soul (“Internalisations” 33). Brisco is clearly presented as abusive and antireligious; a flashback to his earlier life on the Peninsula shows him slapping his wife and ripping a cross from around her neck, before abandoning her. Yet the film explicitly links Brisco’s ongoing perversion to his contact with Guinean women. Javier must marry his father’s attractive slave Souka to a native man, not only to protect the woman but also to rescue Brisco, as the film’s frame narrator, the older priest Urcola, makes clear when he recounts the story to a recently arrived missionary: “One of the dangers of Guinea that the authors of manuals don’t include is the sexual threat. The distance from cultural centers, the lack of white women, make the black race more attractive. Slowly, the white man’s prejudices are erased, and when he falls into ebony hands, it is very difficult to liberate him from them. [. . .] When you’ve spent some time in Guinea, you’ll understand the change that is effected in men who are dominated by ebony.” The film thus reflects the racial prejudices circulated over the years through the Spanish-controlled Guinean press, where one could read, for example, that “the union between different races and colors produces an intermediate race that [. . .] inherits the worst moral conditions unique to each of them” (qtd. in F.-Fígares Romero de la Cruz 133–34).¹³ Although the “ebony threat” presumably continues into the present, the film relegates abusive Spanish colonizers to a distant past, in part through use of an eminently strategic frame narrative. The story of Brisco takes place in 1910, and Father Urcola narrates it to his young protégée in 1935, shortly before the colony came under Rebel control, and the priest insists that exploitation is a thing of the past: “The unscrupulous exploiter has disappeared.” Ironically, however, it was the secular Republican-era policy shifts that had sought to ameliorate conditions for Guineans, by imposing, for example, an eight-hour workday and stiff fines for colonizers who physically harmed their workers. What the film fails to mention—for it remains conveniently beyond its selective time frame— is that exploitation would again flourish during the Franco regime, when fines for the mistreatment of natives were reduced and only punishments that left marks were deemed significant (F.-Fígares Romero de la Cruz 103–9). If Misión blanca was released in an era when the possession of colonies still might augment a nation’s world status as well as its coffers, by the time director Ramón Torrado’s Cristo negro was produced in the early 1960s, modern West-

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ern nations were expected to declare the “civilizing mission” complete (if not simply conceptually bankrupt) and recognize colonized peoples’ right to selfdetermination (Campos Serrano 41–43). Spain’s eagerly awaited acceptance into the United Nations had been imbricated with the concession of Moroccan independence; now the United Nations’ insistence on the complete decolonization of Africa compelled the Franco regime to find new ways to justify Spain’s continued presence in Guinea (as well as the Spanish Sahara). Franco initially followed the lead of Antonio Salazar, his authoritarian counterpart in Portugal, declaring that the remaining African colonies were in fact Spanish provinces, akin to the nation’s other historical regions. In 1958, Spanish Guinea was divided into two provinces (the island of Fernando Po and the continental territory of Río Muni), and all Guineans were converted—on paper—into Spanish citizens. The United Nations was not impressed. As both internal and international pressure mounted, a referendum was organized for December 1963, in which Guineans would decide whether their homeland should remain as two separate Spanish provinces or become one autonomous region, in further preparation for independence. In this way, the Franco regime attempted to pacify the United Nations, while delaying for as long as possible the loss of the colony (Campos Serrano 86–92, 111–228). Against this backdrop, Cristo negro attempts to cast doubt on the Guineans’ readiness for independence, highlighting their vulnerability in the hands of foreign interests and a small group of ruthless nationalists, while foregrounding Spaniards’ selfless dedication to the betterment of their African “brothers.” The film studiously avoids Misión blanca’s direct condemnation of miscegenation, as well as any acknowledgment of past or present Spanish exploitation. Rather, the film works to disassociate Spaniards from the savagely racist violence that is attributed exclusively to northern European colonizers. Here the mobilization of what Gustau Nerín has dubbed “Hispanotropicalism” (which I discussed in chapter 2) is particularly notable. While Hispanotropicalist discourse expands upon the omnipresent conceptualization of Spaniards as “natural” Africanists, uniquely suited to occupy African territory, it also insists that religious and spiritual goals take absolute precedence over economic interests in Spain’s colonial project. Thus, the relative backwardness of Spain’s colonies may become a peculiar source of pride (as seen in La canción de Aixa), while Spaniards’ presumed rejection of racist exploitation is attributed to their fervent devotion to Catholicism, which espouses the brotherhood of all races before God. Indeed, in Cristo negro the Spanish colonizers are represented solely by Catholic missionaries: several nuns, including the bubbly Sister Alicia, and a kindly priest, Father Braulio (Jesús Tordesillas). The missionaries devote their lives to the physical and

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spiritual well-being of their African charges; a montage sequence shows how over the years one village is transformed as a church, a hospital, and a school are built and become centers of bustling activity. By contrast, economic exploitation of the territory is only undertaken by northern European colonizers, who enslave and even murder the natives they consider “beasts.” The cruel racism of the non-Spanish whites is emphasized in the very first scene, which depicts a group of African men and boys struggling to move a massive tree trunk under the vigilance of a whip-bearing colonial overseer. When one of the workers, parched and exhausted, is punished for pausing to take a drink of water, a fight ensues between the overseer and another black man, who is shot dead. This first scene ends with the dead man’s son—our hero Mikoa—weeping over his father’s body and vowing revenge. But Mikoa will soon be taught that revenge is not a Christian sentiment by the Spanish missionaries who take him in and raise him to adulthood. In marked contrast to the northern Europeans, although the Spaniards may on occasion refer “affectionately” to the Africans as “children” or “little devils,” they insist that, in the words of Father Braulio, “souls have neither race nor color.” Here, Braulio employs a stock phrase of Hispanotropicalism, generally attributed to the founder of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and frequently cited by Africanists. In fact, Franco’s trusted adviser (and anticipated successor) Luis Carrero Blanco noted in a speech in Spanish Guinea in the same year that Cristo negro was released that “for us man is, according to José Antonio’s felicitous expression, a bearer of eternal values, and those values are the soul, which has neither form nor color” (qtd. in Nerín, Guinea 134). Father Braulio is evidently responsible for the prominent display in the mission’s church of a carved icon of the black Peruvian saint Martín de Porres, whose name Mikoa adopts when he is baptized. Later, upon seeing a Christ figure that Mikoa has carved in ebony wood, Father Braulio also insists that there is nothing at all unusual in imagining Christ as black. In this way, representatives of the Catholic Church treat the natives as (potentially) spiritual equals, and by film’s end Mikoa will be authorized to offer last rites to the dying Father Braulio (fig. 34), and will even be transformed, quite literally, into the black Christ of the title. The audience is also encouraged to empathize with Mikoa, sensitively played by the black Cuban actor René Muñoz, who had recently gained popularity in Spain in director Ramón Torrado’s previous film. Muñoz’s presence in Cristo negro may have contributed to the film’s box office success (it was the third-longest-running Spanish film of the year [Camporesi 124]), as well as to its ostensibly antiracist tone. This again contrasts with the earlier Misión blanca, whose overtly racist discourse would not have been destabilized by audience identification with the stars who played the native characters, since

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34. Mikoa administers last rites to Father Braulio in Cristo negro. Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

those stars were in fact white Spaniards (Jorge Mistral and Elva de Bethancourt) in “blackface”— wearing dark facial and body makeup. Even though Cristo negro avoids Misión blanca’s open condemnation of miscegenation, however, the text is haunted by the fear of “mixed-race” sexual encounters. Jo Labanyi has analyzed the overblown appropriation of the trope of miscegenation in Spanish colonialist discourse, focusing in particular on the fascist writer Ernesto Giménez-Caballero, who in 1932 had described Spain as a “prolific nation, genital, brilliant. We are race makers, Don Juans, magnificent virile studs of populations” (qtd. in Labanyi, “Women” 384, and Labanyi, “Internalisations” 28–29). “Race making” (here, the whitening of darker populations) is thus characterized as an eminently masculine activity, as passive native females are violently “injected” with the prolific seeds of Spanish men. Miscegenation, the effects of which were so “scientifically” documented in the casta paintings that proliferated in eighteenth-century Spanish America (portraying and categorizing the children resulting from “mixed race” unions), became a key tenet of Hispanotropicalist discourse. Although other colonizing nations had also attempted to argue that such liaisons confirmed that their colonial practices were not racist, they were hard pressed to offer the exhaustive visual “proof ”—or the astonishingly inflated rhetoric—that Spaniards could. But, as

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Labanyi has demonstrated, by the late 1940s and early 1950s Spanish missionary films were beginning to supplant the hypervirile race maker with a “feminized,” maternal, Christ-like man, and racial incorporation in the colonies was now figured through nonsexual (though obviously highly gendered) means (“Internalisations” 29). This tendency is still apparent in the later Cristo negro: Mikoa is welcomed into a peculiar sort of Spanish colonial domesticity, as he is placed under the care and guidance of the asexual “Father” Braulio, and is pampered by the chaste “Sister” Alicia. In this way, the film manages to portray an alternative mixed-race family, untainted by sexual and racial transgression. However, as Mikoa grows up alongside Mary Janson, the daughter of white northern European colonizers, the film must labor to finesse the question of miscegenation. As a black man who falls in love with a white woman, Mikoa threatens the carefully gendered model of miscegenation exalted through Hispanotropicalist discourse (and regulated through both overt and covert policies). While Father Braulio is simply unable to recognize that Mikoa’s interest in Mary might escape the paradigm of the asexual family—he notes that it is only natural that the two love one another “like brother and sister”—Mary’s father insists with alarm that “passion might be born out of that fraternal fondness.” Here, unlike in Zoco Grande, the trope of “blood brotherhood” may not stave off a more literal sharing of bodily fluids. But because Walter Janson is northern European and not Spanish, his staunch opposition to any romantic relationship between his daughter and Mikoa can be neatly attributed to “foreign” racism, rather than to the hypocrisy of the Spanish Catholics who preach that “souls have neither race nor color.” Moreover, Father Braulio and Sister Alicia’s tacit collusion with Janson’s desire to separate Mikoa and Mary is again masked by their status as “family”: like any father, Braulio simply tries to protect Mikoa from Janson’s wrath by sending him away from the village, with the excuse that his services are needed by another missionary (while Mikoa is gone, Mary spends more time with the mission’s newly arrived white doctor, to whom she will eventually become engaged). Similarly, when Sister Alicia decides not to deliver Mikoa’s gift of a bracelet to Mary and hands it over instead to Father Braulio, she is simply behaving as any concerned sister would, sparing Mikoa the pain of Mary’s rejection—even as she acknowledges as well the higher authority of the “father.” Indeed, Father Braulio and Sister Alicia’s treatment of Mikoa is marked with the condescension that one might expect within the model patriarchal family of Francoism, but it is also characteristic of the relationship established in Spanish Guinea between colonizer and native. Mikoa himself has internalized the colonialist logic that declares Guineans legal minors, for he treats the male natives he teaches in the mission’s school—many of whom are grown men—like chil-

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dren. Despite his own elite position, however, Mikoa is also infantilized in order to defuse his sexual potency. Cristo negro’s anxious efforts to establish Spanish colonialism as fundamentally different thinly mask an underlying fear of difference—or, perhaps more accurately, a fear of the dangerous attraction of difference. Three scenes are of particular interest here. Mikoa asks Sister Alicia if she would have considered marrying a black man before taking the veil, and she responds, smiling, “Why not?” Here we see quite clearly how the film works to denounce racism in theory, without threatening the hegemony of racist practices. Sister Alicia’s admission of possible desire for a man like Mikoa is apparently of no consequence, since her vows prevent her from engaging in any sexual relationships at all. At the same time, her assertion reveals what Robert Young has termed “the phobia and fascination that the idea of miscegenation summons forth in the white imagination” (148). Indeed, two earlier parallel scenes vividly portray that “phobia and fascination,” by depicting attempted rapes across the color barrier, where Alicia herself is one of the victims. Both crimes take place during a native celebration, and the “savage” atmosphere as well as the free flow of alcohol are implicated in the stimulation of perverse inclinations. First, a drunken native peers through a window of the mission’s small hospital and, whispering “Look, a white woman” to a companion, spies on the nun, whose pallor is emphasized by her snow-white habit and the bright lights of her antiseptic workspace. The man then cuts himself in order to gain entry to the hospital. A shot and reverse-shot reveal that he gazes lasciviously at the nun before accosting her, again stammering “You are beautiful, white woman” before a native patient in the adjoining ward dashes in to save her. Although this scene mobilizes the worst stereotypes of black men as violators of white women, it is immediately “counterbalanced” by a scene in which the equally inebriated colonizer Charles, who had earlier cast lustful eyes on Dina, a native woman, now pursues her into the jungle to rape her. It is significant, of course, that the white would-be rapist is a northern European, not a Spaniard. Dina is rescued, somewhat unintentionally, by Mikoa, who, having recognized Charles as his own father’s murderer, has sought him out in order to kill him. On the one hand, this sequence implies that the rape of a black woman by a white man is as criminal an act as the more customarily condemned opposite scenario. In conjunction, however, the two depictions of attempted sexual violation associate the desire for racial others with degeneracy. Both scenes also pointedly indicate through shot-reverse-shot structures that such “degenerate” desires are first activated through looking. In fact, in Cristo negro the gaze is of central importance: as constant bearer of sinful impulses, it must continually be reinvested with an exclusively Christian passion. Thus,

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Father Braulio urges Mikoa to sublimate his sexual desire for Mary by diverting his libidinal gaze toward the crucifix. Mikoa’s efforts to achieve that sublimation are underlined in a scene set in the missionary church, where he contemplates the praying Mary with tender longing before shaking his head and guiltily shifting his eyes toward the altar. Even more notably, however, Mikoa’s own dangerous attraction as the object, and not simply the subject, of a desiring gaze is obviated as he is converted, over the course of the film, into a religious fetish. Here it is useful to consider Anne McClintock’s definition of the fetish within the colonial context as embodying the irresolution of a “crisis in social meaning” (184): theoretically, according to Catholic doctrine and in the words of Father Braulio “the cross symbolizes love among all men,” yet the white Mary is not allowed to love the black Mikoa. This contradiction is elided, somewhat paradoxically, as Mikoa ultimately stands in for the image of Christ on the cross. This metamorphosis begins, in subtle fashion, in the opening scenes of the film, when the newly orphaned boy is delivered to Father Braulio as if he were a devotional accessory. After rescuing the unconscious Mikoa from the jungle, little Mary and her father transport him to Father Braulio’s mission, where Mary delightedly informs the priest that they have brought him something for the church he is building. Only after Father Braulio asks if it is a religious image do we learn that, in addition to Mikoa, Mary and her father have brought a long-awaited church bell. The first of a series of fetishistic substitutions is effected in this moment, for we as spectators, denied a key piece of information, are forced to visualize Mikoa in the place of a sacred object. For his part, Father Braulio and his cohorts quickly encourage Mikoa to identify with the icon of Saint Martín. This would have been a particularly resonant detail for many Spanish filmgoers, because in director Ramón Torrado’s film immediately prior to Cristo negro, the immensely popular Fray Escoba (Brother Broom, 1961), René Muñoz had played Martín de Porres (whose canonization as the first black American saint is commemorated in the film). Indeed, critics José Luis Castro de Paz and Jaime Pena Pérez see Cristo negro as a sort of sequel to Fray Escoba. Thus, the actor’s star image within Spain reinforces Mikoa’s transformation here into an object of veneration. While Mary insists on calling her childhood companion Mikoa instead of Martín, the young man himself seems subconsciously to encourage Mary to transfer her affect onto another, and even more exalted, religious fetish by giving her the black Christ that he has carved out of wood (fig. 35). This particular transformation and transferal culminates in the film’s stunning final moments, when members of the African independence movement capture Mikoa and crucify him on the large missionary cross that presides over the village from a nearby hilltop. The last scene shows Mikoa

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35. Mikoa gives Mary the black Christ he has carved for her in Cristo negro. Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

dead on the cross, with the sobbing African “Dolorosa” Dina at his feet (fig. 36). Mikoa’s literal conversion into a black Christ, ostensibly—and perversely—designed to demonstrate Spanish colonialism’s racial impartiality (Spaniards are so unbiased that they can even conceive of Christ as black), in reality responds to the urgent need to neutralize the threateningly irresistible attraction of the racial other. Racial “stigmata”—a trope that we have seen repeated throughout a number of Spanish Africanist texts—are literalized here in shocking fashion, as Mikoa is sexually nullified and, finally, martyred. Once he is converted into a religious object, Mikoa is incapacitated as subject of the look. He may no longer contemplate Mary with libidinal desire, nor may he cast vengeful eyes on Charles, the white colonial overseer who was responsible for his father’s death (and who, as it turns out, had worked for Mary’s own father).¹⁴ Charles notices the threatening intensity of Mikoa’s gaze on several occasions. At the native celebration during which he will eventually attempt to rape Dina, Charles says to Mikoa, laughing sardonically, “How frightened you make me with that look.” He pretends to offer Mikoa a knife with which to kill him, but then pushes him to the ground, “so that you will stop bothering me with [that] look.” But when Mikoa later pursues Charles into the jungle, with his own knife at the ready, the crucifix again deflects the African’s sinful gaze:

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36. Mikoa becomes the black Christ as he is crucified at the end of Cristo negro. Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

in a dramatically shot scene, just as Mikoa is about to kill Charles, the shadow of the crucifix that he wears around his neck is cast onto his would-be victim, and Mikoa recoils in horror from his own murderous intentions. Only Catholicism is capable of diverting the “primitive” urge to violence incarnated in the black man’s gaze. There are numerous scenes in the film that underline the importance of converting the defiant gaze of the Africans into a humble, “Christian,” downturned gaze. After a nationalist uprising in which several colonizers are killed, Father Braulio tells his charges at an open-air gathering that God will condemn them if they had any part in the murders. The Guineans’ articulate spokesman looks Braulio squarely in the eye; for bell hooks, this is the gaze which speaks equality, but which blacks historically learned to avoid in their contact with whites, for fear of punishment (168). And indeed, when the priest underlines his point about divine justice by gesturing toward the sky, all of the natives lower their gazes, turn around, and trudge away with bowed heads. By their second meeting with the priest, the Guineans are more emboldened, and one even throws a rock at Father Braulio, before Mikoa runs over to protect him. Mikoa, too, is hit in the head with a rock, and the spokesman calls him a “traitor to his race.” But Mikoa’s impassioned defense of the priest, and his explicitly

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stated willingness to die for him, again inspires the crowd of men to cast down their eyes in shame, turn around, and walk away with their heads hanging. In this way, Cristo negro demonstrates why the combination of Catholicism and colonialism is, potentially, so effective: ideally, Catholic discourse heads off the desire for vengeance that is a perhaps inevitable product of colonial violence. While the film’s first images, in which Mikoa looks on in horror as his father is killed, function as a symbolic “primal scene” of that colonial violence, through Catholicism Mikoa learns to exorcise his urge to seek retribution, and attempts to persuade his fellow Guineans to do the same. However, Mikoa’s mission is ultimately unsuccessful, and here it is clear that the film struggles to contain the excesses of its own convoluted Hispanotropicalist rhetorical strategies. Mikoa resists the impulse to kill Charles, but he is unable to repress his genuinely felt anger at Father Braulio and Sister Alicia when he discovers that they have engaged in deception to separate him from Mary. In his confrontation with the nun, Mikoa looks defiantly at his “sister,” and now it is her turn to cast down her eyes and turn away in shame, as he tells her (sarcastically?), “Thanks for thinking that we blacks also have feelings.” In another dramatic scene, Dina attempts to foment Mikoa’s consciousness of his African identity, after he insists that she call him by his baptismal name, Martín. Raising her arm close to his face, Dina directs Mikoa’s gaze toward their shared blackness, asserting, “You are Mikoa even though they may have changed your name. But who can change the color of your skin? Look, it is as black as mine.” In a film so obsessed with the dynamics of the colonial gaze, this scene might be read alongside the famous variation on the psychoanalytical “mirror scene” analyzed by Frantz Fanon and further parsed by Homi Bhabha. Fanon describes the way his identity was “fixed” by the gaze of the white child who pointed at him, crying, “Mama, see the Negro. I’m frightened!” (112, 116). Once he becomes conscious of the presumed ugliness of his “uniform” (114), the black child’s response is to don a white mask. As Bhabha describes it, “The black child turns away from himself, his race, in his total identification with the positivity of whiteness, which is at once colour and no colour” (Location 76). In Cristo negro, however, Dina attempts to reverse Mikoa’s incorporation of the white “ego ideal,” by holding up to him the mirror of her own flesh. Dina’s gesture evokes that of Halima in La llamada de África, who attempts to “fix” Andrade as dark when the two gaze together in her hand/mirror. But here, too, Mikoa will refuse fully to embrace a native identity, even though he recognizes that his “whiteness” must be purchased at the price of his subjectivity. For Bhabha, the “seen” inflects the “scene” upon which colonial identities are enacted (Location 76), and the colonial scopic regime always bears within

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it the seeds of its own disruption. The relationship between the white who looks and the black who is looked at, and the disavowal of difference marshaled by both in Fanon’s “mirror scene,” are inherently unstable, for according to Bhabha “there is always the threatened return of the look” (Location 81). Here Bhabha attenuates Fanon’s dramatic assertion that white eyes are “the only real eyes” (Location 116). And indeed, although throughout Cristo negro Mikoa’s gaze is constantly deflected, there is one African whose gaze is impervious to such deflection, who is possessed of “real eyes”: Bindú, the Delegado del Frente de la Independencia, or local nationalist leader. As a black intellectual, this character clearly inspires fear in whites, who believe that he “had better be watched,” as Fanon has written (20–21, 35). Here, however, Bindú’s fundamental “unwatchability” is represented by the sunglasses he wears throughout the film, outdoors and in. The dark lenses enable him to scrutinize the white colonizers with impunity, converting them into his own other, while making it impossible for them effectively to return the gaze. In his meeting at Janson’s home, Bindú employs a Spanish term with great resonance for Africanists when he insists that “our country is embarking upon a grave moment in which it will be decided if our convivencia is possible” (my emphasis). But he only removes his sunglasses to cast a firm and steady gaze upon the white man when he declares the absolute right of his fellow Africans to political self-determination: “Before you can imagine it we will be the ones to write our own laws.” Bindú also converts Charles, the former colonial overseer, into his own subordinate; as the two ride in a jeep, the African, dressed in the attire of the colonizer, takes the wheel and admonishes Charles never to forget that “now you are in our service” (fig. 37). Yet Fanon insists upon labeling as a “psychosis,” bred of racism, the black man’s desire to “make white men adopt a Negro attitude toward him [. . .] obtaining revenge for the imago that had always obsessed him: the frightened, trembling Negro, abased before the white overlord” (60–61). This is precisely the imago with which Cristo negro begins, and although the film shows how Catholicism has managed to drive the “psychotic” need for revenge from Mikoa, too many Africans who carry the same imago within have remained outside the fold of the church. The film appears to present as tragically unavoidable the frenzied climax, in which the Africans, led by the nationalists, rise up against the whites, massacring all of the Spanish missionaries and crucifying the “racial traitor” Mikoa. What were viewers to make of this spectacularly violent denouement? Was the film meant to prepare the Spanish public for a bloody end to the century-long Africanist project, refigured here as a prolonged martyrdom? In fact, in the same month that Cristo negro was released (March 1963), an exiled nationalist group (the Unión General de Trabajadores de Guinea Ecuatorial [General Union of

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37. The African nationalist leader takes the wheel and gazes with impunity in Cristo negro. Photograph courtesy of Video Mercury Films.

Workers of Equatorial Guinea]) announced that it intended to take up arms against the colonizers in order to achieve independence, and Spaniards may well have expected that Guinea would erupt into violence, as had happened elsewhere in Africa. At the same time, however, other exiled nationalist representatives had begun arguing their case before the United Nations, and they enjoyed strong support among representatives from neighboring Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon (all granted independence in 1960) and members of the Special Committee on Decolonization (formed in 1962). Surprisingly, they also found receptive ears in the Spanish delegation, which was much more attuned to the ebb and flow of Spain’s international reputation than were many officials back on the peninsula. Out of the ensuing negotiations, Spain hastened to prepare a popular referendum on autonomy—approved in December 1963—and by the following year black mayors had been elected for the first time in both major cities of the newly baptized Equatorial Guinea. Although different nationalist groups occasionally sought to convert their struggle into armed warfare, it was their search for recourse through international law, as much as their promotion of revolution, that would move Guineans toward independence (NdongoBidyogo, “Guineanos” 200–210; Campos Serrano 167–206). Perhaps for that reason the unnamed narrator of Equatoguinean writer Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo’s brilliant novel Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra

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(The Shadows of Your Black Memory, 1987), a young man who has traveled to the peninsula to study for the priesthood in the early to mid-1960s, decides to abandon the seminary and enter law school instead. As he insists to his spiritual guide, it is as vital that Guineans become lawyers (and engineers, and doctors) as priests: “That’s also fundamental, father, for us to attain our stability, for our progress, to build ourselves a nation” (17). While Spanish Africanist texts are preoccupied with mobilizing the colonies and the colonized in the construction of Spanish national identity, Tinieblas emphasizes that now it is the Guineans’ turn to construct their own nation—with and against Spain and Spaniards. Indeed, Ndongo-Bidyogo’s narrator offers a fascinating counterpoint to Cristo negro’s protagonist. He shares a number of traits in common with Mikoa. Although he is not orphaned, he grows up under the “protection” of the Catholic Church in the continental region of Spanish Guinea and expresses profound religious devotion very early on, as well as “exceptional” intellectual abilities. Just as Mikoa functions as Father Braulio’s closest collaborator, the narrator, too, accompanies Father Ortiz on his missionary work, even aiding in the effort to strip his fellow Guineans of the icons of their “savage” autochthonous belief systems (31). And the novel’s narrator also struggles to come to terms with his desire for women, though in his case he will not develop an interest in a white European until he has traveled to Spain. Unlike so many of the literary and filmic works produced by Spaniards, however, Ndongo-Bidyogo’s novel is obsessed not with the consequences of racial mixing through sex—or rape—but rather with the effects of cultural mixing through contact—or brutal colonial imposition. In this sense the narrator of Tinieblas might be described as an “anti-Mikoa,” for he articulates a profoundly ambivalent perspective concerning the legacy of Spanish colonialism. The novel includes a particularly incisive condemnation of primary and religious education in Spanish Guinea. While Cristo negro attempts to portray Spaniards as “color blind,” Tinieblas’s narrator shows how Spanish colonizers instill a racialized self-loathing in Guineans, who then transmit the scourge to their compatriots, as is clear from the description of the native schoolteacher Don Ramón, who whips his charges, “since he believed, as he said repeatedly, that learning could only sink in with blood, because we blacks are very thickheaded” (24). The novel’s polyphonic interior monologues reveal how the narrator’s thoughts are permeated with the xenophobic discourses repeated ad nauseum in the Spanish colonial world, from the patriotic Falangist hymns sung by the children every morning before the flag outside the school, to the imperialist history textbooks recited aloud in class, to the hate-infused “religious” lessons imparted by Don Ramón and Father Ortiz. The Guineans are encouraged to

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recognize themselves in the native Americans who were also offered the “One True Doctrine” by the Spaniards, “a superior and chosen race” (32). At the same time, the Guineans are fed horrific Civil War–era stories of “the hordes of redskinned men who burned churches and convents with nuns inside and everything, something that no infidel like us had ever done, those ones were really savages” (27). As Spanish leftists are racialized, the Guineans are reassured that, though they may rue the color of their complexions, they can still take comfort in being “blacks” and not “reds.” They may escape from true barbarism—if only they reject the path of godless materialism. Guineans’ defense of their own economic interests are thus aligned with savagery, and in order to whiten themselves (if only on the inside) and earn a place among the “civilized” they must accept a position of financial subordination (including, it must be assumed, the mass expropriation of the most productive land, so common under Spanish colonialism). The colonizers are practiced at marshaling anti-Semitic as well as anticommunist rhetoric to this cause, as the Guineans are warned to avoid the greed of the Jewish Christ killers (33): “We whipped our Lord, just like new Jews, with our barbarous customs, with our desire for wealth, by coveting others’ goods when Christ had promised the kingdom of heaven to the poor: the only wealth which is pleasing in the eyes of the Lord is that of the soul, of a white and pure soul” (65). Ndongo-Bidyogo’s shrewd mobilization of a retrospective first- and secondperson narration and the distance between his narrator’s adult perspective and child’s-eye view enables him ironically to reflect upon this anti-Semitic discourse. As a boy, the narrator experiences an intense desire to know the meaning of the letters “INRI,” emblazoned on the bronze crucifix presiding over his classroom, but he never dares to ask, for he intuits that his curiosity will only be satisfied with a whipping (28): Christ’s status as a Jew hardly harmonizes with crude expressions of anti-Semitism. By underlining his youthful obsession with the INRI mystery, however, the adult narrator mobilizes anti-Semitic commonplaces to delve into the anguished situation of those Guineans who choose to ally themselves with the colonizers. Thus he pointedly rephrases his characterization of Don Ramón’s pedagogy, insisting that the schoolteacher “rather than explaining, nailed into you” the colonizer’s version of history (32); Don Ramón is thus figured as “crucifying” his Guinean pupils. In contrast to Cristo negro, which compares the Guinean nationalists to Jews (they, too, kill one of their own), Tinieblas appears to locate “Jewish” betrayal among those Guineans who are aligned with, rather than opposed to, the colonizers. For that reason, the narrator initially demonstrates profound ambivalence when describing his own father, a model Christian who is respected by Spanish political and religious

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authorities and enjoys all the advantages of emancipation, while inspiring fear in his Guinean neighbors (21–22). However, the narrator’s own guilt increases as he recognizes the abject oppression of his fellow Guineans, even as he pursues the privileges that accrue to him as his religious devotion and academic achievements grow (119–20). Anti-Semitic discourse also figures in the narrator’s resolution of a related trauma provoked by the schoolroom crucifix. When the boy discovers that the beautifully modeled Christ figure is in fact hollow, he attempts to convince himself that the malevolent Jews must have ripped out Christ’s innards (28). Yet the profound symbolism of the hollow Christ will haunt him throughout his youth. The narrator’s efforts to come to terms with his religious vocation are significantly less subtly symbolized in the tragicomic chapter that portrays his first Communion. Unable to comply with the mandate that he fast the day before the event, tormented by hunger pangs and the delicious aroma of roasted lamb, duck, and chicken in peanut sauce prepared for the celebratory feast, he sneaks into the kitchen in the dark of night and gorges himself. The following day, the boy is overcome with nausea as he listens to Father Ortiz’s sermon on Santiago the Moor Killer, and contemplates an image of Spain’s patron saint astride a horse whose hoof crushes the stomach of a terrified dark-faced infidel (83). As the boy approaches the altar he urinates on himself, and after receiving the Host he vomits all over the white suit meant to represent the purity of his soul (85–86). When the narrator reflects that “I would always and forever carry the stigma with me” (87), he suggests, like so many other texts considered in this chapter, that whiteness cannot be simply “put on” like a costume, that the stigma of color—here, symbolized by the permanent brown stain on his snowy suit—is inescapable. This scene contrasts vividly with the previous chapter depicting the narrator’s initiation into manhood. His circumcision is overseen by his uncle Abeso, a venerable tribal leader who refuses to convert to Christianity and renounce his practice of polygamy, and who is described by the narrator as diametrically opposed to his own father (31). After their five weeks of daily walks through the jungle (52), the boy draws closer to Abeso and comes to admire his proud resistance, much in evidence in the conversations he sustains with Father Ortiz, who is desperate to persuade the Guinean to abandon his infidel ways. With the young narrator translating between Fang and Spanish, Abeso preaches religious tolerance and counters Father Ortiz’s private sermons with artfully reasoned arguments, observing for example that Communion is simply another form of cannibalism, a practice condemned by the Christians but in reality much more widespread among them than among the Guineans (93–98).¹⁵ The narrator becomes increasingly anguished by his impossibly inter-

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mediary position, which will again find physical manifestation in another round of nausea, as a brutal priest at his boarding school forces him to eat yucca cooked with an enormous centipede, and beats him mercilessly afterward (122–25). In the aftermath of the beating, the men of the family meet to decide upon a course of action. Although Abeso scolds the narrator’s father for defending the priest and refusing to listen to his son, he agrees that the boy should continue to pursue the knowledge of the colonizers, even though he may be mistreated. The narrator’s great-grandfather appears in a vision before him, advising, “Always do what [the whites] tell you, until you acquire the formula for their power and bring it back to the tribe, and then they will be overcome” (134). He may be destined to suffer, but as critic Baltasar Fra-Molinero has observed, the narrator has been chosen to serve as a “Messiah” for his people (164).¹⁶ As he negotiates the parameters of his own role, the narrator also arrives at a more nuanced understanding of the importance of collaborationists such as his own father, who is now characterized as “the liaison between the tribe and the occupiers,” who labors to fulfill “his mission as spy for the tribe” (134, 140–41). Although he chooses to pursue the priesthood, and even fantasizes about baptizing his uncle Abeso with the name Santiago (136–37), the narrator recognizes that he will always find himself in a liminal position. Before his departure for the seminary in Fernando Po, the narrator participates in a ceremony in which he embraces the inheritance of his ancestors, and subsequently he will come to find strength in the power and wisdom of the tribe, even as he seeks the power and wisdom of the colonizers (149–51). While the narrator’s family views his assimilation into white society as a means ultimately to preserve the culture of the tribe, from the Spanish perspective the promotion of educational advancement for “exceptional” Guineans was designed to create a class of leaders loyal to Spain, who would facilitate the advancement of peninsular interests even after independence. But Spaniards arrived at this strategy—long favored by their colonial rivals, the French—far too late. By 1963, there were only thirteen native Guineans with professional degrees: four doctors, four lawyers, and five agricultural specialists. The ninety-nine students sent to study in Spain during the several years of autonomy, whose ranks the fictional narrator of Tinieblas would join, represented a scant .04 percent of the native population. Ironically, greater investment in health care, housing, infrastructure, and industry during this period only increased Equatorial Guinea’s dependence upon the colonizing power, for the vast majority of Guineans continued to engage in subsistence farming, while Spaniards still controlled the export economy (Abaga Edjang 56–60).¹⁷ Moreover, the complicated dynamics of the autonomous period heightened tensions between bourgeois Guinean collaborationists,

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committed nationalists, and the various ethnic groups that made up Equatorial Guinea, namely, the Fang (historically concentrated in the continental area of Río Muni) and the Bubi (native residents of the much more prosperous island of Fernando Po, who together with the Fernandinos tended to support a separatist agenda). Shortly after the nation’s first elected president Francisco Macías Nguema took power in the fall of 1968, he accused Spain of fomenting an attempted coup d’état, suspended the newly approved constitution, and declared himself ruler for life, initiating an authoritarian regime that would be compared to that of the infamous Idi Amin of Uganda. Macías Nguema began a vicious campaign to purge all vestiges of Spanish presence, and seven thousand of the eight thousand Spanish residents were forced to abandon the country, followed by the tens of thousands of Nigerian guest workers they had under contract. The dramatic exacerbation of capital flight and the loss of agricultural and industrial know-how plunged the fledgling nation into an economic crisis. The many thousands of Guineans who, like Mikoa in Cristo negro, were deemed “traitors to their race” for having assimilated Western values, might escape torture and death only by seeking exile in Spain or neighboring countries, and only those who belonged to Macías’s particular Fang family clan, from the remote continental interior district of Mongomo, avoided persecution. It is estimated that 120,000 Guineans were forced out during these years (Ndongo-Bidyogo, “Guineanos” 200–210; Liniger-Goumaz 184–85; Abaga Edjang 59). Although Macías Nguema claimed that assimilated Guineans were the enemies of his regime, Ndongo-Bidyogo has suggested that it was precisely a highly circumscribed form of assimilation that had facilitated the dictator’s seizure, and maintenance, of absolute power. In the second installment of the trilogy initiated with Tinieblas, Los poderes de la tempestad (The Powers of the Tempest, 1997), we learn that the narrator is finishing his law degree in Spain when Macías Nguema rises to power, but some five years later he decides to risk returning to Equatorial Guinea with his Spanish wife and mulatto daughter, and is horrified by the transformation he witnesses there. While wondering if African cosmogony might also be partially to blame, the narrator nevertheless seems to find greatest fault in the colonial imposition of a censored form of Catholicism: The Guinean people will never rise out of their oppression so long as they continue to put up with everything without the slightest protest, that was what you thought, indignant. Was it Christian resignation, innate cowardice? Was it the fault of the colonial system, the colonial and fascist system, and of the Catholicism that was drilled into you, without any space for reflection, without any possibility of reasoning? Was it because the old-style missionaries had skillfully

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hidden from the people the rebellious Jesus who was incensed by injustice, so clearly revealed in the Scriptures, as a part of that protection which in the end was so counterproductive to the colonial superstructure, to the historical alliance between sword, pocket, and cross? (180)

This passage resonates with Tinieblas’s powerful metaphor of a hollow Christ imposed upon the Guinean population, a Christ emptied of his revolutionary message. The same (mis)interpretation of Christianity had been mobilized through National Catholic rhetoric to repress recalcitrant Spaniards on the peninsula during the Franco regime, and in fact Jo Labanyi has asserted that the dictator sought to implement a form of “internal colonization” at home, drawing upon his imperial mission in Africa (“Internalisations” 26). Moreover, according to Ndongo-Bidyogo, the superimposition of Francoism and colonialism constituted a “double dictatorship” for Guineans, who had no democratic models to draw upon as decolonization approached (“Guineanos” 198). As Carmen Nonell had argued in Zoco Grande, Spain’s colonial subjects on the neighboring continent might not be prepared for political independence—but neither were Spaniards. Given the nature of Spain’s tutelage, then, it is not surprising that Macías Nguema failed to guide Equatorial Guinea toward democratic freedoms. More surprising, perhaps, was the brutality of his regime. Infamous for cannibalizing his political enemies, Macías Nguema clearly took pleasure in the perverse performance of the “savagery” so long imputed to Guineans; Ndongo-Bidyogo’s narrator characterizes his rule as a criminal “farce,” in violation of the traditional morality embodied by his uncle Abeso (Ndongo-Bidyogo, Poderes 282, 213). But in many respects, Macías Nguema resembled no one so much as Franco. Just like the Spanish dictator, Macías quickly instituted a single-party system, outlawing all other political affiliations. As did Franco, Macías promoted the revision of history and the production of new myths of national origin and destiny, presenting himself as both the father and the divine savior of his people. Special care was taken to indoctrinate children; citizens were cut off from the outside world, and censorship functioned to stifle dissent. And as in the aftermath of the Civil War on the peninsula, during Macías’s rule dissidents were terrorized, imprisoned, tortured, and executed, and tens of thousands were forced into exile. Ironically, then, with the decolonization of Equatorial Guinea, Africanist rhetoric had at last come true: Franco and Macías proved to be the ultimate in “blood brothers.”

6

P A   E  F E

Francoist colonial structures only provided negative models to the Moroccans, Equatoguineans, and Saharawis who labored to envision a future freedom, as several of the texts analyzed in the previous chapter make clear. Independence movement leaders sought inspiration in other paradigms, such as panArabism and various forms of Marxian-inflected anticolonialism, unfortunately with less-than-satisfactory results. Upon the death of Franco on November 20, 1975, metropolitan Spaniards, too, scrambled to identify prototypes that would enable them to fashion a new nation, and their relatively smooth transition to democratic governance was deemed both surprising and exemplary at the time.¹ It might be presumed that, as Spanish colonialism in Africa had died along with Franco (the government finally agreed to withdraw from the Western Sahara on November 16, 1975), the Andalusi legacy would no longer play a significant role in the imagination of the Iberian nation’s destiny and identity. Curiously, however, the medieval past has again been mobilized—albeit in sometimes dramatically different ways—as Spaniards have struggled to reconcile centralist and peripheral nationalisms, reconsider their place on the world stage, and negotiate the dramatic increase in the numbers of immigrants, including those arriving from onetime Spanish colonies. CELEBRATING CONVIVENCIA

Under Franco, peripheral nationalist identities had been suppressed in favor of a centralist hegemony that exalted the “glorious” imperial past. As we have seen, while the ongoing Africanist project aspired to carry that glory into the present, it also created fissures in the otherwise apparently seamless emphasis

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on the nation’s racial, religious, and cultural homogeneity. During the postcolonial/post-Franco period of transition, long-repressed nationalist sentiments moved to the fore, and the moderate drafters of the 1978 Constitution sought to appease those with separatist inclinations by establishing a national State of Autonomies. Initially, only the three “historic communities” that had voted in favor of a more independent status during the Second Republic in the 1930s— Galicia, the Basque Country, and Catalonia—were allowed to move quickly toward (re)instating their autonomy. A lengthier procedure leading to more limited forms of self-government was envisioned for other geographical areas of the nation. Residents of the south, however, rallied around the martyred figure of the “father” of Andalusian nationalism, Blas Infante (discussed in chapter 1), insisting that Andalusia also had a legitimate right to consideration as a “historic community.” Although political pacts eventually allowed Andalusia to pursue the same path to autonomy (via popular referendum) as the three counterparts in the north, the process was not without controversy, and the president of the local government even decried Madrid’s “racist” opposition to Andalusian home rule (Ramos 282). Interestingly, voters turned out in considerably higher numbers there than in the three other historical communities, and demonstrated overwhelming support for autonomy (Tom Gallagher, qtd. in Egea FernándezMontesinos 16). Meanwhile, the remaining provinces quickly mobilized to undergo the alternative procedure. Consequently, seventeen autonomous regions and two “autonomous cities,” the African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla— which continue to be claimed by Morocco—now compose the Spanish state (Elorza 333; Carr and Fusi 249–52). As a part of this political process, local histories and cultures have been championed, and those autonomous communities in which the Andalusi past is most visible have invested considerable resources into the celebration of that legacy in particular (Madariaga, “En torno” 82). In Andalusia, for example, the Alianza Socialista de Andalucía (Socialist Alliance of Andalusia, transformed into the Socialist Party of Andalusia, and later renamed the Partido Andalucista, or Andalucista Party), which proposed the first Statute of Autonomy in 1975, has always sought inspiration from Infante’s nationalist writings (Stallaert 99). The party now enjoys mainstream status and garners a respectable showing in local and national elections. At the same time, a series of more radical separatist groups has also emerged in Andalusia since the death of the dictator, in some cases formed by Spanish converts to Islam. While limited forms of freedom of religion had been instituted as early as 1967, it was not until the symbolic year of 1992 (the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reconquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews) that the Spanish government formally promoted religious plurality by signing a series of accords with

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Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim representatives. Islam was granted official status as an “established religion” in part due to its historical importance “in the formation of Spanish identity” (as the accord itself states; Moreras 88, 140). The majority of the estimated one million Muslims in Spain who are immigrants or the children of immigrants (and who are discussed at greater length later in this chapter) generally prefer to invest their political energy into lobbying for improved working and living conditions. For their part, however, the Spanish converts, many of whom were formerly anti-Franco activists, have instead joined forces to promote particular “recuperations” of the Andalusi past. The Movimiento de Musulmanes Europeos al-Murabitún (al-Murabitún Movement of Muslim Europeans), for instance, begun by three Spanish exiles who claimed to have converted to Islam in London on the same day that Franco died, set up communities in Córdoba (where they sought to hold organized prayers in the former Great Mosque for the first time since the days of the Reconquest) and then Seville. In 1981 the group moved to Granada at the invitation of the mayor, Antonio Jara, who purportedly was interested in promoting the city’s multicultural heritage to attract European Economic Community money. Although many members have splintered off over the years, the core group, associated with the controversial Scottish convert Abdel Kader al-Murabit (Ian Dallas), continues to revere the Almoravid fundamentalist warriors who arrived on the peninsula in the eleventh century, and it promotes a stricter form of Islam than that practiced by many of the Muslim immigrants or other converts living in Spain.² Now functioning under the rubric Comunidad Islámica en España (Islamic Community in Spain), the group is responsible for the construction of the new Great Mosque in Granada’s Albaicín neighborhood. The building features a stunning view of the Alhambra, and was completed with funding from Arab nations in 2003 after a lengthy struggle with conservative residents and city officials. At the mosque’s inauguration, a prince from the United Arab Emirates spoke in Spanish of the intense emotion he felt upon returning to the land of his ancestors, where many Spaniards undoubtedly shared his blood (Sánchez Nogales 75–86). Similar returns to the “homeland” were also anticipated by another, differently focused group of Spanish converts studied by Christiane Stallaert. Liberación Andaluza (Andalusian Liberation), led by the Spanish Muslim Abderrahman Medina Molera and active between 1985 and 1989, sought to reclaim the historical territory of al-Andalus, deemed a colony of the Spanish state. Like Blas Infante, Liberación Andaluza characterized the Reconquest as a conquest, and they considered the impoverished farmers of the region to be descendants of the

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Moriscos rather than of the northern colonizers, arguing that serological analysis as well as the continuation of Andalusi agricultural methods supported their assertions. Liberación Andaluza moved beyond Infante’s more limited goals by advocating for the creation of an independent state that would reconstruct an Andalusi identity. The group welcomed the descendants of expelled Moriscos as well as anyone else who shared their more liberal interpretation of Islam, based upon the ideals of tolerance and convivencia—the living together of diverse groups associated with the medieval past—which according to Medina Molera reached a high point on the peninsula by the tenth century (Stallaert 99–108; see also Sánchez Nogales 71–75). Indeed, while Liberación Andaluza marshaled the idea of a uniquely Andalusi tolerance and convivencia for the creation of a radical separatist agenda, many other Spaniards have seized upon those same presumably historical values in order to solidify the State of Autonomies, characterized as the most effective way to overcome the repressive past. As Rosa María de Madariaga has explained, “After the establishment of democracy in Spain in the mid-1970s, we witnessed a renewed interest in al-Andalus as a model of a pluralistic and diverse society, in opposition to the oficial doctrine imposed by Francoism” (“En torno” 82). Federico Corriente has also detailed Spanish leaders’ efforts to locate an autochthonous precedent for a modern tolerant society in the nation’s own premodern past: “The message was transmitted that, in the Middle Ages in both the Christian and Muslim states of the Iberian Peninsula most of the time the three peoples lived peacefully and productively together, and they and their individual cultures all benefited from and were fertilized through mutual contact. We Spaniards should do the same thing” (44). The fundamental ideas in play here—that three peoples and cultures resided peacefully side by side during much of the Spanish Middle Ages, a convivencia made possible by a mutually beneficial insistence upon tolerance—are evidently cribbed from Américo Castro, although he is rarely cited directly, and his assertions tend to circulate in partial and/or distorted form. Castro was a Republican exile from Spain and professor at Princeton University when he published his seminal works, España en su historia: Cristianos, moros, judíos (Spain in Its History: Christians, Moors, Jews, 1948) and the revised and expanded La realidad histórica de España (The Historic Reality of Spain, 1954). As he formulated his arguments, Castro relied upon many of the Arabists who had written on the Andalusi legacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and whose ideas have been discussed throughout this book. For the critic Francisco Márquez Villanueva,

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His most innovative focus obviously consists in the active valorization of the Semitic contribution, which produced a Middle Ages and, by natural consequence, a modern process that can’t be circumscribed through the mere transposition of models elaborated for the rest of Europe. Although at base he did nothing more than skillfully apply the anthropological concept of acculturation, Spaniards’ touchiness concerning their history was enough to lend the project a revolutionary character. [. . .] The inquisitorial penance that extends the pallium of dishonor over Moors and Jews, and that more or less openly considers them undesirable for hosting in one’s own home, militates against [Castro’s perspective] (“Américo” 132–33).

Although España en su historia and La realidad histórica de España were published in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, copies of the latter book clearly found their way into the hands of intellectuals who had remained in Francoist Spain, for the author’s revisionist perspective on Spanish history was hotly debated in specialized journals as well as in works by historians and anthropologists such as Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Julio Caro Baroja beginning in the mid-1950s. It is probably the case, though, that beyond this specific group of scholars the Spanish elite would have had only second- or third-hand knowledge of Castro’s ideas, while the masses had most likely never heard of them at all.³ By contrast, in the democratic era, although serious scholarly interest in Castro has been somewhat limited, his work has enjoyed a popularization that would have been unthinkable during the Franco dictatorship. Indeed, because Castro is widely considered to have been anathema to the regime, the mobilization of ideas associated (rightly or wrongly) with the exiled author has contributed to the larger liberal project of distancing the democracy from the Francoist past.⁴ Although Gema Martín Muñoz has complained that the Andalusi example of convivencia and multiculturalism has not been effectively communicated through the educational system (118–19), Federico Corriente and Manuela Marín have underlined the surprising purchase that “progressive” interpretations of al-Andalus have had within Spanish society in general (Corriente 42; Marín 82).⁵ Indeed, several key terms—“three cultures,” “tolerance,” “convivencia”—now permeate the national discourse at many different levels. The past fifteen years in particular have witnessed a dramatic increase in official foundations and institutions, cultural events, and products devoted to illuminating the lessons that modern-day Spaniards might presumably cull from their medieval past: namely, how to foment harmonious coexistence among communities with separate cultural identities; peaceful assimilation of immigrants, including Muslims; and cordial as well as politically and economically productive relationships

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with neighbors in the Arab world and beyond. For example, the Toledo School of Translators, “reopened” in 1994, is loosely modeled on Toledo’s twelfth- and thirteenth-century collective of scholars of Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin, who sought to share knowledge across cultures. The facility offers courses in Arabic and organizes the translation of contemporary texts so that readers in Spain and elsewhere may become more familiar with the culture of the many immigrants (particularly Muslims) who now make their home in Europe. The school also sponsors colloquia on the movement of ideas and populations within the larger Mediterranean region (Simons, “After”). Legado Andalusí (Andalusi Legacy), founded by the Granadan lawyer Jerónimo Páez in 1993 and funded by the Andalusian government, has sponsored ambitious exhibitions, publications, and academic events, outreach to primary and secondary school students, and detailed tourist routes and guidebooks in order to encourage Spanish pride in the Hispano-Arabic patrimony and solidify ties to other nations within the Mediterranean region. Páez stresses the importance of modifying Spaniards’ attitudes toward others by enabling them to understand their commonalities through the experience of Andalusi heritage sites and artifacts (Rojo and Páez 49, 53, 55), evidently in consonance with Pierre Nora’s notion of “memory places.” Of course, as anthropologist José Antonio González Alcantud underlines in his critique of Legado Andalusí, tourism is also promoted with an eye toward strengthening economic development and linkages between Spain and North Africa (Moro 194). Indeed, sometimes the past is simply appropriated for baldly commercial ends, as is patent, for example, in Alicante’s annual “Medieval Market,” which celebrates the profitability of the “three cultures” concept. González Alcantud also takes issue with Legado Andalusí’s lack of attention to pressing issues within the contemporary Arab world (194), but other organizations have stepped in to fill that void.⁶ The Fundación Tres Culturas (Three Cultures Foundation), for instance, has organized roundtable discussions on wider political issues of current concern, such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and immigration policies in Europe. The foundation, created jointly in 1998 by the Andalusian government and Morocco and housed in Morocco’s splendid pavilion on Seville’s Expo ’92 site, has also sponsored scores of museum expositions, book fairs (Madrid’s 2003 Feria del Libro was devoted to the “three cultures” theme), concerts and other arts festivals, providing an important source of funding for smaller organizations dedicated to cross-cultural exchange and dialogue. Over the years, numerous other institutions in Spain have prepared special expositions and events focused on the Andalusi past and the multicultural present. In Valencia a 1999 Ethnology Museum exhibit entitled “El Rif, el otro occidente” (The Rif, the Other West) launched a series of cultural activities

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dedicated to Morocco. In the catalog, sponsors and organizers articulated the expectation that the exhibit would illuminate “our own past” (Rif 7), as well as facilitate the integration of North African immigrants by emphasizing that “we share a coastline, a history, and some common characteristics that should make mutual understanding and convivencia easier” (Rif 11). Similarly, in Murcia, where a booming greenhouse industry depends for its survival upon large numbers of North African immigrant workers, the equally optimistic (and largely unrealistic) goals of the annual International Three Cultures Festival (initiated in 2000) are to “achieve solidarity [. . .] [by] remembering the happy and exemplary years in which Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together in this Mediterranean city in total harmony” (“VI [Sexto]”). Although during the democratic era a wide range of Spanish cultural texts have also contributed to the recovery and/or resignification of the Hispano-Arabic past—Antonio Gala’s best-selling historical novel El manuscrito carmesí (The Crimson Manuscript, 1990) is just one notable example—musical productions are particularly interesting, as they have entailed efforts both at historical recuperation and at modern-day collaboration between Spaniards and Maghrebis.⁷ Although the Arabist Julián Ribera produced a pioneering, if problematic, defense of Hispano-Arabic music in 1922, it is only in recent years that musicologists have focused their attention in earnest on the melodic compositions of alAndalus and the early post-Reconquest period. While some theoretical treatises and descriptions and illustrations of instruments are extant, there are no manuscripts notating the music itself, which was transmitted orally and showcased improvisational skills. Faced with this lack of documentation, Ribera rejected the idea that contemporary Maghrebi vocal and instrumental styles might bear any relationship to the music of the medieval past, but today many scholars believe that Andalusi groups in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia provide the closest link to traditions dating back many centuries (Zayas). Esteemed Spanish classical musicians and scholars such as Begoña Olavide (founder of the group Mudéjar and cofounder of Calamus), Eduardo Paniagua (cofounder of Calamus and, with Omar Metioui, the Ibn Báya Ensemble), Rosa Olavide, Carlos Paniagua, and Luis Delgado have studied and collaborated intensively with their counterparts in North Africa. As a precise “reproduction” is impossible, their goal has been to “reinvent” discrete musical pieces and suites (or noubas), seeking inspiration in celebrated works of Hispano-Arabic (and Hispano-Hebraic) poetry. The Andalusi influence has also filtered out into the popular and “world music” spheres, again resulting in projects that bring together artists from both shores of the Mediterranean. In 1985, for example, the Valencian folk group Al Tall worked with the Marrakesh-based musicians of Muluk el-Hwa to produce the

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recording “Xarq al-Andalus,” which included vocal pieces based on twelfth- and thirteenth-century eastern Andalusi literary texts, such as the famous “Letter to a Friend” in which the exiled Ibn Amira laments the fall of his beloved Valencia to the Christians. Since the appearance of that album, Hispano-Arabic fusion continues to be met with enthusiasm by popular music audiences. One of the most critically and commercially acclaimed groups to work in this vein is Radio Tarifa, whose name evokes the idea of different radio waves mixing as they traverse the Strait of Gibraltar. The group’s concerts and recordings feature guest appearances by musicians from Africa and the Arabic world, while their Web site insists that they are engaging in a form of historical research: “To insert a refrain from the Maghreb into a popular Andalusian theme, as Radio Tarifa has done in several songs (Rumba Argelina, La Mosca, La Tarara) is more an exercise in rediscovering the common origins of two cultures that at bottom are very close (as the results prove), rather than a fusion understood as a collage of disparate elements” (“Radio Tarifa”). DECONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING CONVIVENCIA IN EN CONSTRUCCIÓN

The previous section’s brief sampling of the myriad academic and general cultural events and texts devoted to the Andalusi legacy indicates that wellintentioned but naively celebratory views of Spanish history circulate alongside more measured and/or rigorously informed considerations of the nation’s past, present, and future. Here I would like to devote greater attention to one particularly sophisticated exploration of the imbrication of the past in the present, José Luis Guerín’s brilliant 2001 film En construcción (Under Construction [or Work in Progress]), which won the International Critics’ Prize and the Special Jury Prize at the 2001 San Sebastian Film Festival, the 2001 National Film Prize, and the Goya Prize for Best Documentary in 2002. The film also did exceptionally well at the box office (“Base de datos”). Convivencia is at once scrutinized and manufactured in Guerín’s work, which documents the gentrification of one of the most richly complex urban spaces in Spain, the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona. As a nineteenth-century center for industry that quickly became associated with a thriving—and often remarkably effective—workers’ rights movement, the Raval has been home as well to the infamous “Barrio Chino,” or red-light district, which has attracted clients from the Catalan bourgeoisie as well as sailors from the nearby port. Moreover, the area has been a magnet for generations of immigrants. In earlier decades, newcomers arrived from other more impoverished communities within Spain, principally Andalusia, Extrema-

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dura, and Galicia; more recently, most have been foreign-born, with roughly a quarter of the immigrants hailing from Morocco, another quarter from the Philippines, and significant percentages from India, Pakistan, and the Dominican Republic (Sargatal). Understanding that his film crew would also add to the remarkable diversity of this human landscape, over the course of the three-year project Guerín explicitly endeavored to engage in a form of convivencia with his subjects: “Face to face, we looked for a way to convivir, to come to know, and to film—in that order” (qtd. in “En construcción”). En construcción opens with a silent prologue composed of black-and-white Franco-era documentary footage of the neighborhood, featuring skyline views of the iconic triple smokestacks remaining from the “La Canadiense” factory (site of a famous 1919 general strike), as well as shots of drunken sailors, prostitutes plying their trade, and working-class families. An abrupt cut then transports us to the present day and to colorful paintings of many eyes on a decaying wall, as a woman walks briskly by in the foreground. Her presence is marked more by the determined pace of her footsteps, which are heard for a second or two after she leaves the frame, and which contrast dramatically with the silence of the prologue, than by her image, which is fleeting and blurred, since the camera is focused selectively on the wall behind. The fact that sound will be as resonant as image in this film is immediately underlined by the explanatory note that appears superimposed over the wall after the title of the film: “Things seen and heard during the construction of a new building in ‘el Chino,’ a working-class neighborhood in Barcelona that is born and dies with the century.” Moreover, the grafitti eyes, which are subsequently framed in a closer shot, also function as a metaphor for the many different viewpoints that will be presented throughout the film, seemingly in an objective manner, since the “voice of God” narrator characteristic of traditional documentaries is completely lacking. Yet careful attention to the interplay of sound and image in this film reveals that despite the illusion of spontaneity, En construcción is eminently “constructed.” Like Guerín’s more patently experimental previous film (Tren de sombras [Train of Shadows, 1997]), this work may provoke viewers to question the boundaries between documentary and fiction, if not necessarily to ask, as Marsha Kinder does of Tren, “How do we know that this so-called documentary is not a hoax?” (19). While it seems clear that the numerous scenes of demolition and construction are not staged for the camera, the conversations we witness are sometimes so incisive, and their interaction with the visuals is so intriguing, that we can not help but suspect that Guerín has again drawn liberally upon the magic of editing— and perhaps even upon the powers of persuasion—to engage in what Kinder terms with respect to the prior film “the restructuring of communities” (21).

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The first section after the black-and-white prologue, for example, is meticulously composed to present a complexly layered “debate” concerning urban renewal. The film’s montage juxtaposes the gauzy pastel tones of a city government sign depicting plans for the Central Plaza of Raval, an impressive tree-lined street and park complex fronted with clean white modern apartment buildings, to a dilapidated blood-red wall bearing a bold graffito of a human-sized rat grasping a building in its jaws. Images such as these are also in dialogue with the extensive voiceover monologue by an elderly ex-sailor who compares the “antiquated” Barcelona to the “modern” London he visited in his youth. Although we later see numerous scenes in which walls bearing graffiti protests against expropriations are demolished, the film suggests that the officially sanctioned process of regeneration is not powerful enough to squelch opposition, which is even voiced by the workers constructing the new housing. Recent studies have shown that efforts to allow the local population to remain in the neighborhood were not particularly successful, since the special loans and indemnifications offered to those who were displaced failed to offset the steep increase in purchase prices and rents as the zone was gentrified, and immigrants were often excluded from those benefits (Pareja Eastaway and Tapada Bertelli 3, 11, 12). In Guerín’s film it is the Moroccan day laborer Abdel Aziz el Mountassir who presents the clearest picture of these economic imbalances in an Arabic conversation subtitled in Spanish. When Abdelsalam Madris, a younger countryman who has come seeking work on the construction site, admires the size of the project and asserts that the Raval residents will get new homes in the bargain, Abdel disagrees: “They give them 800,000 pesetas, and they sell the apartments for 20 million. [. . .] It’s not fair.” Even “internal” immigrants from the 1960s who have apparently been assimilated into Catalan society may express ambivalence about the government’s plans. Juan López, overseeing his son Juan Manuel’s apprenticeship in construction work, comments on the liveliness of the Barrio Chino he knew when he first immigrated as a youth from the south of Spain to Catalonia, compared with the moribund neighborhood now occupied by “four grandfathers.” While measuring and marking chalk lines for a stairway, he tells Juan Manuel, “We’ve determined to make a new neighborhood here, eh? And we are going to do it. Well, not us, for some time now the mayor of Barcelona has wanted to make a new neighborhood here, and we will have to do it, from one day to the next.” Juan tries but is unable fully to reconcile the government’s agenda with his own. The rift in his statement, opened up beneath his precarious use of the bridge word “we,” reveals some of the fault lines traversing Juan’s own identity: Is he still an immigrant, or does he now qualify as a local? Should he sympathize with the working-class and nonnative residents of the Raval, or support

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the interests of the Catalan bourgeoisie to which he has perhaps aspired? (He is, after all, laboring to build a stairway in this scene.) As Juan is then obliged to review some of the measurements he and his son have made, it becomes clear that construction—of buildings, of identities—often requires recalibration, and is always subject to future renovation or reconstruction. The ongoing (re)construction of identity in this diverse neighborhood is most on display in a lengthy sequence depicting an unforeseen source of delay in the rehabilitation project. As demolition progresses, cacophonous scenes of backhoes and bulldozers knocking down walls and moving earth give way to the hush of a single man wielding small trowels and a soft brush; the perfectly preserved bones of a child’s hand emerge from the mud. As a sixth-century Roman cemetery is slowly revealed by a team of archaeologists, crowds begin to gather to observe the excavation. At first, they peer through small slits in the green plastic sheeting that covers the fencing around the site. The camera, situated inside the enclosure, captures the shadowy outlines of their otherwise hidden bodies, and the curious eyes, like those of heavily veiled women, that contemplate the scene. Soon, however, these figures will be “unveiled.” A different sort of excavation ensues as the green sheeting disappears, and the camera begins to scrutinize the reactions of different members of the Raval community—women and men, children and the elderly, Muslims and Christians, natives and immigrants from Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia, speakers of Spanish, Catalan, Arabic, and Urdu—who come to comment on the bodies that have been unearthed. As the camera continues filming, a microphone records the comments of these viewers, who attempt to identify the remains and come to terms with their own relationship to them. As is the case elsewhere in the film, sound and image tracks are carefully edited to create the impression that this nuanced representation of the negotiation of identity is unreconstructed footage. Snippets of conversations are woven together to suggest that throughout history ostensible “outsiders” have been essential to constructions of Spanishness. While one woman prefers to distance herself from the remains—upon hearing that they are Roman, she asserts with obvious relief, “They’re not Spaniards, then”—most of the other observers appear intent upon determining their own connection to the cemetery’s bones, drawing upon their cultural knowledge as well as their personal experience and their immersion in the urban environment. Linguistic issues are of particular concern to one man, who asks (in Spanish) if the dead spoke Catalan. Another group of men engages in a lively discussion in Catalan (subtitled in Spanish) concerning the Roman and Visigothic invasions, seeking out supporting architectural evidence in the arches of the surrounding monuments, such as the adjacent church of Sant Pau.

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Others wonder if the cemetery might be Arabic. Shortly thereafter we see two Muslim women in headscarves survey the excavation, and their (unsubtitled) comments are interspersed with fragments of another conversation in voiceover that includes references to Romans, Christians, and killings. When a young man who earlier in the scene had amused the crowd with his sense of humor exclaims loudly, “An ethnic massacre!,” no one laughs at the joke. The war in Yugoslavia is an insistent if subtle presence throughout the film as television and radio programs communicate news from the front. Scenes in the film centered around the young prostitute Juani and her boyfriend Iván also hint at the potentially lethal mixture of exoticizing fascination and brutal rage that Spaniards may direct at Muslim immigrants: Juani taunts Iván by openly admiring the welldefined muscles and “heavy balls” of a young Moroccan construction worker, drawing upon the customary sexualization of North African men. The two also delight in hurling racial epithets at the “moros” they decimate with toy machine guns in the video arcade. En construcción moves beyond facile characterizations of Spanish history and identity, acknowledging that as diverse groups of people have encountered one another on the peninsula, violence has frequently been the result. Indeed, in the cemetery scene the unexpected sight of so many dead bodies enables many of the onlookers to draw parallels with periods of conflict between different religious, ethnic, and political groups throughout Spain’s past. Gazing upon the exposed skeletons, one elderly man laments over “the crimes that have taken place in Spain.” Some of the older passers-by prefer to focus on the more recent of those historical crimes, recounting stories of the violence during the Civil War, when Barcelona’s nearby Parallel Avenue was littered with corpses, while victims disappeared without a trace in unmarked graves. A Latin American man with a small child in his arms asks a woman if there might be some connection to the Franco regime; perhaps he himself is familiar with similar forms of oppression and is eager to reach out to someone who may have shared a comparable experience. While the specters of violence are invoked throughout this scene, the different groups of people who gather to view the cemetery do manage to connect meaningfully with one another, often through recognition of the commonality of human suffering and mortality. One of the most interesting of these exchanges takes place between a talkative Catalan woman in a housedress and the younger of the two Muslim women seen earlier conversing in Arabic, who is likely an immigrant from Morocco (fig. 38). The woman in the housedress persists in drawing the Muslim woman into conversation, gesturing toward the bones: “There’s no point in getting angry or anything because look at what we are, now. Isn’t that so? Look at what we are; look at what we are.” Her interlocutor, who initially

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38. Women of Christian and Muslim heritage find common ground in Barcelona as they contemplate the remains of the past in En construcción. Photograph courtesy of Ovideo TV.

appears lost in thought, is slow to respond, but once she concurs their discussion quickly gains momentum: Woman in headscarf: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone fits in the same hole. Woman in housedress: Everybody. Woman in headscarf: Everyone; the rich as well as the poor. Woman in housedress: Well, there are no differences there. Woman in headscarf: Well, there’s no difference there. Woman in housedress: Good thing, good thing, because that really would be too much.

While some of the other onlookers argue over the provenance of the remains and their significance, the structure of the brief dialogue here—in which each woman repeats, affirms, and expands upon the arguments of the other—reflects their ability to enjoy a brief moment of solidarity. These two women clearly find much common ground in their shared experience of class, despite their obvious religious differences, and both seek some comfort in the observation that wealth

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is ultimately meaningless in the face of death. As the woman in the housedress concludes, “Isn’t that something; look at how you live on top of the dead and don’t even know it.” This scene anticipates the later interactions between “native” Spaniards and Moroccan immigrants in the film, most particularly the moving friendship that develops between Abdel and the Galician bricklayer Santiago Segade, which is depicted in three lengthy sections over the last third of the film. Santiago fails to live up to the reputation of his famous namesake, the patron saint Santiago Matamoros (the Moor Killer). Although he occasionally responds to Abdel with a gruff “Shut up” or “Get off my case,” Abdel’s warmly solicitous concern for his workmate’s well-being clearly wins him over. As with the two women at the Roman cemetery, their conversation tends to revolve around material questions: the class struggle, as well as their personal struggles with human mortality. The first and third scenes are similarly structured. Abdel begins with a series of Marxian meditations, and here it is evident that, as is often the case with immigrants, his educational level far exceeds what is required for the job he occupies (Solé 216). When Santiago remarks with resignation, “I’m one of those who says that capitalism existed, exists, and will exist,” Abdel seeks to historicize the phenomenon, arguing that capitalism will not last forever; like slavery and feudalism, it too will pass. Abdel avoids violating Santiago’s comfort zone—the Galician prefers not to talk “politics”—but he does weave such terms as “class consciousness” and “alienation” into their conversation. Throughout the film, he is the one clear embodiment of the Raval’s celebrated tradition of left-wing activism. For his part, Santiago demonstrates an intuitive understanding of religious alienation when he tells Abdel of his frustrating sessions with a priest who was unable to explain to him the mysteries of the Holy Trinity. Although Abdel prefers to champion the religion of the poor—he elicits a smile from Santiago when he describes his daily prayer, “Well, I sing the Internationale every morning”—both men acknowledge the temptation to turn to God during moments of vulnerability. The conversation then segues into the principal source of that vulnerability: fear of death. As they work late into the evening, Abdel is disturbed when Santiago recounts that he once worked for the city government in a cemetery, and that he took a midday siesta in one of the niches he built. Abdel confesses that he could never take on such a job, even if he were unemployed. While we hear this exchange in voiceover, we see shots not of the two men themselves but rather of the inky black shadows they cast onto the façade of the old apartment building in front of the construction site, skimming across the surface of the walls as the dangling light source rocks back and forth. The beautifully evocative visuals symbolize the ephemeral quality of human life, even as they underline

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the terror that death evokes, as one elderly resident who peers through a balcony window appears to be beaten by the looming shadow of one of the men. As if inspired by this surreally threatening image, at the end of the third and final conversation, and after Abdel extends his heartfelt condolences to Juan on the death of his mother (“We all travel along that road,” he notes), the two men recount their nightmares. Santiago has dreamed of being surrounded by heavy stones that then crush him (an obvious reference to his earlier practice of sleeping in a cemetery niche), and he has awakened panting, trembling, and sweating. For his part, Abdel describes the ghost who lurked outside his window in the dream that terrified him every night during his father’s prolonged death. As Paul Gilroy has noted, “The recurrence of pain, disease, humiliation and loss of dignity, grief, and care for those one loves can all contribute to an abstract sense of a human similarity powerful enough to make solidarities based on cultural particularity appear suddenly trivial” (Against 17). Despite their very different backgrounds, Abdel and Santiago are able to bond in a way that exemplifies what Gilroy unabashedly terms “planetary humanism” (Against 2, 17). The majority of their dialogue in the central scene revolves around loneliness and its discontents. With the younger Moroccan Abdelsalam listening in as well, Santiago reveals that he spends many hours by himself in his apartment drinking entire bottles of cognac; he is not friendly with any of his neighbors, and although he claims to have always managed to hook up with women, he doesn’t seem to have connected with them on a more meaningful level. Abdelsalam offers to take him out for a night on the town, adding that he knows several Galician women. Abdel then explains that because there are few bars in Morocco, men must woo women on the street or in the market, and teases Santiago that he might have been more poetic had he been born Moroccan. In a more serious moment, however, Abdel observes that “loneliness is crushing,” insisting that the only solution is to reach out to others: “You have to learn to convivir with people” (fig. 39). Abdel’s use of the word “convivir” within the context of this Spanish conversation among two Moroccans and a Galician is highly significant. Indeed, the relationship among these three men might be considered the moral center of a film that advocates the ongoing construction of community out of diversity. It might be argued that because Abdel is a rigorously secular Moroccan many Spanish viewers might find him a less “threatening” and thus more palatable spokesperson for convivencia than a devout Muslim would be, but his humanism is also imbued with a decidedly spiritual quality. In fact, when Abdel describes the thick flakes that have begun to fall as “the snow of salvation,” Santiago warns him (shifting into the Galician language) that he’s sounding like “half a priest.”

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39. Abdel emphasizes the importance of convivencia while sharing a meal with Santiago in En construcción. Photograph courtesy of Ovideo TV.

Despite this empathetic portrayal of the relationship among the workers and Abdel’s optimistic claim that capitalism will not last forever, the camera returns on several occasions to frame the large rotating clock with the BBV (Bilbao Vizcaya Bank) logo on its reverse side that dominates a portion of the Barcelona skyline. Functioning as a counterpoint to the La Canadiense smokestacks that preside over the zone in a number of other scenes, this image is a recurrent reminder that for many, time is money—and that in the era of globalization, money does indeed make the world go around. By the end of En construcción, as the building too is being completed, the gentrifiers arrive, and the workers and their concerns begin to fade into the background. As real estate agents usher prospective residents through apartments, we catch glimpses of Abdel, Abdelsalam, and various other laborers, but we shall never again be privy to their more “private” conversations. Instead, we learn of the mundane details concerning the housing preferences of the relatively prosperous couples, some of retirement age, most younger, and several with children, who comment in Spanish and Catalan on the building’s appointments. One of the agents is intent upon highlighting the “cultural capital” of the site: the historic Roman tombs beneath,

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the views of the beautiful Sant Pau church to the side. But not all the clients are charmed by the location. One middle-aged man complains of the noise from the nearby school. Several object to the battered old façades of the buildings across the street, which one woman describes in Catalan as “ugly; ugly.” One couple expresses distaste at the sight of laundry hanging outside windows (the agent tries to reassure them that it’s prohibited by law), and another ventures to criticize the appearance of the Raval residents themselves (these last two comments are heard as the camera focuses on several children with soulful gazes perched on laundry-laden balconies). In her analysis of the Raval regeneration project Monica Degen observes that “metaphors of colonization permeate the official discourses” (872), and her interviews with governmental proponents as well as her analyses of the official documents concerning the project expose the underlying assumption that those who move into the neighborhood will “civilize the existing population with their new practices and values” (873). Certainly, throughout this segment of the film many of the prospective residents’ comments would support this characterization of the Raval rehabilitation as a form of “internal colonization.” It is telling, however, that Guerín chooses to end this montage by focusing on a well-dressed young couple with an endearing little daughter in tow who, unlike the others, do make a concerted effort to establish friendly contact with the “natives.” Although the father is preoccupied with his concern that his daughter not get too close to the open railing, the mother encourages her to wave and say hello to one of the several elderly people standing out on their balconies in the building across the street. When the old man fails to wave back, she explains to the girl in a disappointed tone that he hasn’t seen her. This scene concludes in a touching way when the girl does finally capture the man’s attention, and he smiles and waves back. The moment exemplifies the way in which Guerín’s film continues to advocate convivencia, even as it exposes the formidable barriers to the construction of a diverse community.⁸ THE VIOLENT RESIGNIFICATION OF CONVIVENCIA

En construcción tempers its hopeful meditation on the ongoing potential of an ethics of convivencia with a measured acknowledgment of the many forms of violence historically experienced in Spain. In recent years, however, that violence has returned to the fore as a fierce discursive backlash against the exaltation of the Andalusi legacy has emerged. In many respects, the pattern is a familiar one: much as the post-Enlightenment rediscovery of the era of Muslim hegemony and the resulting reconsiderations of national identity provoked an anxiously xenophobic diatribe from late nineteenth-century scholars such

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as Javier Simonet, Simonet’s modern-day heirs are again vehemently rejecting what they consider to be falsifications of the historical record as well as of the very essence of “Spanishness.” Spain’s fraught positioning within Europe is, as ever, in play here. Curiously, the stakes are perhaps even higher now that the Iberian nation appears to have finally “arrived,” after being accepted as a fullfledged member of the European Union (Delgado, “Settled” 118–19). In his exploration of the “forgetful” commemoration of events such as the so-called Disaster of 1898, James Fernández identifies the recent tendency to attempt to “cast off once and for all any ‘black legend’ residue. Spain is Europe; Spain has always been Europe” (136). Exceptionalist perspectives on Spanish history and identity are now attributed exclusively to “foreign” historians and yellow journalists. Academicians bolster this perspective by marshaling poststructuralist tools to demonstrate that northern Europeans and North Americans simply invented an Oriental Spain in order to prop up their own modern imperialist agendas (136–37). Elena Delgado and Joan Ramon Resina associate the most recent resurgence of a homogenizing centralist rhetoric with the conservative Popular Party’s election win in 1996, after twelve years of dominance by the Socialists (PSOE). The PP politicians have denied their pointed investment in nationalism, promoting cultural events and texts that present their singular view of the nation and its history as “unmarked” and thus natural, while alternative narratives produced from a multitude of peripheries are condemned as nationalist plots to destroy Spain’s integrity (Delgado, “La nación (in)vertebrada” 322–26; Resina, “Nationalism” 383–85, 397–98, n. 6). Ironically, however, the PP has resorted to some baldly nationalist strategies of its own to rally the electorate, such as Prime Minister José María Aznar’s invasion of Leila/Perejil, a tiny uninhabited island just off the Moroccan coast that is claimed by both Morocco and Spain, in the summer of 2002. The military maneuver was an alarmingly overblown response to the arrival of a small group of Moroccan soldiers on the islet, ostensibly to monitor smuggling and terrorist activity in the Strait of Gibraltar. Coinciding, curiously, with the anniversary of the “Day of Africa” (July 17)—the date the Africanist Rebels in Morocco had set in motion the coup that began the Spanish Civil War—the invasion was also eminently reminiscent of the prelude to the Spanish-Moroccan war of 1859–60. Yet the Leila incident was far less successful at consolidating a lasting patriotic sentiment than the earlier conflict was. It also failed to elevate the nation’s status abroad and ultimately played into Morocco’s hands, since it only highlighted Spain’s intransigence with respect to the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. In his astute analysis of the crisis, Richard Gillespie notes that “under Aznar and the PP, the Spanish government [. . .]

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often seemed to need a negative Moroccan ‘other’ as counterpart to the upholding of Spanish (or Castilian) nationalism, an identity seen as threatened by Basque nationalists as well as by Moroccans” (13). The PP’s clumsy management of nationalist rhetoric would eventually enable the PSOE to regain power, after Aznar’s government—perhaps mistaking one of its negative foils for the other— blamed the March 11, 2004, Madrid bombings on Basque rather than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. Since then, however, the debate over the nation’s past and identity has only intensified. Unprecedented new phenomena—namely, the boom in immigration and the emergence of Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups—have fueled this debate. Although ongoing economic crises had forced many Spaniards to emigrate to other areas of the nation or abroad beginning in the nineteenth century and especially during the Franco years, as is evident from En construcción that demographic flow has dramatically reversed course during the democratic era, resulting in a significant influx of immigrants from Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia, with an especially pronounced presence of Moroccans, who until 2002 constituted the largest group (the most recent figures, from 2004, place them in second place, after Ecuadorans [España en cifras]). Within the European context, Spain is still seen as a source of undesirable otherness, as many of the undocumented African immigrants who survive the perilous crossing of the strait and land upon Spanish shores make their way northward. Spain must now respond to European Union pressures to fortify and police the southernmost outpost of “Fortress Europe.” Through this process of “rebordering,” Spain may shed its association with Africa and assert its Europeanness (Andreas 128–29). Moreover, within Spain discriminatory attitudes and legislation have relegated many immigrants to substandard or even inhuman working and living conditions, which exacerbate the racist perceptions and fears that circulate throughout wider European discourses on immigration (Goytisolo and Naïr 207–24). The violence that sometimes ensues is complex in its etiology. Even though the arrival of immigrants confirms Spain’s current status as a European economic power capable of attracting workers from nations that have not yet achieved “modernity,” it also forces Spaniards into an uncomfortable confrontation with the imperfectly buried ghosts of a less unquestionably Western past. As Delgado has argued, “the current ‘normalizing’ obsession of the Spanish state betrays its insecurity over the very components that constitute it and that do not fit into the ‘modern European’ paradigm: gypsies, Arabs, Jews, but above all the ‘bastardly’ and contaminating mixture of them all” (“Settled” 126). Moreover, when faced with the very real demands of tolerance and convivencia, rather than their exclusively discursive celebration, Spaniards who have been immersed in what Del-

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gado characterizes as the “valorization of a ‘decaffeinated’ difference” (“Settled” 127) may fall back instead upon a more familiar reconquest mentality (Goytisolo and Naïr 135–36). Indeed, Daniela Flesler has studied the ways in which attacks against Moroccan immigrants in particular are linked to their representation as threatening “invaders” in Spanish journalistic and cultural texts that hark back to the 711 North African conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, echoing the most jingoistic of medieval crusader narratives (“De la inmigración” 74). Large-scale terrorism committed in the name of Islam, beginning most notably with the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, has also contributed to the attenuation of enthusiasm for the medieval period of Muslim hegemony in Spain. The fact that Al-Qaeda leaders themselves have repeatedly invoked the legacy of al-Andalus has cast a pall over Spaniards’ idealized recuperation of their past. Indeed, in the videotape in which Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for 9/11 (released on October 7, 2001), second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri cited the “tragedy” of the loss of al-Andalus, while Zacarias Moussaoui, later convicted of conspiring in the 9/11 plot, demanded that Spain be returned to Muslim control in his court appearance in the United States in April 2002. Statements such as these have raised fears that the “reverse reconquest” so often anticipated in Spanish texts might in fact form a part of Al-Qaeda’s agenda (Wright). In much the same way that the presence of Muslim immigrants reminds Spaniards of their historic links to the Islamic world while simultaneously affirming the Iberian nation’s modern European identity, Al-Qaeda’s targeting of Spanish sites invokes the Andalusi past even as it functions to situate modernday Spain squarely within the European polity. Indeed, the bombing of a Spanish restaurant and social club in Casablanca on May 16, 2003, and most especially the commuter train explosions in Madrid on March 11 the following year have only solidified Spain’s newfound (albeit embattled) status as a legitimately Western nation.⁹ Meanwhile, serious historians and hate-mongering journalists alike have capitalized on this confluence of circumstances. With respect to academic historical studies, María Rosa de Madariaga has hailed the arrival of a new era of “scientific rigor, free from passions and ideological interferences” (“En torno” 83), which has enabled scholars to correct “the historical distortions that lead to the exaggerated exaltation of Arabo-Islamic culture in general, and of al-Andalus in particular, and the commitment to demonstrating, at all costs, its direct influence on other cultures” (“En torno” 87). Delgado has emphasized the crucial role of the Royal Academy of History in the promotion of the conservatives’ favored “Castilianizing, monarchical and homogeneous historiographical paradigm” (“La nación (in)vertebrada” 326). On a number of occasions the organization

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has lent its pedigree to projects that condemn or erase the Andalusi legacy. In 2004, for example, the Academy reprised a heated nineteenth-century debate by producing an edition of a previously unpublished study by the doctor and essayist Gregorio Marañón justifying the 1609 expulsion of the Moriscos. The original text is accompanied by several articles by contemporary Spanish historians such as Luis Suárez Fernández, who concurs with Marañón’s description of the Moriscos as threateningly incapable of assimilation into the otherwise “homogeneous society” of the Christian Spaniards (Marañón 13). In April of the same year the Academy organized a “Three Cultures” conference in Barcelona in which a number of historians questioned or countered commonplace notions of convivencia and cultural exchange during the medieval period, and their contributions were subsequently gathered into a book entitled Las tres culturas. The volume implicitly affirms the identification of Spain with Christianity by excluding consideration of religious plurality in the Muslim-dominated areas of the Iberian Peninsula, while European values and the Romano-Gothic tradition are characterized as of greater significance than the transitory Islamic influences (Anes Álvarez 82–83, 85). Somewhat paradoxically, this project also functions to resignify the “three cultures” moniker, as the papers appear in Spanish, Catalan, and English in a gesture “in favor of convivencia and understanding among different cultures and societies in Europe and the world,” in the words of the Director of the Academy, Gonzalo Anes Álvarez (Anes Álvarez 9). The languages selected reveal precisely how that “world” is circumscribed. While the three cultures volume still acknowledges, albeit somewhat grudgingly, a multicultural presence on the peninsula during the Middle Ages (and recognizes some limited measure of cultural plurality in contemporary Spain as well), other works have sought more aggressively to downplay current peripheral nationalisms as well as the impact of two of the medieval period’s “three cultures” in order to proclaim the nation’s Hispanic essence, as did nineteenth-century scholars such as Simonet and Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo. Thus, the revealingly entitled De Hispania a España (From Hispania to Spain) gathers papers from yet another spring 2004 conference sponsored by the Royal Academy of History together with the Colegio Libre de Eméritos (an organization of emeritus professors), in commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the “Catholic Queen” Isabella’s death. While some of the contributors explicitly indicate that their insistence on Spaniards’ millennia-old recognition of a common (Christian and Western) identity results from a methodology that is “as analytical and purely descriptive as possible,” having nothing to do with “rah-rah patriotism” (“patrioterismo”; Benito Ruano 84), others unabashedly pepper their articles with proud references to Spaniards’ “supreme spiritual values” (Aldea Vaquero

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225). In his discussion of Spain’s “universal destiny,” for example, Quintín Aldea Vaquero underlines the heroism of the Spanish soldiers who fought to spread and secure the unity of Christianity, suggesting that they were responsible for protecting the “soul” of Europe (230). For that reason, Spain is without question “as European as the other nations of the West” (217). Notwithstanding the efforts of important scholars such as María Rosa Menocal, who has picked up where post-Enlightenment Spanish intellectuals left off in order to show that all of European culture was profoundly affected by contact with the Muslim world’s outpost on the Iberian Peninsula (Arabic; Ornament), the contributors to the Isabella volume still find it necessary to minimize or even erase the Andalusi past in order to affirm Spain’s Western credentials. Any prioritization of cultural plurality over Spanish national unity is also condemned here. Yet when Fernando García de Cortázar Ruiz de Aguirre characterizes peripheral nationalisms as “totalitarian” and “tribal” (289), he apparently fails to recognize that his own description of their mythical construction holds equally well for the macronationalist project of De Hispania a España: “Nationalism doesn’t ignore the fact that every mythical story, especially if it plunges into the darkness of centuries, achieves such a remarkable effect of communion, of uniting the dead and the living in an integration of the past in the present, that it becomes real” (291). The repudiation of peripheral nationalisms is also closely tied to the “demythification” of the Andalusi past in the work of Salvador Fanjul, a professor of Arabic literature at Madrid’s Universidad Autónoma. Since 2000, Fanjul has edited two special issues of the prestigious journal Revista de Occidente, one entitled “Al-Andalus frente a España: Un paraíso imaginario” (Al-Andalus opposite Spain: An Imaginary Paradise, 2000) and the other “La difícil convivencia de las culturas” (The Difficult Convivencia of Cultures, 2003), and has published two best-selling books, Al-Andalus contra España (Al-Andalus against Spain, 2001), and La quimera de al-Andalus (The Chimera of al-Andalus, 2004). Fanjul considers himself a “heroic” figure (Quimera 81) for unveiling the truth about alAndalus; like Javier Simonet before him, he might be described as a curious example of an Arabist who harbors an intense dislike of Arabs and Muslims. Scorning all those who “swoon sweetly” at the sight of a turban (Al-Andalus 62), Fanjul asserts that the repression of sexuality in Arab societies is “pathetically sordid” (Al-Andalus 9), and that classic Arabic literature is mechanistic and unoriginal, while the contemporary equivalent is histrionically maudlin (AlAndalus 164–65; Quimera 78–79, 236–37). There are few abstract concepts in Islam (Al-Andalus 16), which promotes uncritical narrow-mindedness (AlAndalus 96) and is at complete odds with the practice of freedom (Al-Andalus

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121, 145). Arabs ignore the most elementary forms of reason and live in a dream world divorced from all recognition of reality (Quimera 227). Fanjul also follows in the footsteps of Américo Castro’s nemesis, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz. While De Hispania a España simply prefers to relegate Castro to the silence of the tomb, Fanjul’s works are reminiscent of a bad horror flick: Castro is resurrected again and again, only to be subjected to increasingly more violent forms of excoriation. For Fanjul, Castro anticipates the era of political correctness (Al-Andalus 106; Quimera 73), spewing “verborrea” (a play on “verbiage” and “diarrhea”; Al-Andalus 60), while his followers are a “wolfpack” (Al-Andalus 96), “blind people who choose not to see” (Quimera 73), or “zealots” (Al-Andalus 58). (Although Fanjul himself is not above appropriating their ideas, as when he discusses the contrast between “Maurophilia” and “Maurophobia” in Golden Age literature [Al-Andalus 77], without citing the “zealot” who has treated the phenomenon with greatest subtlety, Luce López Baralt.) Fanjul devotes entire chapters to disproving Castro’s ideas concerning the influence of Arabic on the Spanish language and the Andalusi legacy in Spanish culture, but some of his arguments are patently ridiculous. Castro’s observation that in both Arabic and Spanish the word for “egg” is also slang for “testicles,” for instance, is insignificant according to Fanjul, since everyone knows that testicles are not polyhedral (Al-Andalus 198–99)—but why, then, are they called “balls” and not “eggs” in English? Fanjul’s books are also riddled with contradictions. Were the Moriscos incapable of assimilation, and thus justifiably expelled (Al-Andalus 3), for example, or were they so thoroughly assimilated as to have left no trace (AlAndalus 22–23)? In either case, Fanjul “supports” his argument that modern-day Andalusia has been completely stripped of any remnant of the Andalusi past. All of its culture derives from the North, and for that reason Andalusia does not deserve to be called an autonomous community (Al-Andalus 118). Indeed, the author’s general discomfort with the State of Autonomies is clear (Quimera 194), while the profound ambivalence of the omnipresent term convivencia emerges when he argues that the widespread media attention focused on al-Andalus has only managed to “disturb the convivencia among Spaniards” (Quimera 16). Fanjul also asserts that the mythologization of al-Andalus has inhibited Spaniards from expressing their true attitudes toward the “moros” in their midst: “Nobody dares to suggest the least criticism against Muslims, no matter how well founded it might be” (Quimera 216–17). Yet Fanjul is hardly alone in his “heroic” criticism of Muslims. It is not surprising that in this climate Sánchez Albornoz’s original refutation of the ideas of Américo Castro, España, un enigma histórico (Spain, a Historical Enigma, 1957), has been reedited (in the year 2000; Delgado, “Settled” 122). This classic diatribe, however, seems remarkably mea-

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sured in comparison to the author’s more recent De la Andalucía islámica a la de hoy (From Islamic Andalusia to the Andalusia of Today), first published a year before his death in 1984 and reprinted in 1998, which advocates “violence, yes violence, against the little Moors and against some Christians who attempt to turn the sleeve of time inside out” (32). Not surprisingly, Sánchez Albornoz is liberally cited by the journalist César Vidal in his España frente al Islam: De Mahoma a Bin Laden (Spain opposite Islam: From Mohammed to Bin Laden, 2004), which sold through nine printings in less than a year. Vidal devotes nearly six hundred pages to demonstrating that “historically, Spain has been a country that has been cruelly ravaged by the proximity of Islam” (467). He rewrites Spanish history as a never-ending struggle to fend off attackers from the Islamic world, who in 711 began liquidating the most important culture of Western Europe (459). Remarkably, even colonial incursions such as the 1859– 60 Spanish-Moroccan War or the “pacification” of the Rif are characterized by Vidal as instances of Moroccan aggression. Of Morocco’s ongoing efforts to negotiate for control of Ceuta and Melilla, the author asserts that “underneath a presumably anti-colonial claim is hidden an imperialist project whose main victim is Spain” (395). Here Vidal participates in a larger trend toward reversal of the postcolonial rhetoric of victimhood, casting former colonies as new imperial powers that now threaten to conquer those in the “first world.” That conquest is imagined to be effected through the mobilization of armies of immigrants, drug traffickers, and terrorists—in Vidal’s words, “a fifth column located in the national territory itself ” (468)—who seek to destabilize or destroy the host country. The solution, according to Vidal, is to prohibit immigration from Muslim countries. Spain should determine precisely how many immigrant workers are needed and select them exclusively from among native speakers of Spanish or those from similar cultures who will integrate with ease into the nation (470). Clearly, for Vidal notions of tolerance and convivencia between Christians and Muslims are as “stupidly false” (16) for the current era as they were during the medieval period. SPAIN’S LAST AFRICAN “BROTHERS” IN THE LAST AFRICAN COLONY

Curiously, however, there is one group of Muslims that Vidal spares excoriation: the Saharawis. Vidal’s description of the botched decolonization of the Western Sahara casts the Moroccans as victimizing not only the Spaniards—including the dying Franco, whose vital signs reportedly plummeted when he was informed of King Hassan II’s machinations to seize control of the territory—but

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also the Saharawis, the traditionally nomadic people who have lived there for many centuries. In Vidal’s account the duplicitous Moroccan king took advantage of Franco’s rapidly declining health in order to force the Spanish government to cede administrative authority over the Saharan province to Morocco and Mauritania in the Tripartite Agreement, signed only days before the dictator’s death in November 1975. In this way, Hassan II invalidated Spain’s painstaking efforts to ensure that the Saharawi people would enjoy the right to selfdetermination (in accordance with longstanding United Nations mandates) and establish for themselves a democratic form of governance (377–94). Although many might question Vidal’s claims concerning the disinterested benevolence of the Franco regime as it sought to manage the decolonization of its last African colony, few would disagree that the Tripartite Agreement resulted in a tragedy for the Saharawis. In early 1976, as Spain withdrew and Morocco and Mauritania occupied the territory, members of the Frente POLISARIO (Popular Front for the Liberation of Saquía el Hamra and Río de Oro), a Saharawi armed anticolonial resistance group initially formed in 1973, fought to recoup their lands as they proclaimed the establishment of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (RASD). Meanwhile, Saharawi women, children, and elderly, pursued by Moroccan planes raining down napalm and white phosphorous, fled across the border to refugee camps in a barren region of the Sahara desert near Tindouf, Algeria. While Mauritania withdrew from the conflict in 1979, Morocco continued to wage war with the POLISARIO until the United Nations brokered a peace accord in 1991. Although the United Nations has mandated since 1965 that the Saharawis be granted the right to self-determination, the long-anticipated referendum provided for under the 1991 Settlement Plan (in which the Saharawis would choose either independence or incorporation into Morocco) has never been held, for Morocco and the POLISARIO disagree over who precisely should be eligible to vote. Morocco has remained in occupation in the Western Sahara, constructing a mined wall more than a thousand miles long to hold off the POLISARIO and altering the demographics of the zone by enticing large numbers of settlers with the promise of high-paying jobs in the phosphate mines and fishing industry. The population of the refugee camps near Tindouf has grown to upward of 160,000, and most of the younger residents have never seen their homeland.¹⁰ Meanwhile the Saharawis who remained in the Western Sahara after the Moroccan invasion are now a minority of the territory’s population, suffering political persecution and economic discrimination, and are cut off from their family members in the camps. The POLISARIO asserts that only those included in the 1974 Spanish census of the colony and their direct adult descendants should be eligible to participate in the referendum, but

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Morocco has insisted that other ethnic Saharawi Moroccan citizens (who are less likely to be POLISARIO supporters) should also be polled by the United Nations (E. Jensen 25–71). Morocco defends its claim to the territory—which may harbor rich offshore oil deposits, as well as lucrative fishing and mineral resources—by asserting that the Saharawi people have historically pledged allegiance to the sultanate (A. Hernández 25–27). As Moroccan scholar Anouar Majid has affirmed, “European concepts of sovereignty and Islamic ones were quite different” (39), but in fact in their current struggle many Saharawis have adopted what Majid terms “Eurocentric” conceptualizations of nationhood. While the Moroccan government has consistently sought to downplay or even co-opt Saharawi cultural differences (Shelley 110), the POLISARIO maintains that the Saharawis’ language (Hassaniya) and traditionally nomadic lifestyle are clearly distinct from those of the Moroccans, and that the only just solution is to allow the Saharawis to return to, and enjoy full sovereignty over, their native land. Today, over thirty years after “decolonization,” it would hardly be an exaggeration to affirm that Spaniards are obsessed with the plight of the Saharawis. There are literally hundreds of organizations in Spain that support the POLISARIO and send massive “peace caravans” to the refugee camps; a Catalan effort in February 2003, for example, purchased seven tractor trailers and four all-terrain vehicles to ship three hundred tons of donated food to Tindouf (“Catalunya”). The organizations also arrange for thousands of Saharawi children to spend the summer vacation months of July and August with Spanish host families, some of whom later travel in turn to visit the camps (Bárbulo 34; Tortajada 13, 198). Marathons and other sporting events, concerts, movie screenings, and even an impressive Sahara International Film Festival (the FISAHARA, inaugurated in Tindouf in November 2003, with a second edition in March 2005) have been held to raise both awareness of and money for the cause. Newsletters, magazines, and Web sites provide continuous updates on the ongoing battles over U.N. plans. By contrast, there are no summer vacation programs in Spain for Equatorial Guinean children, and the only “caravans” sent to Morocco carry undocumented immigrant workers who have been unceremoniously expelled from Spanish soil. Yet while there appears to be little postcolonial guilt over Equatorial Guinea and Morocco, many Spaniards evidently do feel intense shame for their country’s treatment of the Saharawis. The journalist Ana Tortajada has penned one of the more evocative expressions of personal culpability, narrating her encounter with an elderly Saharawi woman, an unnamed POLISARIO activist—the first woman to join the movement—who reveals that she was left crippled after being tortured in a Spanish colonial prison. Tortajada writes:

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I began to sob. I tried to control myself and hide it, but I found that impossible. I felt ashamed. Ashamed of my tears on the one hand, and ashamed to belong to a country whose governments have been, and continue to be, responsible for the situation in which the Saharawi people find themselves. Ashamed that this courageous woman who has withstood adversity and torture without collapsing, had to console me, as she did, also in Spanish: —Don’t cry, don’t cry. The Spanish and Saharawi people are brothers. (117)

I would like to emphasize the elderly female activist’s astute mobilization of the rhetoric of brotherhood in this remarkable exchange, as a prelude to an analysis of the ways in which Saharawi supporters of the POLISARIO have resemanticized Spanish colonial discourse on North Africa in order to secure support for their cause. As this book has shown, the proclamation of Spaniards’ “fraternity” with Africans has been a staple of neo-imperialist rhetoric ever since the mid-nineteenth century. While Moroccans were initially characterized as the “younger siblings” of the Spanish colonizers, who claimed the right to speak for them by adopting the guise of concerned older brother or parent, in more recent years it is the Saharawis who have come to occupy that position within a network of ostensibly postcolonial interests, and Saharawi women in particular have been subjected to a concerted campaign of “sororization.” Gayatri Spivak’s foundational article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” which pays particular attention to representations of subaltern women, is pertinent to the critical consideration of this aspect of contemporary Spanish discourse, as well as to an ethically engaged consideration of how the Saharawis have come to articulate a counterdiscourse that recirculates terms of “family” relationship. Spivak is concerned with the ways in which postcolonial critics may reinscribe the power structure of the colonial regime as they seek to “speak for” the other, in effect silencing the voices of subaltern subjects, if only inadvertently. Here it is important that I acknowledge the very real risk of erasing individual Saharawi subjectivities, even as I explore the possibility that some Saharawi activists’ self-conscious strategy of “reverse ventriloquization” may in fact have turned the tables on this dynamic: indeed, perhaps in speaking for certain Saharawi communities, I am also being “spoken for.” It is my contention, then, that while POLISARIO leaders may still tactically affirm Spaniards’ unique ability to “give them voice”—an elderly male chief also interviewed by Tortajada asserts, for example, “The one who can indeed speak for us and in our name is Spain” (111)—many Saharawis have come creatively to negotiate the discourse of brotherhood and related family topoi, as they seek to ventriloquize Spaniards (and other participants in first-world cultural exchanges) and advance their own interests.

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Spanish-Moroccan brotherhood, as we have seen, was grounded in Spaniards’ conceptualization of a common historical and cultural legacy, as well as in the idea of a shared “Ibero-Berber” racial heritage. On strategic occasions (such as during the Spanish Civil War, when Moroccan soldiers were vital to the Rebels’ “Crusade”), Spaniards even attempted to attenuate their religious differences with Moroccans by highlighting the intense spiritual fervor characteristic of true brothers on both sides of the strait. For their part, throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods Moroccans have not hesitated to marshal a similar fraternal rhetoric when it has been politically expedient to do so. For example, on October 16, 1975, the same day the U.N. International Court of Justice released its opinion that neither Morocco nor Mauritania had proven its claim to territorial sovereignty over the Western Sahara, the Moroccan king Hassan II called for the now legendary “Green March,” mobilizing 350,000 of his citizens to walk to the nation’s border with the Spanish colony and attempt peacefully to occupy the territory. This was a crucial part of the king’s successful strategy to compel Spain to cede the Western Sahara to Morocco: as Franco’s death was imminent, the dictator’s representatives sought to avoid a full-blown war with heavy civilian casualties, and they privately agreed to exchange the colony for favorable fishing rights along the Saharan coastline and a continuing share in the phosphate mines (Bárbulo 235–65; Amate 330–33). Meanwhile at the United Nations a Moroccan official justified his expectation that the Franco regime would comply with the wishes of his people by invoking the now moribund Spanish dictator’s own favorite Africanist mantra—eight hundred years of “shared history”—as well as by recalling the pivotal contributions of Moroccan soldiers to the Rebel cause during the Spanish Civil War (qtd. in Criado 221–22). Improbably, King Hassan also instructed his marchers to treat any Spaniards they might encounter while reclaiming the zone like family: “If you meet a Spaniard along the way, embrace him like a brother” (qtd. in Criado 184, n. 1). In recent years, however, Spaniards have been encouraged to view Moroccans as other rather than brother, as is evident from the texts by Fanjul and Vidal discussed above. Even so, the notion of Spanish-Maghrebi brotherhood has not been completely disavowed; instead, it has been transferred from the Moroccans to the Saharawis. This is particularly surprising, since, as discussed in the previous chapter’s section on the 1952 film La llamada de África, the traditional bases for declaring Spanish-Moroccan fraternity do not obtain with the Saharawis. They are much less likely to be descendants of the Andalusis who emigrated or were expelled from Spain; their nomadic traditions differ dramatically from Spanish rural and urban lifestyles; their cultural expressions are in some cases more closely tied to sub-Saharan than North African forms; and finally, the

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fairly widespread practice of intermarriage with black Africans confounds any attempt to characterize their racial identity as Ibero-Berber. But if the concept of Spanish-Saharawi fraternity did not exactly come “naturally,” it could be manufactured. After Morocco was granted independence in 1956, Spain’s colonial resources, both human and material, were transferred to the Western Sahara, and large-scale investment in the long-neglected region was finally undertaken. Intensive development of the Bu Craa phosphate mines and related infrastructure depended upon the recruitment of indigenous workers. Government coercion in combination with the severe droughts of the 1960s resulted in the widespread settlement of the Saharawi nomads, who began to abandon their traditional lifestyle to take up residence in Spain’s colonial cities and interact with Spanish working-class settlers (many of whom were Canarians, as will be detailed later) (Criado 30; Gandolfi; Bárbulo 52–53). Crucially, Spain’s educational policy in the Western Sahara differed from the previously established practice in both Morocco and Equatorial Guinea, for the native boys and girls whose families had settled in the cities attended primary school alongside Spanish children, and the two groups were separated only for religion classes. At the secondary level, gender polarization was promoted as Saharawi girls were incorporated into the Women’s Section of the Falange, where, just as elsewhere in Spain, homemaking skills as well as political indoctrination were emphasized. The Youth Front ran special high schools for the children of the native elite, and small numbers of the best students were sent to metropolitan universities. Many of this cohort, somewhat predictably according to colonial paradigms, would later become POLISARIO leaders (Salafranca 330–32, 338–39; F. Alonso 124– 25). Thus, although the Saharawis were never judged the equals of Spaniards— native workers earned less than half the salary of metropolitans—those who had settled in the cities were strongly encouraged to assimilate in ways that were deemed useful for the regime. Consequently, urban Saharawi youth became fluent in Spanish, adopted Western styles of dress and cultural values, and made friends with the more receptive of their peers among the colonizers (Gandolfi; Bárbulo 53, 59). One fascinating example of the ways in which the Saharawis have come to occupy the position formerly held by the Moroccan “brothers” involves the evocative trope of the key to the ancestral home. As Spanish interest in the colonization of Morocco grew over the course of the nineteenth century, it became customary for journalists and others who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to refer to the centuries-old keys to residences in the Kingdom of Granada that Moroccan descendents of the expelled Andalusi Jews and Muslims reverently passed down from generation to generation. Such anecdotes sometimes functioned to

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express anxiety over the possibility that Moroccans might aspire to reconquer the Iberian Peninsula one day, precisely the sort of invasion rhetoric discussed by Daniela Flesler. More commonly, they were invoked as an indication of Andalusi Moroccans’ nostalgia for and love of Spain, a sentiment that, it was presumed, might be effectively fomented and rechanneled into loyalty toward Spanish colonizers.¹¹ From an imperialist standpoint, however, after Moroccan independence, the trope of the ancestral key became singularly unproductive for Spaniards. Yet in the democratic era that trope, too, has been revived and been transferred from the Moroccans to the Saharawis. This is most vividly portrayed in Canarian director María Miró’s film Los baúles del retorno (The Return Trunks, 1995), winner of the Best Film award at the 1994 Madrid Festival of Films by Women. Produced with POLISARIO support and filmed in part on location with a large number of Saharawi extras, Baúles dramatizes the Spanish pullout, the Saharawis’ grim exodus from the territory, and their long wait in the Algerian refugee camps. The narrative centers on Mariam, a young Saharawi student studying medicine in Paris (played by Catalan actress Silvia Munt) who visits her home in the Spanish colonial city of Villa Cisneros in late 1975 and is caught up in the political turmoil of the moment. While fleeing through the desert with her family, she encounters her boyfriend Ahmed, a POLISARIO activist. Mariam explains to Ahmed that when she was away at school in the Canaries and then Paris, she always knew she could return home, but now “it’s as if I had lost my keys.” Later that night Mariam has a nightmare in which her father beats on the locked door to their house, insisting that it is his home. When a strange man answers and asks, “Do you have the key?,” the father responds in the negative and the door is repeatedly slammed in his face. By the end of the film, Mariam’s family has spent several years in the refugee camps near Tindouf when word of an imminent referendum for self-determination spreads, and the Saharawis begin packing the return trunks mentioned in the title. At that moment, Mariam’s grandmother, who ironically is associated with the maintenance of Saharawi tradition, removes the key to the family home in Villa Cisneros from its prominent place on the central tent pole, kisses it, and packs it away in a trunk (fig. 40). For viewers familiar with Saharawi nomadism, the key motif is oddly jarring. But the film implies that it is the Spanish colonizers who have granted the Saharawis a “proper” notion of home, in both the limited sense of a family abode and the general sense of a “homeland.” The idea that the Saharawis learned to adopt a more proprietary conceptualization of place, and by extension a national consciousness, strictly as a result of Spanish colonialism circulates widely (A. Hernández 23). Calls for the liberation of the Saharawis from their refugee camps in the desert, so that they might be “fixed” in their

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40. Mariam’s grandmother reveres the key to her home/land in Los baúles del retorno. Photograph courtesy of Cinema i Televisió, S.A.

homeland, reveal tensions stemming from what theorist John Durham Peters has termed nomads’ “frisson of otherness to a settled society” (35). Miró’s film, in which only their colorful native clothing distinguishes Mariam’s literate family from the average upper-middle-class Spanish household, also emphasizes that the national identity now proclaimed by the Saharawis is intimately related to that of the Spaniards. After all, even Mariam’s little brother is a die-hard Barça (Barcelona Soccer Club) fan. Nationhood is not the only “modern” concept that the Spaniards sometimes claim to have bequeathed to the Saharawis; the “civilized” treatment of women is another. As I discussed in earlier chapters, since the nineteenth century Spaniards had sought to justify the colonization of North Africa by drawing upon standard European imperialist clichés, including the one famously scrutinized by Spivak: “White men are saving brown women from brown men” (“Can?” 296). For many decades, a singularly vivid image of the Moroccan woman appeared and reappeared in a diverse range of Spanish cultural texts: barefoot, heavily veiled but dressed in tatters, loaded down with heavy bundles and children, she trudges behind her husband, who rides in princely fashion on the family donkey (Martín Corrales 106). Moroccan women have been cruelly abused by Moroccan men, and Spanish men must step in to save them. In some cases, that paradigm has been transferred directly to the Saharawis. In an oral history interview, for example, a Canarian man who had lived in the Western Sahara recalled of

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the native women, “It was possible to see them burdened in an incredible way, and walking behind the husband, who might even be going along on a donkey” (qtd. in Gandolfi). Spanish writers and artists who are quite sympathetic to the Saharawis may also express reservations concerning the comportment of Saharawi men. In María Miró’s film, for example, Mariam repeatedly refuses to marry Ahmed, for she has seen how her best friend has been mistreated by her husband, who eventually abandons her for another woman. As Mariam explains to her boyfriend, “Our customs frighten me.”¹² Journalist Ana Tortajada is also taken aback by some more recently instituted Saharawi customs, including, for example, the imprisonment of unwed pregnant women (147–50). The same phenomenon is also mentioned by sociologist Ángela Hernández (106), who offers an unusual pro-Moroccan perspective through interviews of the “Aidin,” a term used to describe those who have fled the refugee camps in order to “return” to Morocco. Hernández’s informants describe how beginning in the late 1980s Saharawi women were arrested and tortured after protesting POLISARIO authoritarianism and the imposition of polygamy; although the women recognized the need for a pronatalist policy, they strongly objected to a practice that was previously alien to their culture (89, 97, 121, 133). Hernández does not cast all of the blame on men from the Western Sahara, however, for she and her informants insist that it is ethnic Saharawis from other Maghrebi states, particularly Algerians, who really control the refugee camps—despite what she considers propaganda to the contrary—and are largely responsible for the widespread and unrelieved oppression of women (82–83, 107, 144, 154). Notwithstanding the texts that underline their status as victims, Saharawi women are described by most contemporary Spanish sources as radically distinct from their counterparts in the rest of the Muslim world, a characterization that facilitates their ventriloquization as “daughters” and “sisters.” Many argue that the Saharawis’ unique cultural traditions and historically nomadic lifestyle, their presumably more liberal interpretation of the Islamic faith, and their experience of several decades of exile, in which (pace Hernández) the women have assumed nearly complete responsibility for running the refugee camps, have contributed to gender constructions that differ radically from those of neighboring Morocco. Friendly relationships between men and women are common, women enjoy complete freedom of movement, and only cover their faces when men do, to protect themselves from excessive sun, wind, and sand (Tortajada 74–75, 112–13, 180; Juliano; Montero; García Felipe). Even so, Spaniards still insist that these “brown women” are abused by “brown men”—not Saharawis, however, or Algerians, as Hernández would have it, but Moroccans. It is Moroccan men who were responsible for bombing Saharawi women and

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children in 1976, and it is Moroccan men who have imprisoned, tortured, and raped female Saharawi activists ever since (Pineda 41). And it is one Moroccan man in particular who has cruelly robbed Saharawi women of their homeland: the king. Silvia Munt’s Goya Award−winning short film Lalia (1999) is hardly exceptional in its demonization of this particular “brown man,” deemed responsible for the woes of all Saharawi women. After playing the role of Mariam in Los baúles del retorno, Munt has been untiring in her devotion to the Saharawi cause, and she has helped to organize the FISAHARA film festival, where both Miró’s film and her own brief feature were shown in the fall of 2003 (A. Rojas). Munt’s film centers on a character similar to Nayat, the orphaned girl whom Mariam adopts in Baúles. Lalia is a Saharawi girl with poetic inclinations born in the refugee camps, who in one pointed scene directs her gentle wrath at the “evil king of Morocco.” Beginning in the 1980s, member states of the Organization of African Unity condemned Morocco for “behaving as a colonial power” (Walraven 259), and just as César Vidal has done in his recent book, the film expands upon that accusation, working to transfer guilt for the plight of the Saharawis from Spain to Morocco. Lalia’s voiceover informs us that the Moroccan king has occupied her country—a seaside nation that she herself has never seen, where her family supported itself by fishing—and exiled the Saharawis to a barren desert devoid of the basic necessities of life. Yet the Saharawis have not characteristically been fisherfolk.¹³ Like Baúles, Lalia converts the Saharawi homeland into a space more comfortably familiar to many Spaniards. In Miró’s film Nayat describes the Western Sahara as a place where the sands of the desert are united with the ocean’s beaches, and she fantasizes about her beloved sea as she flies a kite in the shape of a ship; she even reworks into an underwater fantasy the traditional, and now allegorical, story of the sultan’s obsessive pursuit of a wounded gazelle through the desert, told to her by Mariam’s grandmother. For her part, Lalia recounts her own grandmother’s description of the beautiful school in the Western Sahara, with large windows overlooking the water, where girls daydreamed of cargo ships laden with mirrors, dresses, and hair combs. Both films implicitly credit the Spanish colonizers—the “white men”—with having brought modernity to the Saharawis by bestowing the precious gift of water as well as educational and consumerist opportunities on their women. Others, however, have argued that women’s traditional freedoms were in reality severely curtailed during the colonial era (Tortajada 75, 90; F. Alonso 117, 120; Perregaux 35, 95). Few of the urban girls who were the only ones to attend school advanced beyond primary education, and none was sent abroad for medical training, as the fictional Mariam is in Baúles (Lippert 647–48; Gandolfi). The proper role of women in

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society would have been made much clearer to the larger numbers of Saharawi girls incorporated into the Women’s Section of the Falange. In her nuanced reading of Canarian settlers’ testimonials, historian Nicoletta Gandolfi offers an alternative perspective on the situation of Saharawi women, which adds another layer of complexity to interpretations that cast blame solely on North African men: if Saharawi women appeared oppressed, it was likely because Saharawi men had been encouraged to assimilate the Spaniards’ machista views. Now that Spanish women have been liberated from their own evil patriarch Francisco Franco, however, Spain may function as a nurturing motherland, protecting her Saharawi “children” from the new abusive stepfather in Morocco. The many Spanish texts that “give voice” to Saharawi women and girls exalt their indomitable spirit even as they engage in the classic colonialist gesture of infantilization, which withdraws from them the agency of articulation. Lalia, for example, is shown writing her lyrical compositions, which emphasize the strong Saharawi women who nurture her development, in Arabic characters. Yet her lilting voiceover is intoned in an accented, childlike Spanish, and the final credits of the film reveal that while Lalia has been played by one young actress, her voice—and language—have been supplied by another, and her words have been scripted by Munt and a fellow Catalan. This cinematic “ventriloquism” recalls the concerns underlined by Spivak: “The assumption and construction of a consciousness or subject [. . .] will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization. And the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever” (“Can?” 295). Summer vacation programs in Spain also threaten to literalize metaphors of infantilization while erasing the subjectivity of Saharawi mothers. The Spanish government has been forced to prohibit Spanish host families from initiating adoption proceedings, prompting Ana Tortajada’s impassioned plea: “Spanish families must understand that those boys and girls are not their children [. . .] those children do not belong to them; they only belong to their mothers, and to their people” (249). As the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has observed, a crucial challenge facing those who seek to lobby on behalf of women and girls in other cultures is discovering “how to develop forms of feminism that don’t presume that ‘mother knows best.’” Spivak has asserted that along with the expression of motherly concern, the “sororizing of women in development is also a way of silencing the subaltern” (“Cultural” 342). Indeed, the rhetoric of sisterhood that emerges from other wellmeaning Spanish texts focused on Saharawi women and girls may be equally troubling. Spaniards who acknowledge the legacy of colonial injustices against native women, such as Ana Tortajada, seek to draw ongoing parallels between

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the experiences of Spanish women and their Saharawi counterparts. After reporting that many women residing in the camps express the fear that when their husbands return from the front they may not permit them to continue working, for example, Tortajada notes, “I reread what I am writing you and I realize that it would be perfectly applicable as well to some men in our own country” (146). Detailing Saharawi women’s concerns over their lack of representation in the upper administration of the POLISARIO, Tortajada observes, “As a general rule, we are much more critical with African, Asian or Latin American countries than with those in our own area, when in reality in our countries there aren’t that many women in power either” (168). Thus, the Saharawi women, who are represented as uniquely receptive to Westernization, and as engaging in a common struggle for gender equity, may be considered the true sisters of Spanish women—unlike, for example, those inscrutable Afghani women, who shocked Western feminists when they resumed wearing the burka after their “deliverance,” as Lila Abu-Lughod wryly reminds us. Abu-Lughod has analyzed these ongoing forms of feminist neo-imperialism, posing a question that is equally pertinent for the Saharawi context: “Can we only free Afghan women to be like us?” At the risk of falling again into Spivak’s “imperialist subject constitution,” I would argue that the Saharawi women I have thus far characterized as ventriloquized by many Spanish texts have in fact themselves become exceptionally astute purveyors of the rhetoric of sisterhood—and brotherhood. Here it is useful to recall Tortajada’s notable exchange with the elderly female POLISARIO activist, who insists, in Spanish, that Spaniards are the Saharawis’ “brothers.” Tortajada’s book shows that its author has been moved by the Saharawis’ insistence that “the only brother nation that we have known is the Spanish,” and she feels intimately implicated in the mandate to use all the media technology at her disposal to educate the global community about the Saharawi situation (248). Language is key to this strategic formulation of fraternity, suggesting that the subaltern can indeed speak. For example, Saharawi residents of the occupied territory have expressed indignation at Morocco’s imposition of French instead of Spanish as the official second language (Shelley 84). In the camps, the POLISARIO’s linguistic policy—that all Saharawi children begin to learn Spanish at the age of nine—works to capitalize on Miguel de Unamuno’s claim (discussed in chapter 1) that language, not blood, is the true bearer of the national spirit, of “an entire form of thinking and conceptualizing, along with popular and traditional customs and habits” (qtd. in Sepúlveda Muñoz 334). The policy is clearly designed to strengthen ties to the former colonial power (A. Hernández 89). In recent years, Saharawi musicians such as Nayim Alal have also begun to

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compose songs in Spanish, in an effort more effectively to communicate their message to listeners in Spain, and to bolster perceptions of the Saharawi as part of the larger “family” of Spanish speakers. This co-opting of the neo-imperial discourse of Hispanidad (Hispanicity) has been quite successful, as legal scholar Carlos Ruiz Miguel’s advocacy on behalf of the Saharawis demonstrates: “They are Spain’s friends. The most tangible proof is that they maintain the Castilian language as an Hispanic inheritance” (180). Recently, Spanish and Saharawi artists, intellectuals, and other public figures joined forces to protest the fact that the Algerian refugee camps lack a Cervantes Institute cultural center dedicated to the promotion of Spanish. They also sent an open letter to Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero demanding that he seek justice for the Saharawis, whose children “study in Hassaniya and Spanish, and their poets write and publish in our same language” (“Carta”). The Saharawis have become equally practiced at fomenting alternative notions of brotherhood and sisterhood with Spaniards that do not imply acceptance of presumably Western feminist values, or of the language of colonization. These forms of alliance are in fact dramatically counterposed to the neo-imperialist rhetoric that subtends much of the more mainstream Spanish support for the Saharawi cause, for they seek to underline commonalities between myriad nationalist struggles in Spain and the POLISARIO’s fight for political independence. Here the politics of ventriloquization become particularly complex, as representatives of Spanish peripheral nationalisms and POLISARIO members in turn “channel” the discourse of the other in order to advance their interests. There is a strong precedent for the recognition of such commonalities, since African independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s—most especially the Algerian FLN, which would later become a strong supporter of the POLISARIO—played a crucial inspirational role in the development of radical peripheral nationalist politics in Spain. Basques, Galicians, Andalusians, Catalans, and Canarians began to conceive of themselves as oppressed in similar ways to many Africans: colonized by an imperialist European power that imposed upon them a “foreign” language and/or culture, they too sought independence and affirmed their right to self-determination.¹⁴ Even after the transition to democracy and the establishment of the State of Autonomies, throughout Spain separatist sentiments have continued to be expressed—occasionally in violent fashion—by fringe groups such as the Andalusian nationalists discussed above, as well as by the much-higher-profile Basque organization ETA. Both moderate and radical peripheral nationalist political organizations have articulated their support for or even identification with the Saharawi cause, and indeed a significant number of pro-Saharawi organizations are affiliated with separatist groups. Sometimes the

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gestures of solidarity are subtle. Basque photographer Xabi Otero’s beautifully produced coffee-table book, for example, features many images of noble Saharawi warriors and a thoroughly militarized culture—“We are all combatants,” reads one of the photo captions (115)—and includes references to the ongoing project of nation building in preparation for future independence. Given the foundational comparison between Basque and Saharawi “small states” (15), it is difficult to avoid viewing the Saharawi freedom fighters in this book as ciphers for their Basque comrades. The dissatisfaction with the State of Autonomies evident throughout a number of peripheral communities has also served to validate the POLISARIO’s initial repudiation of the so-called third-way settlement first proposed by Morocco in the year 2000, which would provide for an independent Western Sahara to be incorporated into Morocco, “taking as a model the autonomous regions of Catalonia and Andalusia in Spain” (Zoubir and Benabdallah-Gambier 8). Kofi Annan and his personal envoy to the Western Sahara, James Baker, viewed the Moroccan proposal as the basis for a compromise between the two parties. Baker worked with U.N. Security Council mandates to create the May 2003 peace plan calling for the Western Sahara’s incorporation into Morocco as an autonomous region for a period of four to five years, followed by a self-determination referendum in which all long-term Moroccan settlers would also be allowed to vote. Despite the eminently favorable conditions of the plan, however, Morocco ultimately refused to consider any measure that might result in independence for the territory (Mundy).¹⁵ It is not surprising that soon thereafter the POLISARIO’s delegate to Catalonia, Emboirik Ahmed, began to deliver public lectures encouraging Catalans with separatist inclinations to draw parallels between their own political situation and that of the Saharawis (“Jornades”). Prior to his arrival in Catalonia, Ahmed had been posted to the Canary Islands, which without a doubt present us with the most fascinating and complex case of identification between peripheral separatism and the Saharawi cause. Oral histories of the Canarians who settled in very large numbers in the Western Sahara during the colonial era reveal widespread sympathy for the Saharawis, based on their perception of a shared experience of impoverishment and imperial oppression. As one Canarian teacher noted, “We were also a sort of colonized people, though maybe in a different form. [. . .] I felt comfortable with [the Saharawis], more than with the Spaniards” (Gandolfi). A Saharawi woman exiled to Galicia recalls, “We spent our childhood mixing it up and playing with the Canarians, sharing everything with them. That’s why there is such a great unity between the Canarian and Saharawi peoples” (qtd. in F. Alonso 157). Even an official Spanish government report from 1974 concluded that although peninsular settlers in the

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Western Sahara held racist views of the indigenous population, “the Canarian is much more integrated with them” (qtd. in Bárbulo 55). According to Pedro Fernaud, it was the crisis over the decolonization of the Western Sahara that catalyzed the emergence of a politicized Canarian nationalism. Some Canarians who embraced their Hispanic identity (including Fernaud himself ) were troubled when the central government suddenly converted the archipelago into an exposed border territory that would no longer be protected by the Spanish province on the nearby northern coast of Africa (just one hundred kilometers away).¹⁶ Other Canarians, however, preferred to emphasize their sempiternally subaltern status with respect to mainland Spaniards (Fernaud 113–15). By the 1970s, POLISARIO representatives in the archipelago and Canarian nationalists had united in support of what they perceived to be parallel causes. Here it is important to recall that, as I discussed in chapter 1, Spaniards’ conquest of the Canary Islands immediately preceded their “discovery” of the New World. Consequently, beginning in the nineteenth century some Canarians demanded that the decolonization process begun in the Americas be completed on the archipelago, citing among other reasons the distinctiveness of the original native inhabitants, the Guanches. During the Franco years, an archaeologist and anthropologist from Cádiz, José Pérez de Barradas, laid the foundation for the reconceptualization of Canarian identity as Saharan and sub-Saharan in origin (Farrujía and Arco Aguilar), a shift that would facilitate the development of a radical separatist movement on the archipelago. As early as the 1960s, Canarian nationalists were championing their right to independence as colonized Africans, since in geographical terms the archipelago “belonged” to the African continent, and the Guanches were ethnically and linguistically Berbers. Afrocentric Canarian nationalists received a huge boost when in 1968 the Organization of African Unity’s Liberation Committee, which had demanded a referendum in the Western Sahara, decided to form a subcommittee to study the situation of the archipelago, acknowledging the Canarian right to selfdetermination “like any other African territory still under colonial domination.”¹⁷ Moreover, the Algerian government threw its support behind the Movement for the Independence of the Canarian Archipelago (MPAIAC: Movimiento para la Independencia del Archipiélago Canario)—responsible for a number of terrorist acts in the 1970s—just as they promoted the POLISARIO, and when the movement’s founder, Antonio Cubillo, was forced into exile he too, like the Saharawis, was granted a new home in Algeria. The perceived link between the Saharawi and Canarian independence movements was an important justification for the Franco regime’s decision to turn the Western Sahara over to Morocco, since it was feared that an independent, POLISARIO-run state would help bol-

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ster the strength of the MPAIAC (Criado 187–88). After Morocco occupied the Western Sahara, it was clear that such a state would not be forthcoming, but Antonio Cubillo expressed his hope that the MPAIAC might succeed where the POLISARIO had not, and that the Canarians could then help the Saharawis in their equivalent struggle against Spanish colonialism. As he emphasizes in the prologue to Ramón Criado’s book on the Saharan situation, “Perhaps the future independence of the Canaries will be the key to the total liberation of the Saharawi territory” (Criado xv).¹⁸ Since the death of Franco, a plethora of Canarian separatist movements proclaiming the archipelago’s essential African identity have sprung into existence. But their traditionally close ties to the POLISARIO have been strained or even severed in recent years, in some cases because Saharawi leaders are now claiming the right to speak fully and exclusively for themselves. For example, while Canarian separatists such as Cubillo had characterized the Canaries as “the last Spanish colony in Africa” (Criado xiv), now some POLISARIO members are voicing their own unique status as “the last African colony.” Octavio Hernández, of the group Canarian Archipelago Liberation (Liberación Archipiélago Canario) has complained, “The POLISARIO Front has called itself ‘the last colony in Africa,’ a phrase which sounds great in Madrid because it implies the indirect negation of the rights of Ceuta, Melilla, and the Canary Islands to decolonization.” Hernández warns that the Spanish government will ultimately be unable to reject the third-way proposal to incorporate an autonomous Western Sahara into Morocco, since the proposal is inspired by Spain’s own Constitution; for that reason, according to Hernández, the POLISARIO would do well to rethink its strategy of alienating Canarians in order to curry favor with Madrid. However, one of the largest Canarian nationalist groups, the Popular Front for the Independence of the Canaries (FREPIC-AWAÑAK, which borrows part of its name from a Berber word for “Republic”), has recently shifted course completely. After years of supporting the POLISARIO, the group is now vehemently pro-Moroccan, a move that has “perplexed” other Canarian nationalist groups (“Azarug”). Yet the Popular Front claims that by declaring Morocco the enemy in the context of the Saharawi conflict, the Spanish government has prevented the Canaries from cultivating their rightful economic, political and cultural relationships with North Africa (“Comunicados”). Support for the Saharawi cause is intimately tied up with notions of national identity in Spain, and the mobilization of brotherhood rhetoric functions to position that identity along an ever-shifting border between Europe and Africa. Omnipresent images of Saharawi “sisters” as on the way to modernization yet still in need of salvation from their retrograde Moroccan oppressors work to situate

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Spain alongside other “progressive” European nations that, if only inadvertently, declare their cultural superiority as they lobby on behalf of the disadvantaged. On the other hand, demonstrations of a fraternal solidarity between Spanish peripheral nationalist and/or separatist movements and the POLISARIO reaffirm Spain’s fundamental difference from other European nation-states and reconfirm as well the multiple African legacies present throughout the country. Yet the Saharawis, who continue to refine the sophisticated political understanding they have developed in response to many decades of colonialist pressures, are hardly mute pawns in a game they do not understand, as Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo once argued (Problema 96). Rather, they have proven themselves to be highly adept at negotiating between international political bodies and nongovernmental organizations, the Madrid government, peripheral national parliaments and movements in Spain, and individual Spanish citizens. Indeed, the Saharawis are now perhaps equally practiced at ventriloquizing Spaniards. It is still unclear, however, if any of their efforts will ever result in a just solution for the Saharawi people. AFRO-SPANIARDS AND THE RESTAGING OF IDENTITIES

While Saharawis living in the Algerian refugee camps, together with their political representatives in Spain, have learned to co-opt Spaniards’ identitarian strategies in order to advance their own struggle, for their part Equatorial Guinean exiles residing in the former metropole have also developed a keen understanding of nationalist ideologies in Spain, creating an eloquently expressive postcolonial immigrant literature that endeavors to move Spanish society toward a practice (rather than a mere theory) of convivencia. Ever since dozens of Guinean students found themselves “trapped” on the peninsula beginning in the late 1960s, when their nation’s transition to independence was sidetracked by the dictator Francisco Macías Nguema and the Franco regime declared them stateless (Zamora Loboch 46), there has been a significant population of Equatoguineans residing in Spain. While many of the writers among this group have focused on dissecting the colonial experience—as in the case of Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo’s first novel, discussed in the preceding chapter—or on recuperating native cultural forms threatened with extinction during and after the period of Spanish dominance, others have also incorporated reflections on their experience of life in democratic Spain into their writing. Benita Sampedro has highlighted the complexity of these authors’ meditations on their relationship to the former metropolis (“African” 211). Carrying on in the tradition of NdongoBidyogo, their deconstruction of two centuries of Spanish Africanists’ fraternal

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rhetoric is particularly withering, demonstrating that when African “brothers” and “sisters” show up on Spaniards’ doorsteps, they are not always treated like family. The popular music of Las Hijas del Sol (The Daughters of the Sun) and the essays and poetry of their fellow musician and journalist Francisco Zamora Loboch exemplify the range of cultural spheres impacted by the voices of Equatoguinean immigrants. Piruchi Apo and her niece Paloma Loribó, the two members of Las Hijas del Sol, benefited from the brief period of relative liberalization in Equatorial Guinea after Teodoro Obiang toppled his uncle Francisco Macías Nguema in a coup in 1979. A hopeful Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo had also returned to Equatorial Guinea shortly thereafter, and it was under his direction of the Hispano-Guinean Cultural Center in the capital city Malabo that Apo and Loribó won a prize for their singing (García-Elvite 157). They were also selected to perform at their country’s pavilion at Seville’s Expo ’92. But as Obiang came increasingly to resemble his notorious predecessor Macías Nguema, Apo and Loribó, like Ndongo-Bidyogo, were compelled to flee their homeland for the former metropolis. In 1995, two years after their move, the duo released their debut CD under the title Sibèba, and they also began touring with other more established musicians, such as Manu Chao. Subsequently, Las Hijas del Sol released five additional recordings and shifted from singing primarily in their native Bubi to producing a majority of songs in Spanish. Dosinda García-Elvite has noted that the two (who have since parted company) were accused of “selling out” for signing with a larger multinational company and increasing their Spanish-language output. However, she prefers to view their linguistic choices as reflecting a decision to establish a bridge between Spaniards and immigrants (154). In combination with their propensity for fusing African soundscapes with Caribbean and Latin American musical forms, their tendency toward Spanishlanguage songs may also have been designed to tap into the rhetoric of Hispanidad, similar to the Saharawis’ strategy, discussed above: “By singing in Spanish and displaying their knowledge of Spanish cultural codes they ironically demonstrate that the ‘civilizing mission’ of the Spaniards in their country has been successful” (155). Even so, language choice is not strictly an either-or proposition for Las Hijas del Sol, as is evident from one of their celebrated earlier songs, “Tirso de Molina” (from Sibèba), which includes lyrics in both Bubi and Spanish, demonstrating a strategic deployment of bilingualism. The song is perhaps best described as an adaptation of an earlier cut on the same recording, “A ba’ele” (The Foreigners), which includes several names of Madrid subway stations and an apparent code switch into the Spanish word for “reverse” (“marcha atrás”) but otherwise is en-

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tirely in Bubi. The two songs share a common melody, rhythmic structure, and instrumentation, as well as a number of Bubi phrases, while some of the Spanish verses in “Tirso” are translations of verses from “A ba’ele.” Thus, while Pablo Guerrero is credited with the lyrics of “Tirso”—apparently raising again the specter of Spaniards’ ventriloquism of Africans—given the notable correspondences between “A ba’ele,” written entirely by Apo and Loribó, and “Tirso,” his contribution appears to have been more akin to translation and collaboration, responding to the duo’s desire to avoid errors in Spanish, particularly when they first arrived in Spain (Perandones). Indeed, the song itself works to counter the Spaniards’ practice of silencing those considered outsiders; while the singers lament, “Like voiceless intruders / They throw us out of the Puerta del Sol,” they insist that they will voice the plight of immigrants in Spain through their music: “Oh, what sorrow, I may only sing!” Sorrow is associated from the very beginning with modes of transportation, and, as Sampedro has noted, Las Hijas del Sol are particularly adept at articulating the pain of “dislocation” (“Salvando” 311). “Tirso” (like “A ba’ele”) opens with the sound of a motor roaring, the siren of an ambulance or a police car, and the disconsolate wailing of a woman. The trope of the “vehicle” that has neither a reverse nor a forward gear appears in both songs. In “Tirso” the idea is also articulated through the poignant refrain, “Unable to look / either forward or backward,” referring to many immigrants’ irrevocable decisions to flee lifethreatening political repression or sheer hunger, as well as to the lack of viable opportunities for them once they arrive in Spain, leaving them with nothing to look forward to. The transport symbolism is extended in both songs’ references to Madrid’s subway system, where the singers find themselves lost, unable to determine how to get to specific stops, such as the “Tirso de Molina” of the title. Since African immigrants in particular are often seen in metro stations selling clandestine merchandise, the songs evoke as well the immobility of those vendors, trapped in the dead-end drudgery of their literal and figurative “underground” occupation, in the very same space that everyone else uses to “move on.” In “Tirso” the singers’ reference to being thrown out of the Puerta del Sol is equally resonant, suggesting the abject marginalization of those who are excluded from the very geographical center of both Madrid and Spain (the plaza features a famous marker indicating the nation’s “kilometer 0” point). Employing apostrophe, Las Hijas del Sol request of Spaniards in general, “Don’t make me feel out of place,” but they reserve their harshest condemnation for the police officers who enforce the official state line on immigration, reflected in the Ley de Extranjería (Foreigners Act), which from 1985 to the early 2000s tended to prioritize EU demands for the maintenance of Fortress Europe via

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detentions and expulsions.¹⁹ The singers’ worst fears are expressed in Bubi, in a repeated refrain that also appears in “A ba’ele”: that the police will manhandle them and haul them off to jail. It is a fear that appears fully justified in a 2002 Amnesty International report documenting cases of racial profiling, as well as of beatings and rapes of immigrants in Spanish prisons (Daly). These lines of “Tirso de Molina” would only be readily understood by fellow Bubi speakers, and in this way Apo and Loribó create an immediate connection with many of their compatriots, even as they encourage other listeners to make the small effort (here, symbolized by the simple gesture of consulting the liner notes) required to “understand” and empathize with immigrants. The fear of imprisonment—and worse—at the hands of the authorities, articulated by Las Hijas del Sol (and several other popular Spanish musical groups [Bermúdez 185–89]), is a common refrain among immigrants in Spain. Indeed, the title of Francisco Zamora Loboch’s mordant 1994 essay collection Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca (How To Be Black and Not Die in Aravaca) refers to the wealthy neighborhood on the edge of Madrid in which a tense standoff between some of the neighbors and local police officers and the Dominican domestic workers who spent their leisure time in an Aravaca park culminated in the November 13, 1992 hate-killing of Lucrecia Pérez, one of the immigrant women, by an off-duty Civil Guard officer. Pérez’s tragic death moved the Congress to call for “a culture of respect for a plural convivencia.” King Juan Carlos sought to assure immigrants that “you are at home, we consider you brothers.” Nevertheless, there were numerous public demonstrations against both official and individual forms of xenophobia, as represented by the Foreigners Act as well as by the specific cases of racially motivated exclusions and violence inflicted by Spanish citizens on immigrants. Latin Americans and Spaniards protesting together outside Madrid’s Casa de Américas did not hesitate to link Pérez’s death to Spanish imperialism, condemning the fifth centennial of the “discovery” of the Americas, which had been the occasion for many celebrations over the course of that year, in their shouted slogans (Calvo Buezas 2.4, 3.1, 3.11). In his book, Zamora Loboch expands upon that critique, countering the “collective amnesia” (108) and historical distortions that have been so essential to the construction of a hegemonic Spanish national identity, and offering a distinctively revisionist perspective on the nation’s past. His text begins with a sly comparison: “The first Moor to whom Spain applied the Foreigners Act was Boabdil” (11). Zamora Loboch reminds his readers that Muslims like Boabdil, the last leader of the Kingdom of Granada, who was compelled to leave Spain in 1492, were as “Spanish” as anyone else whose family had resided on the peninsula for centuries. He traces the origins of Spanish racism precisely to the policy

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of “ethnic cleansing” (12) initiated with the expulsion of the Jews by the Catholic Kings (whose conduct he contrasts with that of the more tolerant Christian leaders of the medieval period), and culminating when the Moriscos, too, were expelled more than a century later. Spaniards’ imbrication in the slave trade, so rarely detailed in traditional historical texts, is also foregrounded by Zamora Loboch, who asserts that Bartolomé de las Casas “saved his Indians but crucified the blacks. And this is a fact that no one has emphasized enough” (16). Zamora Loboch also scrutinizes early modern Spanish writers’ representations of the enslaved and free blacks who made up a significant part of the population on the peninsula until the eighteenth century, exalting Quevedo’s literary genius while excoriating him for his notable prejudice, and lauding the universal Cervantes for his empathy for all racial groups (101–7, 11–12). Modern-day Spanish “literature” on blacks appears limited to excruciating racist jokes, compiled in one of Zamora Loboch’s chapters, though he notes that during the Franco years it was more common for Spaniards to laugh at Catalans than at blacks, since “at that time, officially Spain was not a racist country” (45). Like the Saharawis, Zamora Loboch is highly cognizant of the impact of peripheral nationalisms in Spain, but in his case he is less interested in enlisting the support of specific communities by appealing to a shared experience of oppression than in exposing the implication of all those communities in Spain’s past and present exploitation of Africans. He indicates, for example, that Basques, Cantabrians, Galicians, and Asturians all dedicated themselves with great devotion to the slave trade (20), but in referring to the even greater devotion of Catalans he establishes a provenance for the racist condemnation of immigrants articulated by the man whom they elected to serve as their local president from 1980 to 2003, Jordi Pujol: “In the dark trade of having a go at Rwandans until sugar ran from their pores, Jordi Pujol’s countrymen particularly distinguished themselves” (“En el sombrío oficio de dar caña al ruandés hasta que soltase azúcar por los poros, se distinguieron especialmente los paisanos de Jordi Pujol”; Zamora Loboch plays here with the multivalence of the Spanish word “caña,” in “caña de azúcar” and “dar caña”; 19).²⁰ That longstanding racist sentiments continue to reverberate in Catalonia is also suggested in Zamora Loboch’s brilliant poem “Salvad a Copito” (Save Snowflake; Ndongo-Bidyogo and Ngom 160). Copito de Nieve (Snowflake) was an albino gorilla—the only one ever known—captured as a baby in 1966 by an Equatoguinean man, Benito Mañé, and later sold to Jordi Sabater Pi, a Catalan scientist working in the colony in a facility run by the Barcelona Zoo. Sabater took the gorilla to Barcelona, where he lived in the home of a veterinarian and was looked after with great tenderness by the latter’s wife until suitable accom-

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modations could be prepared for him in the zoo (“Snowflake”). Once placed on display, Copito de Nieve quickly became a beloved mascot of Barcelona, famous the world over. In his poem, Zamora Loboch implicitly contrasts the privileged treatment of this uniquely white Equatoguinean celebrity with the fate of those of his compatriots who do not sport “white covering and blue eyes.” While Equatoguinean poets have sometimes compared their exile in Spain to an imprisonment (as in Zamora Loboch’s “Prisionero de la Gran Vía” [Prisoner of the Gran Vía], or Raquel Ilonbé’s “Soledad” [Loneliness], where she refers to her “cage” [Ndongo-Bidyogo and Ngom 161, 167]), despite his own confinement, Copito’s circumstances are considerably less onerous: he enjoys heat and hot water in winter, savors three-fork-rated meals, has friends in the ministries, and is visited by dignitaries. Benita Sampedro suggests, intriguingly, that with his reference to Copito’s “white covering” and “friends in the ministries,” Zamora Loboch allies the gorilla with Equatoguineans who toward the end of the colonial period were sent to study in the military academy in Zaragoza, returning to their homeland in white dress uniforms “as tyrannical leaders of the country after the 1968 independence” (“Salvando” 310). In the final lines, the poetic speaker politely requests of Copito, “Permit me to recall that things went much worse for others from the same crowd,” alluding indirectly to the horrors that many other Equatoguineans have experienced. At the same time, Zamora Loboch’s poem reveals that Copito has also paid a “very dear price” for the privileges he enjoys. There is perhaps more than a hint of sarcasm in the speaker’s reference to Copito’s “lovely family-size laundry detergent name.” The comparison suggests that the gorilla has been commodified, converted into yet another indispensable household product, and indeed, as a Nature documentary notes, the gorilla was “a valuable exhibit. With the crowds that flocked to see him, came money” (“Snowflake”). It also underlines the color-coded system of values subtending racial politics: advertisements for laundry detergents frequently boast of their “whitening” powers, and the slippage between “whiteness” and purity facilitates the characterization of blacks as inferior. Zamora Loboch satirizes Spanish Africanist meditations on the “paradox” of outer blackness/inner whiteness, which I have analyzed on a number of occasions throughout this book, when Copito is described as “the only gorilla in the world with a white soul.” Notwithstanding his white soul, however, Copito is still subjected to derision: amid the murmur of conversation from the Ramblas, of the crunching of peanuts and sunflower seeds, can be heard “small obscenities in Catalan.” No matter how much Copito has been “whitened,” inside and out, no matter how much he has been assimilated to a Western lifestyle, he will never be able to escape the Equatoguinean origins that place him at the mercy

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of xenophobes. And in this case, not incidentally, the xenophobes speak Catalan.²¹ Increasingly, however, African immigrants in Spain also speak—and write— Catalan. And Galician. The Cameroonian Víctor Omgbá, a lawyer and journalist currently writing for A Coruña’s newspaper La Voz de Galicia, may have initiated a trend when in 2001 he published a fictionalized account drawn from his own immigration experiences, not in Spanish but rather in Galician. Calella sen saída (Dead-End Street)—whose title recalls the emphasis on immobility found in the songs of Las Hijas del Sol—is particularly notable given the almost absolute absence of texts published in Spain by those African immigrants who, unlike many of the Equatoguineans, are not native Spanish speakers. Omgbá’s protagonist arrives in Madrid hoping to continue his legal studies, but when a scholarship from his home country fails to materialize he falls into illegal status and is forced to sell merchandise in the subway. Through a chance connection he finds a job in Galicia, but there, too, he is exploited by his employer, arrested, and slated for deportation. Throughout his stay, the protagonist befriends a number of other immigrants from West African countries, whom he engages in extended conversations concerning their perspective on their homelands, their arduous efforts to reach Spain, and their treatment by Spaniards. In this way, Ombgá’s narrative functions as a forum for a range of sub-Saharan voices and complements the songs, essays, and poetry produced by Equatoguineans. For their part, Moroccans have been “spoken for” (in Castilian) in literary works inspired in journalistic accounts of the plight of immigrants (such as Gerardo Muñoz Lorente’s Ramito de hierbabuena [Mint Sprig] or Andrés Sorel’s Las voces del estrecho [Voices of the Strait]), as well as in sociological analyses of interviews and compilations of “testimonials” (such as Rafael Torres’s Yo, Mohamed [I, Mohammed] or, somewhat more complexly, Pasqual Moreno Torregrosa and Mohamed El Gheryb’s Dormir al raso [Sleeping in the Open]). But as Daniela Flesler has detailed, these texts “constitute less than successful efforts to ‘give voice’ to the immigrants” (Return, ch. 5). In 2004, however, two women born in the northern Moroccan region of Nador, both Amazigh (Berber) speakers who immigrated to the city of Vic near Barcelona when they were eight years old, published autobiographical narratives of their experiences. Like Víctor Omgbá, they chose to do so not in Castilian but in the language of their own adopted community in Spain, Catalan. Laila Karrouch’s De Nador a Vic (From Nador to Vic) won the Columna publishing house prize for juvenile literature; it features a chronological recounting of the challenges the author faced as she and her family sought to adapt to life in Spain, whose culture Karrouch describes as diametrically opposed to her rural Berber origins (112). While Karrouch en-

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deavors to familiarize young readers with Moroccan traditions, particularly with respect to gender roles, as well as with some of the forms of discrimination faced by immigrants in Spain, in her narrative she tends to skim over the surface of emotions. Najat El Hachmi by contrast is more introspective, demonstrating a profound affective and intellectual engagement with her circumstances. The title of her Jo també sóc catalana (I Am Also Catalan) engages in dialogue with a decades-long series of publications on the impact of immigration on Catalan national identity (such as Miquel Arimany’s 1965 I els catalans també [They Are Also Catalan]),²² working to complicate Francesc Candel and Josep Maria Cuenca’s recent advocacy of a “unique and plural Catalan-ness” (11). Moreover, through her impressively confident new literary voice El Hachmi evidences her passion for the expressive musicality of language (39, 137), including her assimilation of the Catalan literature that she has devoured since childhood and her absorption of the narrative traditions of Morocco. If the Hijas del Sol respond to their “dolores,” or sorrows, by singing, El Hachmi will work through her own “dors,” the sorrow of mourning the many losses that are often acutely felt by immigrants, through her writing. Indeed, one of the losses mentioned early on in her text is the enveloping, womblike context of her mother’s bedtime narratives (33), and in its poetic “orality” her own text seeks to recreate, if not recoup, the magical storytelling of the women of her childhood, who were capable of converting family anecdotes into grand histories (174). That there is no real recuperation, however, is evident in El Hachmi’s several references to her “long road with no return” (38, 179), reminiscent of Las Hijas del Sol’s trope of the vehicle with no reverse gear. El Hachmi recognizes, as have so many immigrants before her, that she has been irrevocably changed by her migration. She will never again be the same person who abandoned Morocco as a child, a fact she rediscovers whenever she returns with her family to visit and realizes that her Amazigh is no longer completely comprehensible, that she ignores an entire vocabulary of bodily gestures, and that she could no longer survive if ever she moved back “home” (45, 73). Her past identity, as she comes to understand it, is no less ephemeral than a desert mirage (46). Even so, the capacity for a “border thinking” (“pensament de frontera”), culled from her experience, enriches her text—which bridges a number of genres, including autobiography, fiction, and analytical essay—as well as her comprehension of divergent realities (13–14). There is a felicitous coincidence between El Hachmi’s conceptualization of a “pensament de frontera” and the “border thinking” that Walter Mignolo analyzes in his book Local Histories/Global Designs. For Mignolo the term refers not to the hybridity or syncretism omnipresent in postcolonial theory but rather to the emergence of knowledge produced from a

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subaltern perspective, whether that perspective relates to an exterior border— such as the border between Spain and Islam—or to an interior border—such as the one produced within Europe when Spain lost its earlier hegemonic status (11). According to Mignolo, border thinking consists of “new forms of knowledge in which what has been subalternized and considered interesting only as an object of study becomes articulated as new loci of enunciation” (13). And indeed in her prologue El Hachmi explains that her book is a response to the statistical analyses of immigrants that now abound in Spain—analyses that entail maximum “objectification” of the “object of study”—and she asserts that “people are not known through statistics” (12). El Hachmi reappropriates statistical language, claiming that she will enumerate the “gross yield that I have obtained from the singular paternal inheritance that is the migratory project” (12). By moving in on the language of Western epistemology, by occupying it, she theorizes from the position she has been placed in (Mignolo 109), while contesting the notion that (as Mignolo so aptly articulates it) “disciplinary language should be as pure as the blood of early Christians in Spain” (Mignolo 222). In this way, she “thinks from the experience of the subaltern who has liberated [her]self from that position” (Mignolo 111). El Hachmi’s formulation recalls Equatoguinean immigrant writers’ descriptions of their metaphorical imprisonment, and her liberation again entails a reappropriation of the language of objectification (in this case, the labels that categorize certain products such as wine as exclusive to a certain region): “I write to feel more free, to dismantle my own cloister, a cloister constructed of designated origins” (“denominacions d’origen”; 14). El Hachmi’s border thinking emerges in force from the section of her narrative in which she juxtaposes her own life as a “modern” woman—a mother in a household in Catalonia where both parents are employed outside the home—to the lives of the women in her family who have remained in Morocco. In one chapter she notes that the dishwashers who toil alongside her on the night shift at a pizza factory typically return home to a “second shift” of housework and childcare, concluding dryly that one woman who is “liberated” is worth ten who are not (161). While with respect to hours of labor the situation of contemporary working-class women in Catalonia hardly differs from that of their turn-of-thecentury predecessors in the textile mills, they are also subjected to the media’s insistence that they strive to be model mothers as well as modelesque, obsessed with the elimination of superfluous body hair and cellulite. As El Hachmi ironically remarks, “How great to be liberated like Western women, worn out and with no time for almost anything, but liberated, when all is said and done” (137). In this same section of her book, El Hachmi also recounts a family crisis in

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Morocco, when her aunt Jamila shows up at her parents’ home, complaining that she has been mistreated by her husband’s mother and unmarried brothers. But when the narrator’s grandfather insists that Jamila return to her husband, his six other daughters converge on the scene and scold him for being so harsh. He gives way, as he always does, and the sisters settle in for a lengthy commiseration session. In contrast to Ana Tortajada, who as we have seen measures the status of Saharawi women in accordance with presumably Western standards, El Hachmi refuses to isolate Moroccan women from their local context, characterized by very specific forms of gendered negotiations. Nor does she accept the “paternalism” of Western women—even the same exhausted working-class women she labors alongside—who feel compelled to “save” their poor counterparts in the rest of the world (162). She notes that her aunts would never describe themselves as oppressed by patriarchal power or appeal to Western feminism to free them from their enslavement, concluding, “After all, they were relatively happy in their corner of the world, made up of small joys” (147). One of the “small joys” from her own childhood in Morocco, whose memory El Hachmi clearly treasures, is of the comforting smell of her grandfather’s old wool djellaba; it was particularly intensely experienced once when she rested her feverish face on her grandfather’s back as he anxiously sought to smooth the jolting gait of the donkey upon which the two were riding, following his insistence that she be tended to at the local health center (168–69). It was in fact her grandfather who, concerned about substandard medical care in Morocco, encouraged El Hachmi’s family to join their father in Spain, fighting back his own tears over their imminent departure. El Hachmi’s powerful anecdote configures an alternative image to the one reproduced in so many Spanish texts, of overburdened Moroccan women trudging behind their donkey-riding menfolk. In this way, the author responds to the “stories that have been told and the conceptualization that has been put into place to divide the world between Christians and pagans, civilized and barbarians, modern and premodern, and developed and underdeveloped regions and people” (Mignolo 98). In her narrative, El Hachmi first engages in a theory and practice of border thinking while meditating on the two mother tongues that she and her young son Rida share, yet have amalgamated in different fashions. Indeed, the differences are marked out through the very words for “mother”: during Rida’s first several years of life, when his parents speak Amazigh exclusively with him, El Hachmi sees herself as her own mother every time her son calls her “iimma,” yet when he later shifts to “mama,” that image disappears, as does its emotional impact (23). El Hachmi remains convinced, however, that despite Rida’s increasing tendency to speak Catalan, thanks to his parents’ deliberate decision initially

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to immerse him in Amazigh, he will continue to carry with him the expanded “toolkit” for comprehending the world that multilingualism affords (20–21). He too will have access to the epistemological reframings characteristic of border thinking. El Hachmi’s childhood acquisition of a new language, by contrast, was not the product of a conscious, ideologically motivated choice; as is the case with most immigrants, practical necessity compelled her to learn her second “mother tongue.” As Juan Goytisolo has observed of this growing phenomenon in Catalonia, “There will be Maghrebians and sub-Saharans who speak Catalan, and Spanish citizens who refuse to do so” (“Metáforas”). However, while immigrants who learn languages other than Castilian may initially relate to issues of peripheral nationalism quite differently (if at all) from other Spaniards, questions of identity will inevitably be refocused or even destabilized as a result of their linguistic assimilation. El Hachmi, for instance, eventually comes to appreciate the parallel status of Catalan and Amazigh as minority languages, as she explains to her son: “Amazigh has always been considered secondary, strictly an oral language, barbaric, they say [. . .] your other mother tongue, Catalan, was once persecuted and despised, it’s not in vain that your mother feels that they are two sister languages” (27). El Hachmi’s recognition of a certain “fraternity” between Moroccan Berbers and Catalans is based, then, upon their shared experience of linguistic persecution, but there remains a crucial disconnect here: Catalan is no longer marginalized in the same way Amazigh is. And indeed, as she will come to discover, Catalan speakers are as capable of converting their language into an instrument of power as are speakers of Castilian and Arabic. For El Hachmi, gaining fluency in Catalan also allows her to open the doors to a new world, “to have the keys to enter into the intimacy of the residents of this misty country” (38). Her revision of the resonant key motif reveals a sophisticated conceptualization of her place within diachronic and synchronic time, a capacity for temporal as well as geographical and cultural border thinking. Simple possession of a mythical “key to the family home” is not sufficient for her to find herself at home in Spain; for that, she must immerse herself in the modern-day local language. And once she and her family have done so, she discovers that many of their neighbors do indeed appear to accept them: “For all of them, we were already from here” (65). At the same time, El Hachmi’s integration within Catalan society enables her and her Moroccan immigrant friends to attend university, where they seek to recoup another, seemingly lost part of themselves by reading anthologies of Andalusi poetry compiled by the esteemed Spanish Arabist Emilio García Gómez. In one of the books’ most complex passages, the immigrant students’ yearning for their Moroccan past melds with the Andalusi poets’ yearning for their own lost paradise, the Middle Eastern caliphate: “We

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will now reign among anthologies by Emilio García Gómez, the poetry of ignorant ones, coveting Khorasan²³ and lost kingdoms in order to recoup this plot of land that disposed of us at some point on our path, which is neither of first nor second generation” (26). Here the shift from third to first person, the conflation of the narrator’s voice with the voice of the “ignorant” Andalusi poets who were oblivious to the looming threat of expulsion, even as they looked back in nostalgia to a previously lost paradise, suggest that El Hachmi and her friends are also in danger of a future exclusion, or even expulsion. Indeed, El Hachmi will also encounter the widespread prejudice, articulated as well by Jordi Pujol (Moreras 119), that Maghrebi immigrants are simply incapable of integration—the same claim which, as we have seen, has been repeatedly marshaled over the centuries to justify the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. Presuming that she could not possibly have learned Catalan, shopkeepers routinely insist upon speaking Castilian to her. El Hachmi equates the gesture with the preference for viewing immigrants as voiceless outsiders: “This girl, with these features and such brown hair. [. . .] At a minimum she must be Moroccan. My reflection in your eyes, Mr. Shopkeeper, is that of a poor and ignorant immigrant girl, unfamiliar with the country she lives in, perhaps even mute” (50). She notes that her son Rida receives the same treatment; in store after store, they are both addressed strictly in Castilian, even as they themselves conduct all of their business in fluent Catalan. In an encounter with another woman who appears offended that both mother and son speak the language, the narrator makes a pointedly sarcastic reference to linguistic policies in Catalonia, which have mandated that schooling be conducted in Catalan (with Castilian introduced later as a second language): “You know, I also speak it. And almost all Moroccans of this age, if this is what you mean, they speak your language perfectly, it’s the language of schooling, if I remember correctly” (51). Despite the official policy of linguistic assimilation of internal and external immigrants, “native” Catalans may still maintain a proprietary attitude toward “their” language, a phenomenon that emerges with particular virulence when the narrator ventures to correct Catalans who erroneously employ lexical items borrowed from Castilian: “Sure, man, you’re telling me, who’s a Catalan [. . .] you won’t be coming from abroad, telling me how I should speak my language” (53). Here again, El Hachmi refers to Catalan linguistic policies, in this case the 2003 “TU ETS MESTRE” (YOU ARE A TEACHER) publicity campaign encouraging Catalans to speak the language with all newcomers so that they have the opportunity to learn to communicate through their daily contacts. The narrator’s interactions expose the ambivalence of a social sphere in which, although language assimilation is ostensibly prescribed, no one seems capable of imagining that a Mo-

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roccan in fact could have mastered Catalan, and might even consider herself a “teacher.” Although young Rida has already become both fluent and militant in his use of Catalan, his mother wonders if his curly hair and skin color will still “betray” him one day (55). Indeed, betrayal seems inevitable, as is clear from Francisco Zamora Loboch’s poetic analysis of the ostensibly ultrawhite Copito de Nieve. Much like Zamora Loboch, El Hachmi reveals the intimate connection between conceptualizations of purity and racism in her description of a crushing episode from her childhood, which prompts her to try to hide the Moroccan component of her identity from the outside world. In celebration of the end of Ramadan, her mother painstakingly paints her hands with elaborate henna designs, which the narrator takes great care not to smudge before they dry. Later, expecting others to marvel at the beautiful colored tracery, she is ashamed when an overweight woman with dyed hair playing a slot machine in the local bar scolds her instead, telling her to wash her “dirty” hands (66). The narrator subsequently takes to scrubbing her skin in an unsuccessful attempt to whiten her complexion.²⁴ She also prefers to venture onto the street in dark clothing, and cringes when her father plays his favorite music, fearing that her family might appear too “Maghrebian” to the neighbors (69). When her family visits Morocco and she recognizes how different they have all in fact become, she imagines that they will also become more white: “More and more, we would resemble our almost transparently-skinned companions” (46). However, once she grows up and begins to seek employment (an aspiration initially complicated by her lack of working papers), she finds she is able to “pass” over the phone, but as soon as she arrives in person for interviews, her features, her hair, her name, are all likely to betray her (85).²⁵ Despite her educational level and her fluency in Catalan, she too will be forced into a job—the night shift in a pizza factory—that “natives” would be loath to accept. El Hachmi suggests that perceived phenotypical and cultural “differences” alike fuel racist reactions; indeed, such differences might even be intuited rather than actually seen: “Unjustly, I believed that we would be criticized for whatever Maghrebi trait our neighbors might intuit” (69). Through the insertion of the crucial qualifier “unjustly,” however, the narrator introduces a critical distance into her recollections, recognizing her own susceptibility to the very generalizations that form the basis of racist thought. El Hachmi is in fact careful to acknowledge the many Catalan friends she has made, from a wide range of different social contexts, who would never disparage her origins (91). She also pointedly draws distinctions among her Catalan neighbors when she describes their reactions to the increasing visibility of Muslim immigrants’ religious observance. As Jordi Moreras has noted in his work on Mo-

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roccans in Catalonia, newly arrived immigrants often modify their adherence to Islamic strictures in order to avoid drawing attention to themselves. While some may gather in extremely modest storefront prayer halls, all but indistinguishable from the street, others only participate in Ramadan. But once family reunifications begin to take place and Muslim communities become more established, fathers in particular seek to create organized mosques with Koranic schools where their children may receive an education in the ways of their faith. Alongside halal markets, these locales function to increase the visibility of Muslim immigrants (169–78). El Hachmi describes a similar trajectory for her own family, even as she structures her narrative around a parallel strategy of religious discretion. Indeed, for nearly a hundred pages she avoids any sustained reference to Islam. Only in the third section, entitled “Mesquites i esglésies” (Mosques and Churches), does she directly tackle the subject, opening with a moving meditation on her recollection of Ramadan celebrations in Morocco, which emphasizes several “universal” experiences: the child’s longing to participate in the world of adults, the warmth of a family gathering around a lovingly prepared celebratory meal. Although memories of elaborate Ramadan festivities fade into the past when the family moves to Spain and prioritizes adjusting to the new environment, the narrator’s fond perspective on the Islamic practices of her childhood are most threatened, ironically, when some five years after their move her father announces the opening of the first mosque—a rented commercial space with papered-over windows—in Vic (106). El Hachmi subsequently struggles with the religious leader’s imposition of modest forms of dress and behavior, as well as with the new obsession with food purity, facilitated by the arrival of a halal market. She worries in particular that her burgeoning literary vocation might be at odds with Islam. Her crisis of faith reaches an apogee when her beloved aunt Fàtima dies and she is unable to reconcile the event with the existence of God. Despite having concluded that God is dead, however, she finds herself feeling more Muslim than ever when a later project to build a formal mosque in her own neighborhood in Vic resurrects the long-buried discourse of “Moors and Christians” among the local population (119). In a rancorous meeting, the narrator is dismayed to see that a number of the same neighbors who years ago had expressed delight over her fluency in “their” language and who appeared genuinely to accept her family suddenly begin to disparage her homeland and religion, arguing that the presence of a mosque will only lead to violence. El Hachmi’s experiences contradict the government’s ongoing claim—articulated, for example, by the current minister of foreign affairs Miguel Ángel Moratinos— that Spaniards have opted for a policy and practice of integration, rather than the French model of assimilation (Garzón). As the narrator observes, in a play on

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words that works equally well in Catalan and English, sometimes those who call for “integration” in reality expect “disintegration” (90). Even so, she is still able to preserve intact one fragment of her memory of the “paradise” of her childhood in Vic, for the kind owners and at least one of the regulars from her father’s favorite bar have not attended the meeting, nor have the genuinely observant Christians, who continue to greet her on the street, cooing over baby Rida, as they emerge from Mass (121). Perhaps they understand—as her many friends also seem to do—that integration requires respect for cultural and religious differences, rather than an insistence upon their complete renunciation. El Hachmi’s narrative complicates analyses that attribute conflicts between Spaniards and immigrants to the difficulties of reconciling a “secular” postEnlightenment society to the religious expressions of newcomers (see, for example, Manji). Public life in Vic is permeated with the signs of Catholicism, as the ringing of bells welcomes the faithful to Mass (105) and children sing Christmas carols and stage nativity plays in school (110, 125). How can the same people who marry in the local church, celebrate their children’s first Communion, and visit family graves on the first of November, also clamor for the maintenance of a secular state? For her part, El Hachmi must reconcile her own agnosticism with the desire that Rida be circumcised, recognizing that religion is but a “pretext for identity” (127) when nothing else remains of an abandoned homeland, “just a sediment of centuries and centuries of history, which settles in our daily life” (128). Perhaps her son’s circumcision reflects her longing to inscribe him with an identity, and she is aware of the gravity of what she describes as the most painful decision she has made since his birth (126). Unlike all of the Christian “sediment,” however, Rida’s circumcision is of necessity swept out of public view. As with the other references to Islamic practices, it is also kept from readers until late in the text, for although in the opening pages we are privy to El Hachmi’s mortification when her son shouts in the street, “We’re going to the doctor to look at my penis!” (22), it is only later that we learn the reason for the medical appointment.²⁶ And only by reading the two sections of the text alongside one another do we understand that Rida is circumcised precisely when the Catalan he learns with such facility in preschool begins to supplant the Amazigh that had previously been his sole mother tongue. It is a loss that will be sutured over with a symbolic gain. Similarly, El Hachmi’s text ends with a painful loss that is not precisely experienced as such: when she learns that her beloved grandfather has died, she remains unaffected, coming to realize that for her he had already died when she left Morocco. Indeed, he had died over and again, after the end of every threeweek-and-two-day-long visit undertaken by her family. El Hachmi reflects on

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the inevitable series of deaths that will follow his, leaving her with nothing of Morocco. Or not quite nothing, as the last lines of her narrative indicate: “The first eight years of life, the phone calls and the memories of three weeks and two days. Nothing more” (195). By ending her narrative with such a resonantly succinct phrase—“nothing more”—El Hachmi prompts us to meditate on the manner in which language itself may produce plenitude out of loss. If, as she states in her prologue, El Hachmi has written this text to free herself from the confinement of her “designated origins,” she still leaves her readers with considerably “more” than “nothing” of Morocco. Perhaps Spanish society will also be left with “nothing more” of its own “designated origins.” Throughout the post-Enlightenment era, Spaniards had sought to turn their own fraught border position to advantage within the new “rational” world system, metaphorically playing both sides of the fence by exalting their African legacy, precisely in order to legitimize their participation in the modern European “civilizing mission” on the African continent. In the postcolonial, democratic era, even as the African inheritance has been mobilized anew, Spain has again sought to affirm its place within Europe, this time by fortifying—both literally and figuratively—its borders with Africa. Yet African immigrants’ incursions into the Spanish cultural sphere effectively bury the ghosts of the medieval past, so strategically employed by Spaniards over the previous two centuries; their narratives eschew exaltation of an idealized and remote convivencia to focus on more recent historical memories of expulsion and enslavement, colonization and deportation, even as they struggle to envision and to theorize a new place for themselves in the world. And indeed, the forms of border thinking that immigrants such as Ndongo-Bidyogo, Loribó, Apo, Zamora Loboch, and El Hachmi are now engaging in promise to destabilize the very Enlightenment epistemology that sought to draw sharp lines of division between European and non-European peoples and civilizations. If, as Walter Mignolo has written, “the concept of Reason introduced by Descartes did not only have philosophical and metaphysical import, but was a crucial principle to develop and manage the large spectrum of society [. . .] one should expect that new forms of rationality, emerging from subaltern experiences, will not only have an impact in philosophy and social thought but in the reorganization of society” (111). In this way, the (re)mappings of identity undertaken by immigrants may ultimately prove to be the most productively “disorienting” of all.

A

At the end of the previous chapter, I suggested that the increasing presence of immigrants in Spanish life and cultural production is leading to a new form of “disorientation,” as communities in Spain are forced to confront the realities of a modern-day convivencia, rather than indulge fantasies of a convivencia associated with a remote past. If that is the case, however, it might be asserted that the challenges now faced within Spain are not in fact so different from those experienced elsewhere in Europe. That is to say, the era of a singularly Spanish disorientation, in the many ways in which that term has been parsed in this book, may have come to an end. Even so, Najat el Hachmi’s cautious negotiation of religion as well as her critical reflections on secularism in Spain, also discussed in the final paragraphs of chapter 6, hint at a more recent permutation of Spanish distinctiveness within the larger European context. It is evident that in the post-9/11 world, attention has shifted notably to questions of religious faith and culture. Racism, unfortunately, has not disappeared—and religious groups are still subject to racialization, as El Hachmi herself makes clear—yet religious belief is now perhaps a more commonly articulated criterion for the formulation of absolute distinctions between self and other. As we have seen, however, religious anxieties have not generally dominated texts that have constructed Spanish identities vis-à-vis Muslims and Africans throughout the modern era. I would argue that this is due to the fact that while “scientific racism” and its legacy drew attention to Spaniards’ ostensibly less-secure racial status, Spain’s religious identity was never seriously in question. As I discussed in detail in earlier chapters, religion was foregrounded in discrete moments in which Spanish Catholicism seemed threatened. This was the case, for example, when freedom of religion was first debated and insti-

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tuted in the ephemeral Constitution of 1869 and Neo-Catholics such as Pedro Antonio de Alarcón launched an impassioned response, and when the anticlericalism associated with the Second Republic prompted Africanists previously indifferent about religious questions to embrace the tenets of National Catholicism. Such periods of religious ambiguity were relatively fleeting, though, and up to the death of Franco, Spain remained a confessional state, linked to an essentially Catholic identity. Since the consolidation of democracy, however, notable changes have occurred. While the 1978 Constitution theoretically established the separation of church and state, it also made special mention of the Catholic Church, which was granted a favored economic and social status through accords signed with the Vatican in 1979. Yet since 2004 the PSOE under Prime Minister Zapatero has moved to curtail religious education and end the church’s privileged position. The party has also successfully sponsored legislation contrary to Catholic doctrine, such as the legalization of gay marriage, the easing of restrictions on divorce and abortion, and the promotion of stem cell research. The PSOE’s policies reflect the fact that a significant number of Spaniards have abandoned Catholic practices: fewer than 20 percent of Spaniards who claim religious affiliation attend services regularly, and 36 percent of Spanish youths define themselves as atheists or nonbelievers (CIS 19–20). The situation has led the Vatican to view Spain as a crucial frontline in the new battle for “Christian Europe,” launched by Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Valencia in July 2006. Although the gradual tendency to become “unchurched” is evident throughout most of Europe, in Spain the rapid erosion of Catholicism is especially fraught, since it is frequently related to the desire to dis-identify with a Franco regime associated with “antiEuropean” backwardness and repression. Much as nineteenth-century processes of racialization put Spain’s “equivocal” racial identity in play, the latest emphasis on the clash of religious faith and cultures, precisely at a time when Spaniards are questioning or even rejecting their traditional ties to Catholicism, has produced new stresses on identity formations. Contradictions and ambivalence are again emerging in full force. Spaniards of Catholic heritage may now vacillate between reaffirmation of a religious identity that still bears the residue of past abuses and declaration of an essentially secular character that cannot be firmly anchored in the weight of national history. Such is the case, for example, of feminist philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, who argues for the creation of a rigorously secular public sphere in Spain, while affirming that Christianity is a more properly academic subject than Islam in Spanish public schools, since it is pertinent to understanding “our culture and history [. . .] whether we like it or not” (160–62).

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Armando Salvatore has emphasized that European secularisms, which developed out of the specific context of the Wars of Religion and were institutionalized in pacts between individual states and particular Christian denominations, are far from religiously neutral arrangements and rely upon a “willful ignorance of the fact that long before colonialism and mass migration, Islam participated in Europe’s history” (555). Spain’s current religious identity is further complicated by the small yet vocal community of Muslim converts who continue to draw specific attention to that history, as is evident from the petition they sent Pope Benedict on December 25, 2006, asking him to allow Muslims to pray together with Christians in the former Great Mosque of Córdoba. Elsewhere in Europe, converts are generally motivated by individual religious conviction or personal relationships, rather than by an expressed yearning to return to a more authentic national identity. Notwithstanding their sometimes tense relationship with the diverse immigrant groups that make up the majority of Muslims in Spain, the Spanish converts’ highly politicized role in society confounds efforts to counterpose Christian or secular Spaniards to Muslim “others.” Rodríguez Magda’s anxious musings in La España convertida al islam (Spain Converted to Islam) reflect the “disorienting” presence of the converts, whom she characterizes as a “hidden gangrene” within the Spanish body politic (164). It is perhaps not surprising that one longtime Spanish convert leader, Abdelkarim Carrasco, claims that for Muslims life in Spain is more difficult than elsewhere in Europe: “Here it is too close. You scratch the surface of a Spaniard and the other [identity] comes out” (Wilkinson). Taken together, these two comments recall the late nineteenth-century exchange, discussed in chapter 1, in which Ángel Ganivet, viewing himself as incarnating the nation’s plural past, wryly accused Miguel de Unamuno of seeking to dismember him. Disorientation, as I have proposed here, can be a uniquely embodied phenomenon. Its endurance in Spain, moreover, may still be revealed through discursive or even physical violence, as has been the case for many generations. Yet there are any number of signs—such as Najat el Hachmi’s eloquent memoir and José Luis Guerín’s resonant film, analyzed in the preceding chapter—that alternative responses, combining lucid realism with a profound hopefulness, are still possible. It remains to be seen, however, if the ethically engaged meditations on Spain’s past, present, and future that have also flourished in a state of disorientation will continue to inspire Spaniards of all backgrounds in the years ahead, as they participate in the ongoing and multifaceted “performance” of national identity and community.

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N

Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish, Catalan, and Galician are my own.

INTRODUCTION 1. Discussion of the nascent political and cultural rapprochement between Spain and Morocco in the eighteenth century remains outside of the purview of this study, although it is a topic that has been productively taken up by scholars such as Elizabeth Scarlett. The many historical texts brought to light by Mariano Arribas Palau over the course of his career (including, for example, the correspondence surrounding the ambassador Muhammad ibn Utman’s stay in Spain), together with other key sources such as José Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas (Moroccan Letters, 1774), appear to suggest that during this time period some members of the Spanish elite viewed Moroccans through an Enlightenment prism. That is to say, educated Moroccans were deemed as capable as Spaniards of becoming “citizens of the world,” aspiring toward affirmation of the positive values presumably shared by all cultures. Membership in the modern world community was thus of greater interest than the recuperation of a common past glory, which, as I argue here, would only become an essential stimulus to the (re)construction of Spanish national identity in the nineteenth century. 2. Richard Fletcher’s Moorish Spain and María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World both provide fascinating, albeit very differently inflected, characterizations of al-Andalus. Throughout this book, I will employ both “Andalusi” (which should not be confused with “Andalusian”) and “Hispano-Arabic” to refer to the historical legacy and cultural production of al-Andalus. Recently, however, the use of the term “Hispano-Arabic” (which is quite common among the many sources I cite) has been called into question by scholars who note that it implies that there was a Hispanic component to the Islamic culture of medieval Spain (Hitchcock 202, n. 2). While the term “Hispano-Arabic” unquestionably carries with it that often ideologically loaded resonance, I suspect that its absolute rejection for the alternative “Andalusi” is an equally ideological gesture, one that appears to suggest, curiously, that acculturation, transculturation, and syncretism never took place on the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. Two other similarly fraught terms that I use in this book are “Reconquest” and “Western.” A number of my discussions will foreground

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the contested nature of these terms, although I generally avoid placing them within quotation marks. 3. Irigaray is not the only theorist to have addressed the performativity of femininity. Joan Riviere’s ground-breaking 1929 article “Womanliness as Masquerade” is a crucial reference here. However, it is Judith Butler who is most commonly associated with the theory of “gender performance.” Yet Butler is conspicuously absent from McClintock’s discussion. It is clear from her arguments that McClintock much prefers Irigaray’s formulation, which requires the agency of women, to Butler’s (as expressed in Gender Trouble [1990] and further clarified in Bodies That Matter [1993]), in which possibilities for subversion are viewed as radically limited and considered as largely a byproduct of systemic failures, rather than of studied acts of resistance (much as in Bhabha’s initial theorization of colonial mimicry).

C H A P T E R 1. P O W E R P L A Y S 1. As a Shakespeare scholar interested in the intersection between British and Spanish constructions of race during this time period, Loomba reads Sandoval’s “blacks” as Moors, but it is equally or perhaps more likely that Sandoval was comparing the Jews to the black slaves who had become a common sight in many cities of the peninsula. Similarly, in his pioneering theoretical discussion of racial formations in early modern Spain, Paul Julian Smith begins to explore the “ruthless exclusion” of black Africans as well as Moors and Jews by seventeenth-century Spanish writers such as Baltasar Gracián, who were anxious to affirm the whiteness of an otherwise “precarious” Spanish identity (85). 2. Here it must be remembered that in the late sixteenth century the Alpujarras had been the site of particularly violent conflict—the Alpujarras War of 1568–70—between Spanish authorities and the rebellious Moriscos who had sought to continue their way of life in those mountains after 1492. 3. Delfín Rodríguez’s fascinating book details some of the tremendous difficulties the Academy encountered while pursuing this project. 4. According to this legend, a Nasrid king of Granada ordered the assassination of numerous members of the Abencerraje family, since rumors indicated they were conspiring against him. Another version claims the assassination was punishment for the adulterous affair between the king’s wife and one of the Abencerraje men. This subject was also painted by Clairin (The Massacre of the Abencerrages, 1874) and by Fortuny (La matanza de los Abencerrajes, 1871), among others. There is an abundance of literary works inspired in the legend, from the immensely popular sixteenthcentury Spanish story “El Abencerraje,” which circulated widely throughout Europe, to Chateaubriand’s Romantic-era novella (for more on the popularity of the Abencerrajes, see Perceval 47; Irving 820). Another productive legend, which inspired many paintings and literary works, is the “Moor’s last sigh,” referring to the last Nasrid king Boabdil’s emotional final view of Granada as he headed into exile. For a fascinating reading of several versions of this legend and their imbrication with figurations of racial and gender identity, see Saglia. 5. Ironically, the precise nature of Ford’s own “veneration” of the “beautiful woman” of the Alhambra is borne upon her very flesh: his name and the date, 1831, are carved into a wall in the Hall of Ambassadors (photograph in Galera Andreu 23). 6. While there is an admirable tradition of cross-dressed women in Spanish Golden Age plays, their

Notes to Pages 26–34

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appearance in a number of Spanish literary works of the Enlightenment and the Romantic era focused on the Muslim past is particularly notable. Daniela Flesler mentions another example as well (“Rodrigo” 93). Although he does include footnotes, Irving tends to magnify his own contribution to scholarly research. In his chapter on poetry in al-Andalus, for example, Irving states: “The following are all the particulars I have been able to rescue out of the darkness and oblivion which have settled upon the brightest names and geniuses of Moslem Spain” (1029). However, Rolena Adorno has refuted some of the accusations of plagiarism that dogged Irving, in her fascinating article on his biography of Columbus. It is interesting to compare Cánovas’s description of popular support for the expulsion to his characterization of the Restoration (which overlooks the crucial role of military intervention in bringing about a change of government): “The Restoration came about as I had willed it: it came about when a large body of public opinion [. . .] was convinced of the absolute necessity of the proclamation of the King” (qtd. in Carr 342). Cánovas’s attempts to define democracy for nineteenth century Spaniards by reference to their early sixteenth-century counterparts, who presumably loathed the Moriscos, contrasts in curious fashion with what Labanyi has described as the Romantic writers’ creation of modern notions of citizenship through their Morisco protagonists (“Love” 233–34). Despite the ferocity of the debate during the second half of the nineteenth century, in his “revisionist” essay on the expulsion of the Moriscos written many decades later in the following century, medical doctor and historian Gregorio Marañón asserted that everyone in his generation had learned from official texts that the measure was the reprehensible product of the “blind religious fanaticism” of the Catholic Kings, which cruelly condemned a hard-working community to exile (19). Thus it seems that the critical reconsiderations of Spanish history begun in the postEnlightenment era did indeed have a notable impact on subsequent conceptualizations of the nation’s past. This is particularly evident in recent studies focused on Spanish xenophobia. In his discussion of Arabism, for example, González Alcantud only mentions Simonet and his close collaborator Leopoldo Eguilaz (Extraña 111–12). Although her article is in many respects considerably more balanced, Díaz-Andreu also exhibits some curious blind spots and, again, prefers to quote only Simonet (73). This is a phenomenon I will address in greater detail later in this chapter. Articles by both Simonet and Fernández y González were published with some regularity in the Ilustración Española y Americana. Over the course of several issues, beginning in July of 1873, for instance, Fernández y González published a translation of parts of an Arabic manuscript from 1538 housed in the Escorial, entitled Relaciones de la época correspondiente a la caída de la dinastía naserita (Accounts from the Era Corresponding to the Fall of the Nasrid Dynasty) (“Memorias”). The powerful selection focuses on the last days of the Kingdom of Granada and makes dramatically clear the hunger and suffering of the Muslim population during the siege, as well as the enslavement of women and children afterward. That the monarchs, particularly Ferdinand, failed to keep their “Christian word” is emphasized throughout. In April of the following year, Simonet published his “Testimonios de los autores arábigos en favor de la religión cristiana” (Testimonies of Arab Authors in Favor of the Christian Religion), which commences in no uncertain terms, “The light of Catholic truth is so clear, so brilliant and so everlasting, that it couldn’t help but penetrate the thick shadows of faithlessness, of heresy, and of impiety, ripping from the mouths of its enemies confessions and testimonies in its favor” (247).

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11. Articles in the Museo Español de Antigüedades not infrequently countered typical stereotypes of Muslims. For example, in his detailed study of an Andalusi coffer which had been converted into a Christian reliquary, José Amador de los Ríos asserts that it was originally a gift from an emir to his beloved wife, and comments of the doves and dogs which decorate the object that they are “symbols among all peoples of loyalty, innocence and tenderness” (71). The presumed superiority of Christian and/or contemporary culture is also questioned in a number of articles. For example, Francisco Fernández y González notes that Hispano-Arabic textiles are so finely woven and artfully designed that they rival the best products of Spain’s modern industry (“Pinturas” 464). And for his part, Paulino Savirón y Estévan laments the “angry brutality” that led Christian conquerors to destroy Islamic architectural treasures such as the Aljafería in Zaragoza, only to replace them with crudely designed structures (146). It might be assumed that didactic material available in the National Archaeology Museum itself would present similar perspectives, since Rada y Delgado, the editor of the Museo, had been charged with organizing and presenting the collection in its first years of existence, and was also the museum’s director in the last decade of the nineteenth century. For these reasons I disagree with María Bolaños’s assertion that the museum’s displays were organized in accordance with evolutionary notions of human progress across time, and only exalted the Iberians and the Visigoths as forerunners of the “national genius” (223–24). 12. Aranzadi wrote the thesis while living with his cousin Miguel de Unamuno, who had also focused on Basque identity in his dissertation (Zulaika 55–56); this might explain the curious fact that, despite Unamuno’s association of North African tribes with the presumed backwardness of Andalusia (see chapter 2), the notion of a Basque-Berber affinity also surfaces in a poem that I cite later in this chapter. 13. The legend of the “Black Irish”—Irish with dark skin, hair, and eyes who were presumed to have descended from shipwrecked sailors of the Spanish Armada or even from Moorish traders who had traveled from the Iberian Peninsula to the western coast of Ireland—establishes another intriguing, and potentially derogatory, link between the Irish, the Spanish, and racial otherness. 14. Chronologically, Américo Castro falls outside the confines of this chapter, and his work is less central to my arguments in later chapters than might be expected. Ironically, I believe that the emphasis placed on Américo Castro and his polemic with Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz in the late 1940s and 1950s—significant though that polemic was at the time and subsequently—tends to obscure the fact that questions of national identity in relation to the medieval past were vigorously debated beginning at least a full century earlier than is commonly assumed. In fact, Bernabé López García has commented upon the inadequate documentation of essential nineteenth-century Spanish sources in the work both of Castro and of Sánchez Albornoz (“Enigmas” 31–32). This surprising lack of bibliographical references may have contributed to the generalized notion among contemporary scholars that the two were working from a veritable “blank slate.” In chapter 6, I consider how the notion of convivencia (coexistence, or living together), customarily associated with Castro, is mobilized by different nationalist factions in the current democratic era in Spain. Similarly, readers may be surprised to see that this book does not include an extended analysis of the novels of Juan Goytisolo, since, together with Castro, he is the figure most associated with the recuperation of Spain’s ties to Africa. Goytisolo’s treatment of the Spain-Africa connection has enjoyed considerable critical attention (and has been subjected as well to intelligent critique, namely, by Carmen Sotomayor, Claudia Schaefer-Rodríguez, and Paul Julian Smith), whereas the notable historical precedents for his insistence upon the significance of that relationship still

Notes to Pages 50–63

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remain virtually unknown. For the purposes of my study, then, I have found it more productive periodically to draw upon Goytisolo’s literary critical and political essays, which are less frequently discussed than are his novels. The discourse of Hispanidad and the neocolonial rhetoric and policies concerning Spain’s relationship to Spanish America that emerge in the late nineteenth century construct yet another national narrative (albeit one that harmonizes more effectively with traditional formulations), which, like the “Africanist” narrative I focus on here, still circulates today. My own reading of national identity during the modern era would be productively supplemented by an analysis focused on this other transatlantic connection. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s recent book covers some of this terrain, as does Ángel Loureiro in his ongoing project, excerpts of which have appeared in article form. Courtney Johnson’s fascinating doctoral thesis focuses on Spain’s other remaining overseas colony in the nineteenth century, the Philippines, and also deals centrally with questions of modernity and racialization. For a useful introduction to European discourse on degeneration, see Pick. I address the impact of degeneration theory in Spain at greater length in chapter 4. Abdellah Djbilou presents a more balanced view of the writers of this time period in his Diwan modernista. Similarly, Carl Jubran’s unpublished dissertation, “Spanish Internal Orientalism, Cultural Hybridity and the Production of National Identity: 1887–1940,” also includes a helpfully revisionist view of modernista writers, particularly of Francisco Villaespesa (137–51). However, Jubran does not acknowledge that Arabism had a profound impact on constructions of Spanish identity well before 1887, nor does he address the anxiety and ambivalence resulting from the profound imbrication of Spanish Orientalist discourses with processes of racialization. Martín Corrales is not comfortable, however, with employing the word “racism” in his characterization of these images, for despite the fact that he insists that the vast majority are extremely “pejorative” he is loath to make any assertion that would appear to support the generalization that Spaniards are racist (28–29). For example, Martín Corrales includes Marià Fortuny in a lengthy list of Spanish Orientalist painters who represented Moroccans as an inferior and savage people (55), yet he provides no analysis of paintings to support this dramatic point. As I argue in chapter 3, Fortuny’s work is considerably richer and more complex than Martín Corrales allows here. Other images are categorized in ways that suppress contradictions: caricatures of Moroccans are highlighted, but similar caricatures of Spaniards in general, or Andalusians in particular, go unremarked (see for example pages 138, 112). Sometimes crucial information is relegated to a footnote, only to be minimized or discounted. For example, when in 1916 a Spanish soldier sent a postcard of a Moroccan family to his girlfriend, he fantasized in his note to her that the portrait was actually of the two of them, “who have become Moors and the little Moors [are] our children.” Yet Martín Corrales dismisses the comment as “a fit of foolish romanticism” (123, n. 34). Even the apparently obviously racist images included in this book would benefit from more extensive commentary. For instance, what does the illustration of Spanish children cruelly taunting a caged Moroccan (143) really “mean”? Teasing out such ambiguities is a daunting task, but one that I believe must be attempted in studies of this nature. The few texts that do focus on Orientalism (in Said’s sense of the word) and Spain tend to function along the lines of Martín Corrales’s book: to affirm Spain’s European identity by demonstrating that Spain, too, participated in the presumably Western practice of exoticizing and/or

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denigrating Oriental others. Lily Litvak’s several books and articles on the subject are, like Martín Corrales’s volume, invaluable for their incorporation of a multitude of fascinating texts, but they too function to situation Spain squarely within European aesthetic tendencies. If al-Andalus is represented by Spaniards, according to Litvak, it is as a “closed page” in the book of the nation’s (remote) past, “unconnected to the present” (35). Enrique Arias Anglés’s introduction to a volume on Spanish Orientalist painting is much more tendentious. The author insists in a revealingly defensive tone that Spain has since its origins been a European nation—all other claims are historical fallacies—and that Spanish Orientalism is of necessity a strictly European phenomenon (33). A notable exception to this critical tendency can be found in the work of Lou Charnon-Deutsch, which I consider at greater length in chapter 3.

C H A P T E R 2. T H E “S A V A G E” A R T O F M I M I C R Y I N S P A I N’S C O L O N I Z A T I O N O F S U B - S A H A R A N A F R I C A 1. I will use the name El Negro here, since it has also been adopted in Botswana to refer to the repatriated body, whose exact origins remain undetermined. 2. Though Stanley’s advice was eminently sensible, it could hardly be considered disinterested, for at the time the American journalist, recently returned from his trip to find Livingstone, was scheming to undertake an ambitious expedition to the areas of central Africa not yet traversed by whites (precisely some of the territory that Iradier was interested in covering as well). Stanley detailed that journey in his Through the Dark Continent. 3. Oddly, Iradier rarely mentions the presence of the two women on his first trip; they only emerge as ghostly figures in the gaps and margins of his text—or as figures that he himself imagines haunting in ghostly fashion after his own demise. Spanish writer Cristina Morató, who has dedicated several recent books to women explorers of Africa, has tracked down Iradier family documents and photographs and has pieced together a fascinating account of the difficulties faced by Iradier’s wife Isabel de Urquiola and her younger sister Juliana, who were twenty and eighteen years old, respectively, at the time of their journey to Africa (109–28, 359). 4. Gerald Bender has analyzed population data from a number of formerly colonized nations in order to debunk the notion that Iberian exceptionalism led to greater racial mixing, arguing instead that “whenever Indians and/or blacks comprised a majority of the population and most of the whites were single males, a significant mestiço group developed (usually equal to the size of the European population) which was racially and socially distinguished from both blacks and whites. It is almost axiomatic that where these demographic conditions obtained there was a noticeable absence of any stigma against sexual intercourse between white men and non-white women; on the contrary, it was normal and expected. This was as true for the English in the Caribbean, the Spanish from Chile to Mexico, the French in Martinique, the Dutch in Brazil and the West Indies, as it was for the Portuguese and other Europeans in Brazil” (34). However, Ann Laura Stoler disagrees with demographic analyses that sidestep racialized colonial policies, asserting that “ratios of men to women followed from how sexuality was managed and how racial categories were produced rather than the other way around” (4; Stoler’s emphasis). By the twentieth century, the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar was mobilizing Lusotropicalism to justify Portugal’s colonization of Africa, much as Francisco Franco in Spain would draw upon Hispanotropicalism to bolster his Africanist agenda (I return to the latter phenomenon in chapter 5). It is curious, however, that

Notes to Pages 76–82

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earlier discussions of national identity in Portugal sought exclusively to affirm the racial purity of the Portuguese. Unlike in Spain, in the nineteenth century there appears to have been no acknowledgment, let alone valorization, of a legacy of racial mixing from the medieval or colonial periods (Vale de Almeida). This may be due to the fact that the Portuguese were not as subject to the Black Legend and had been less insistently “Orientalized” by northern Europeans than had Spaniards. It was still possible for the Portuguese credibly to claim a “white” identity. Iradier attributes this dreamy passage to his exploration of another mysterious and unexplored terrain: his own brain (I: 17). While the flights of fancy present later in his writings might be attributed in part to the hallucinations Iradier suffered from constant fever and, perhaps, from drugs taken prophylactically (a phenomenon that Johannes Fabian has detailed with respect to other explorers of central Africa), it seems an unlikely explanation for a narrative corresponding to such an early stage in his journey. Although Basques probably made up a substantial percentage of the Spaniards who arrived at the islands in the fifteenth century—as is evident in part from the common Canarian surname Vizcaíno (Fernández-Armesto 44)—they were certainly not the only peripheral nation from the peninsula responsible for the conquest, as Iradier implies here. In one successful ambush, for example, the Canarians dressed in the clothing of the Spaniards they had just killed in battle, and driving sheep before them, approached a Spanish fort late at night. Their “performance” of the return of a foraging mission was utterly convincing, and the Spaniards were overcome as they opened up their fort to their presumed countrymen. On another occasion, the Canarians tied fat seagulls to the rooftops of their dwellings to give their village the (false) appearance of abandonment; once again, the Spaniards were fooled and slaughtered (Mercer 188). In the past several decades, Canarian nationalist leaders have invoked this early history of the archipelago to justify their demand for independence from Spain; I return to a consideration of the contemporary Canarian independence movement in the final chapter of this book. In Iradier’s narrative, however, whites are not the only ones to engage in the inside/outside dichotomization of color. Iradier transcribes a conversation he has had with one of his servants, in which the subject of body odor arises. The servant defends the superiority of African hygiene, arguing that underneath all of their clothing, whites must be as black as their teeth and as dirty as the mucous-stained pockets where they keep their handkerchiefs (II: 169). If black skin might envelop a white interior, whites may very well be black inside. Upon returning from his self-financed first trip, with his entire life’s savings completely depleted, Iradier had reactivated La Exploradora, but despite their concerted efforts the group’s members were never able to gather together the necessary funds for the second journey, estimated to be 20,000 pesetas. With the support of the Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonistas, money eventually came from a variety of sources, including banks, aristocrats, and other private donors, the Ministry of State (7,500 ptas) and King Alfonso XII (3,000 ptas) (Martínez Salazar 95). Iradier would later suffer a falling out with Costa, who had come to renounce the Africanist mission in disgust over the Spanish government’s colonial ineptitude, as well as with Osorio, who publicly accused Iradier of inflating his accomplishments in Equatorial Guinea. Although Iradier published a persuasive defense of his actions, which was supported by several other members of his expedition, he never recovered from his profound distress over the controversy (Martínez Salazar 123–28).

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Notes to Pages 82–88

10. It is curious that a recent reprinting of Iradier’s work edited by Ramón Jiménez Fraile omits the section concerning Gambaragara, as well as the discussion of linguistic issues (indeed, nowhere does Fraile indicate that Iradier’s original text has been significantly abridged in his edition). Nor does Azucena Pedraz Marcos mention the Gambaragara passage in her discussion of Iradier’s goals for his second journey (94). Yet this “silenced” aspect of Iradier’s study is not only fascinating in and of its own right; it also anticipates a later phenomenon analyzed by Michael Taussig: the explorer R. O. Marsh’s “wildly improbable” search in the 1920s for the lost “White Indians” of Darién (Panama), which was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute itself (151–75). The “discovery” by Smithsonian linguists that the language of these Indians bore greater resemblance to Old Norse than to any other Indian language (170) recalls Iradier’s claims concerning the relationship between Basque and Bantu dialects. Surprisingly, at least one modern-day linguist has pursued a theory similar to Iradier’s, concluding that “Basque, without a doubt, is a Niger-Congo language.” Graham James K. Campbell-Dunn prefaces his analysis of lexical and grammatical similarities between Basque and Niger-Congo by asserting that the Togo Remnant peoples had traveled north to the Canary Islands and then on to the Bay of Biscay. As this article does not appear to have been published in a refereed journal, however, it is probably of greater anecdotal than “scientific” interest for my own study. 11. Henry Stanley claims that he himself was taken for a Bacwezi on his later expeditions through the region (Darkest II: 345; 365–66). Not surprisingly, he characterizes “primitive” Africans’ racial makeup as vastly improved by mixing with presumably whiter immigrants from the North (Darkest II: 389). 12. These articles have only garnered a quick dismissal by the scholar of Basque nationalism Jon Juaristi, who simply describes the series as being “as virulent as it is lacking in rigor” (El linaje 200). Yet it seems difficult to argue that any number of Arana’s other pieces could be described as more “rigorous” than these, admittedly fantastical, essays. Curiously, Juaristi doesn’t mention Arana’s contribution to “Tubalism,” or the notion that the Basques descended directly from Tubal and were the original inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula, in his detailed treatment of the subject (see his chapter on “Caldea” in El bosque, esp. 139–46). However, one Basque scholar, Joseba Gabilondo, has detailed another connection between constructions of Basque and African identity. In his fascinating article, Gabilondo asserts that for Anton Abbadie, the nineteenth-century Irishborn explorer of Africa, the Basque Country functioned as a “compensation” for colonialist loss: after years of mapping Ethiopia yet failing to discover the source of the Nile, Abbadie, together with his Ethiopian slave boy Adula, set up housekeeping—or, more accurately, castle-keeping—in the Basque Country. Abbadie’s publications concerning the Basque Country draw upon the same forms of colonialist rhetoric used to describe Africa, thus contributing to the representation of the peripheral nation as an “internal other” within Spain (“Postcolonial”). 13. This detail (among others) leads me to believe that Ganivet may have been familiar with the writings of the Spaniard Joaquín Gatell, who adopted the name El Kaíd Ismail and “went native” in Morocco (and who is discussed again in chapter 4). After the war of 1859–60, Gatell served as an adviser to the sultan’s army, and in his work (first published in 1878–79) he describes many aspects of military life in Morocco, including the playing of the Spanish Royal March (27) to accompany the sultan’s comings and goings, and of Riego’s Hymn for the triumphal return of the army to the capital city (104). For his part, José María de Murga, a.k.a. El Moro Vizcaíno, who published his own Moroccan travel narrative in 1868, also mentions the use of the Royal March by Berber

Notes to Pages 88–93

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troops, and of Riego’s Hymn by the Turks (91, n. 18). This text may also have been one of the numerous tales of African adventures that Ganivet consumed before composing La conquista. Benito Pérez Galdós would later represent the same political motivations for the war of 1859– 60—as well as the preference in Spain for hero worship over serious historical studies—in his historical novel Aita Tettauen, which I analyze in the following chapter. In a letter to Navarro Ledesma dated July 22, 1893, Ganivet indicates that he had read quite a few volumes of African travel narratives while in Spain, though he fails to enumerate them; by contrast, he indicates that it is not until he arrives in Belgium that he reads Stanley (Obras II: 869). It is possible that another source for Ganivet’s novel was the Marquis de Sade’s Aline and Valcour, or The Philosophical Novel (1795), which has been studied by Christopher Miller. In an intercalated adventure, one of the characters is compelled to search the world over for his abducted wife, and as a consequence he stumbles upon a previously unknown cannibalistic and libertine tribe in “Butua,” in the heart of Africa. There he encounter a Portuguese man named Sarmiento who has gone native and risen to become the personal aide to the king, inspecting women destined for the harem and for human sacrifice, and categorizing them according to racial classes. Sade underlines the easy adaptability of Sarmiento to Butua, for as a Portuguese Roman Catholic he is naturally predisposed to superstition and idolatry (Miller 184–200). Ganivet may have been influenced by the French writer’s equation of Iberians and Africans, as well as by particular details of plot, setting, and characterization. In his earlier work, Through the Dark Continent (Iradier’s inspiration), Stanley situates the white tribe precisely in Gambaragara (in western Uganda), but in his later narrative In Darkest Africa he shifts the general location of the “tall big men, with long noses and a pale colour” slightly, to neighboring Rwanda (II: 345). Although José Antonio González Alcantud helpfully sketches out some of the reactions of Spanish Africanists to Stanley’s endeavors, he apparently does so only to confirm that Ganivet would be very familiar with the famous explorer (“Ángel”). He doesn’t suggest, as I do here, that in La conquista Ganivet demonstrates that he understood that Spaniards’ enthusiasm for Stanley was leading them to aspire to imitate his colonial practices in Africa. It is remarkable how many of the critics who do recognize La conquista as satirical—and ostensibly acknowledge Pío Cid’s untrustworthy nature as narrator—still tend to read his racist declarations concerning the Africans he encounters “straight.” For example, in his otherwise sophisticated and thorough analysis, Nil Santiáñez-Tió uses Stanley to “corroborate” the authenticity of Cid’s descriptions: “The savage movements, the grotesque contortions and the animalesque screams of the Uagangas were also common in African dances, according to their description by European explorers of the era; in this respect see, for example, the dance related by Stanley in Through the Dark Continent” (178, n. 63). Juan Ventura Agudiez employs Stanley in similar ways, but more shocking is his reference to Pygmies as a “species” (63), thus repeating the racism of turnof-the-century “science,” which excluded “primitive tribes” from the Homo sapiens club. Miguel Olmedo Moreno’s assertion that to focus on “Bantus or Zulus [sic]” in La conquista is to “reduce to insignificance a transcendental thought” (178) also exemplifies the profound ignorance underlying racist dismissals of Africans. Given the fact that so many presumably “professional” readers have been unable to perceive the satirical nature of Cid’s characterization as a racist, a focus on textual reception lends support to Yaw Agawu-Kakraba’s assertion (which I return to later) that La conquista is not a satire.

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19. This treatment of the Moriscos is detailed by Deborah Root, Mary Elizabeth Perry, and L. P. Harvey, among others. 20. Pío Baroja’s somewhat derivative Paradox, rey (1906) also features a Spanish protagonist, Silvestre Paradox, who attempts to create a new civilization in Africa together with a group of international traveling companions. Like Ganivet’s earlier novel, Baroja’s text reflects public horror over atrocities in the Belgian Congo and French West Africa, and it also mixes an abundance of troubling racist commonplaces with a more modernist multiperspectivism (which enables the reader to question the legitimacy of those commonplaces, according to Mary Lee Bretz [113–16, 134–38]). Unlike Ganivet, however, Baroja does not link his characters’ experiences to Spain’s medieval or imperial past. Indeed, as in his other works Baroja reflects contemporaneous concerns over the Jewish “race” and the rise of Zionism: Silvestre Paradox’s journey to Africa in fact begins when he joins a “modern” Zionist group seeking a new Jewish homeland in Africa. For more on Baroja’s ideas concerning race, see Laura Otis (75–92). 21. In October, 1898, the Africanist geographer Gonzalo de Reparaz articulated an argument almost identical to Ganivet’s in the Ilustración Española y Americana, proposing that “tired” Spain return home in order to gather forces for a return to the imperial mission from which she erroneously strayed in the sixteenth century, the conquest of Africa (7). 22. Ganivet described La conquista as “somewhat cruel and typical of a savage” (Correspondencia 256), and as a “reminder of my savagery and brutality” (“Epistolario” 292). 23. In Unamuno’s novella San Manuel Bueno, mártir, for example, one of the protagonists (and perhaps an Unamunian alter ego?), who initially espouses the Marxian notion that religion is the opiate of the people, comes to reject socialism, preferring instead to administer that very opium to the “simple” residents of his village in order to provide them consolation.

C H A P T E R 3. S T A G I N G T H E O D A L I S Q U E ’ S C O N Q U E S T I N T H E S P A N I S H - M O R O C C A N W A R (1 8 5 9 – 6 0) 1. It is indeed notable, however, that the two works that so passionately advocate the righting of the historical wrongs of the expulsion both begin with historical errors. The first sentence of “Conversación” (Obras 165) attributes the expulsion of the Moriscos to Ferdinand and Isabella (instead of to Philip III), while in the prologue to the first edition of the Diario Alarcón perhaps overcorrects this slip by imputing the expulsion of both the Jews and the Moriscos to Philip III (Diario 24). In the 1880 edition of the Diario, Alarcón corrects the error (Obras 833). Throughout this chapter, I will be quoting from the 1859–60 edition of the Diario. In the second edition Alarcón made substantial changes—deletions, additions, and corrections—that in some cases significantly alter the original meaning. It has also been important for me to cite from this edition because it is the one Benito Pérez Galdós read as he prepared to write his historical novel on the Spanish-Moroccan War, which I analyze later in this chapter (Márquez Villanueva, “Estudio” 26, n. 50). 2. Neo-Catholic is a term, often deemed derogatory, that emerges in the mid-nineteenth century to refer to the more religious members of the moderate party (including Donoso Cortés) who began to reject the revolutionary excesses of liberalism and advocate a return to a government grounded in Catholicism (Olabarría Agra). In his Diario, Alarcón explicitly associates himself with the term, suggesting that he has undergone a “conversion” to a more devout faith as a result of his experiences in Africa: “Does all of this mean that the war has made me a ‘Neo-Catholic’? I don’t care

Notes to Pages 106–122

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what you say of me, as long as you believe in the sincerity of these emotions” (381). Cecilio Alonso sees Alarcón’s religious references in the Diario as purely strategic, since the author’s youthful involvement in the Revolution of 1854 had garnered him a reputation for irreligiosity that was at odds with his desire for widespread acceptance from the Spanish public—and the economic advantages that acceptance would entail (87–89). However, I believe that Alarcón’s consistent representation of a profoundly Catholic perspective throughout his mature work suggests that his religious faith was more deeply felt, rather than simply strategic. Although it might appear that Alarcón engages here in the common strategy of identifying Andalusia with Africa and the remainder of Spain with Europe, this is not a perspective that is found consistently throughout his text. Alarcón’s narrative betrays the influence of the most fanciful of nineteenth-century visual spectacles, as for example when he describes the “optical illusion” through which enemy soldiers on a nearby mountaintop are converted into fiery devils thanks to the dramatic backlighting of the scarlet sunset (Diario 139). Similarly, Alarcón avoids referring directly to his servants, though it is clear from his narrative that there are a number of people tending to his needs. The author’s use of the passive voice depersonalizes that labor force. Of his well-appointed tent, for example, he notes: “I abandoned my house, then, so that it could be dismantled [. . .] everywhere, trunks were being packed [. . .] the mules were loaded” (Diario 213). There is also some discrepancy between his indications in the prologue to his 1880 edition that he planned to take a donkey and a servant, paid out of his own pocket, to Morocco (Obras 834) and what was reported in the periodical El Café on November 14, 1859: that his publishers Gaspar y Roig were providing him a generous salary as well as two servants and an artist (qtd. in Lécuyer and Serrano 181). Benito Pérez Galdós later satirizes Alarcón’s relatively privileged status in the war in his novel Aita Tettauen. Montse Martí Ayxelà is perhaps the only contemporary commentator to remark (briefly) this aspect of the painting’s compositional strategy, although she prefers to emphasize the Romantic manner in which it works to dramatize the gore of battle and the fear on the faces of the vanquished Moroccans (“Crònica” 42). Fortuny probably found initial inspiration for his placement of troops in Horace Vernet’s famous and even more monumental Battle of Smalah/Capture of Abd-el-Kader’s Train by the Duc d’Aumale (1843), which was displayed along with Lejeune’s painting (and scores of other battle scenes) in the Palace of Versailles, and which the Diputació had been particularly concerned that the young painter view. Despite its somewhat unusual composition, however, Vernet’s painting—which features frozen, tableauxlike groupings and highlights the serene benevolence with which the French military leader, the Duke of Aumale, treats the vanquished Algerians (Geffroy 102–3)—is still informed by the classical aesthetics and ideology that Fortuny, for his part, would reject. Notwithstanding Alarcón’s claim that photography was useless in Morocco, a photographer named Facio in fact captured many aspects of the campaign. According to García Felguera, it is possible that Facio was the same Malagan photographer initially hired by Alarcón, though she concludes that there were probably several different photographers present at the front (García Felguera 263–64). It is not surprising that Fortuny was influenced by the visual technologies of his time. The artist grew up immersed in popular spectacles, for his grandfather (who took responsibility for Fortuny’s upbringing once the boy found himself orphaned and destitute at the age of eleven) was well

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known for the wax museum figures he created in his workshop (González López and Martí Aixelà I: 15–16; Pinedo Herrero 18–19). The artist’s fascination with magic lanterns is also evident from the several pieces he devoted to the subject in the late 1860s. In one of his early letters to Galdós (dated July 7, 1901), Arabist Ricardo Ruiz Orsatti indicates that the Spanish-Moroccan War was generally called “Aita Tettauen” by Moroccans. One year later, Ruiz Orsatti mentions in another letter to Galdós that he has seen the as yet unwritten Aita Tettauen advertised on the back cover of an earlier novel in the series (Ricard 103). It seems evident that, as most critics maintain, Galdós’s title was inspired by Ruiz Orsatti’s letter, and that he understood it to be the equivalent of what Spaniards termed the “Guerra de África.” Gregorio Torres Nebrera has devoted the most attention to the relationship between the Diario and Aita Tettauen, but he dedicates the majority of his textual analysis to documenting the degree to which Galdós mined Alarcón’s text for details concerning the war and the city of Tetuán and its inhabitants (388–89, 391–93). Although he characterizes Aita as an “Anti-Diario” at the end of his article (404), he does not scrutinize the ways in which specific passages of Galdós’s novel satirize Alarcón’s narrative. Santiuste literally and figuratively reaches his lowest point in a later battle when he is caught off guard by a sudden retreat, falls to the ground among the dead soldiers, and is trampled. Later, when he manages to pick himself up, his perception of spectacle could not be farther from the imperialist ideal: “He felt a chill before the spectacle of so many dead fallen in tragic poses” (Aita 81). In several articles gathered in a recent volume, José Antonio González Alcantud asserts that Alarcón is one of the most Moroccan-identified of the Spanish Africanists, citing passages such as this one in the Diario, the “Conversacón en la Alhambra” (which I interpret quite differently here), and the verses he dedicates to the Moroccan poet Chorby, whom he met in Tetuán, in which the lyrical voice claims, “I believe that I’m [. . .] the same as you.” González Alcantud also refers to a much-quoted exchange between the author and his fellow novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán, in which Alarcón confessed, “You already know that I am a Moor [. . .], and consequently a fatalist [. . .] Allah is great, and He will do with me as he pleases” (“Poética” 20–29; “Pedro” 31–33, 42). Given my own analysis of the zeal for conquest and religious conversion articulated throughout Alarcón’s texts, however, I read the author’s occasional references to his “inner Moor” as an affected “pose,” rather than a genuine expression of identification. Márquez Villanueva (“Estudio”) also reaffirms the fundamental importance of the Moroccan account of the war that Galdós drew on to compose this section of the novel (Ricard). Ricardo Ruiz Orsatti sent Galdós a translation of Ahmed ben Jálid el Nasiri’s text, which at the time had not yet been published in Spain (a translation would not in fact appear until 1917). Together with the clear correspondence between the Moroccan author’s name and that of Galdós’s character, Márquez Villanueva documents the parallels between El Nasiri’s text and El Nasiry’s narrative (“Estudio” 31–36, plus later footnotes, for example 254, n. 29). For those familiar with Goytisolo’s own novels, it is understandable that he would support the notion that it is indeed possible to represent “another” subjectivity. Recent critical work on Goytisolo, however, has emphasized the tremendous difficulty of that effort (see for example Epps, particularly ch. 1). In her book on Orientalism, Rana Kabbani includes an example from Edward William Lane, who describes his entrance into Egypt: “As I approached the shore, I felt like an Eastern bridegroom,

Notes to Pages 132–141

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about to lift the veil of his bride, and to see, for the first time, the features that were to charm, or disappoint, or disgust him” (qtd. in Kabbani 67). According to Alarcón, once the Spanish troops occupy Tetuán they are in fact disappointed by what they find inside the “coveted odalisque,” though the writer himself remains charmed (Diario 362). Characteristically, when Alarcón describes his first encounter with Haketia in Tetuán in his Diario, he assumes that the “vile” Jews have simply learned a few words of Spanish to ingratiate themselves with the occupiers (354). The author’s apparent ignorance of the Sephardic maintenance of Judeo-Spanish dialect is surprising. Similarly, when Lucila’s children decide to dress up as Moors and play war games, they must blacken their faces with soot from the kitchen (Aita 36), and the narrator later describes them as “mulattos” when their sooty faces are smeared with tears as they learn of their father’s sudden death (Aita 37). Rana Kabbani discusses the significance of this whiteness in her analysis of the representation of odalisques: “The desirable woman in Orientalist painting was hardly ever ‘foreign’ looking. She conformed closely with conventional standards of European beauty. The more desirable prototypes were Circassian (the fair-skinned descendents of the Circassian subjects of the Ottoman Empire) since they were exotic without being unappetisingly dark. The light-haired Circassians were made (as the Europeans liked to imagine) precisely for sensual gratification” (81). Another exuberantly romantic Orientalist painting that Fortuny produced at this time—his Dream of the Odalisque (González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 180)—depicts a pale odalisque’s desire for a North African partner as well. In this work, the woman writhes in bed with her white breasts exposed; her face is flushed, and an overturned cup rests near one of her hands. The upper portion of the canvas depicts her dream, in which she is seen embracing and kissing a darkerskinned, turbaned man. In his formally most complex depiction of this subject (Odalisque, also ca. 1860–62; González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 189), Fortuny plays off Velázquez’s brilliant use of mirrors in Las Meninas and the Rokeby Venus. Here, the native man, in conjunction with the complex structuring of space, serves to entrap and immobilize the European imperialist viewer. Thus, Fortuny’s odalisques consistently function to destabilize the racialized and gendered power structures that were so essential to Orientalist works of the period. In her book Continental Drift, Emily Apter develops a similarly spatialized metaphor for this process that, because of its specific ties to Orientalist imagery, also proves particularly resonant for Galdós’s novel. Linking the paradoxes of the Möbius strip (reminiscent of the Derridian invaginated space) to the undulations of the snakelike, exoticized dancer, who appears to promise a “palpable collision with the real” (176), Apter explores how serpentine shapes and movements function as a “metaphorical way of talking about the epistemological limits to knowing culturally ‘other’ subjects” (171). In her article on Delacroix’s painting Massacres of Chios, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby notes that in French colonialist texts of the nineteenth-century, mulattos were often described as “red”; assuming this color had a similar resonance in Spain, the association of El Nasiry’s horrifyingly diseased wife with redness at this point in Galdós’s text might once again suggest the perils of racial mixing (691, 704 n. 54). According to one anecdote, Fortuny was particularly angered by a theatrical representation of the Battle of Tetuán, which bore no resemblance to his own experiences of the war. Several years later, Fortuny also refused to participate in a competition of paintings on the Spanish-Moroccan War

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Notes to Pages 141–163 organized by the Duque de Fernán Núñez, since the majority of the artists vying for the prize had never even set foot in Morocco (González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 40, 64). Jim Housefield generously shared with me his theory that the young woman’s fibula—the elaborate pin that fastens her tunic just below the shoulder—is Berber in design, thus suggesting that she, too, is Berber. An exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York also included fibulae quite similar to the one depicted in Fortuny’s watercolor. In the exhibition catalogue, descriptions of the pieces explain that in Morocco both Berber and Jewish rural women fasten their clothing with fibulae, which are typically created by Jewish silversmiths (Mann 157–58). Moreover, Berber and Jewish identities are not mutually exclusive: an extended essay in the catalogue by Oumama Aouad Lahrech documents the presence of Berber Jews in Morocco—a community antedating that of the Sephardic Jews by many centuries (Mann 68–69). Although a large number of Fortuny’s works have traditionally been characterized as “unfinished,” more recently art historians have begun to address the extent to which the artist may have been experimenting with new modes of representation in the works that appear incomplete. Rosa Vives, for example, reexamines an engraving in which two Moroccan men occupy the right portion of the paper, fading off into a ghostly blankness on the left, and she concludes that the piece is not unfinished or technically flawed but represents a particularly suggestive and modern use of space (Vives and Cuenca García 68). Vives also views the quick brushstrokes and unfinished quality of many of Fortuny’s paintings as a sign of avant-garde experimentation (“Apuntes” 378–79). José Antonio González Alcantud has reviewed the literature concerning the Andalusi inheritance in the Alpujarras in his Lo moro. He concludes that it is more accurate to speak of a broad cultural bricolage, characteristic of the frontier experience, rather than a legacy that has been transmitted seamlessly across the centuries (109). Although Alarcón’s perspective on the “racial” makeup of modern-day Spaniards is clear, he also takes pains to note that even the Alpujarrans who were expelled were “Asian” and not “African” in origin (Obras 1538). It’s tempting to conclude that Alarcón’s discovery on his earlier trip that many Moroccans were black—together with his racist reaction to them—leads him to formulate this clarification in the later travel narrative. Erotic photographs of “naked” (rather than “nude”) women, sometimes engaging in masturbation, were also circulating by this period (see for example Cabra Loredo 98), and Fortuny must have been familiar with them as well. But I suspect that the images of Isabella in the Borbones collection may have been a more significant source of inspiration for Fortuny as he prepared to paint Carmen Bastián.

C H A P T E R 4. T H E M A S C U L I N E R O L E I N T H E SPANISH-MOROCCAN THEATER OF WAR 1. In a thoroughly researched article, Enric Ucelay da Cal has studied the shifting nature of Catalan working-class and nationalist identification with the situation of the Moroccans. He recounts an anecdote concerning a group of Catalan peasants sent to Morocco in 1922 who agreed among themselves not to shoot anyone, reasoning that the Riffians were peasants just like them (413). For his part, the Catalan separatist leader Francesc Macià sought to create a League of Oppressed Nations, which would include Catalans, Basques, Galicians, and Riffians, among others deemed

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still to be subjected to colonial forces (418). Although Ucelay da Cal notes that left-wing Catalan nationalists often appealed to a common situation of colonization—even arguing that the Catalans needed to show the same virility as the Riffians who fought against the “occupiers” (417)—he also argues that their “sympathy” for the Moroccans was largely instrumentalist. By characterizing the Spanish centralists as more barbaric than the Riffians, for example, the Catalans were seeking not to exalt the Riffians but rather to highlight their own superior degree of civilization. Underneath the rhetoric, according to Ucelay da Cal, still lay many of the centuries-old stereotypes of North African savagery, which would rise to the surface again once the Moroccans decided to ally themselves with the Rebels in the Civil War, after being rebuffed by the Spanish left (420). The anthropologist Henk Driessen echoes this characterization in his own analysis of 1920s Spanish military ethnographies of the Rif: “On the whole, the Spanish despised everything Rifian, probably because it uncomfortably reminded them of the rural Andalusian society which the majority of the colonists had come from. In this way, they created social and cultural distance, which from an outsider’s point of view would not have appeared to be so great” (70). By the mid1930s, according to Driessen, once the Riffians had been “pacified,” and particularly once they had joined forces with the Rebels of Spain, fraternal rhetoric would come to the fore (as we shall see later in this chapter and in the next) (71). In contrast to the repulsion evident in Carmen de Burgos’s 1909 publications, by the late 1920s José Díaz Fernández could provide a much more nuanced meditation on the “women warriors” of the Rif. For example, in his prize-winning story “El blocao” in the 1928 collection of the same title, the narrator, an officer isolated for months on end with his soldiers in a remote blockade, finds himself sexually attracted to a scrawny teenage Riffian girl who sells produce to the Spaniards. But when she mobilizes that attraction to lure the officer away from his men, thus enabling her compatriots to attack the blockade, the narrator finds it impossible to kill her in retribution. Rather, he discovers that he admires her “great and unique heroism” (43), a quality with which he would perhaps like to identify. Mary Gibson explains that Lombroso was able to reconcile his condemnation of the “Semitic” legacy of Italian criminality with his own Jewish heritage by claiming that because of intermixing European Jews had in fact become more Aryan than Semitic (104). As Daniel Pick has noted, the coexistence of theories of degeneration as diverse as Lombroso’s and Nordau’s produced a fundamental dilemma: “Was degeneration separable from the history of progress (to be coded as ‘regression,’ ‘atavism’ or ‘primitivism’), or did it reveal that the city, progress, civilisation and modernity were paradoxically, the very agents of decline?” (106). Jo Labanyi finds the same problematic in the Spanish realist novels that she studies, noting, for example, that in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87) “the distinction between civilization and backwardness is breaking down because both are producing degeneration” (Gender 201; see also 158–59, 338). Within the context of imperial endeavors, it seems logical to wonder how the “civilizing mission” could be reconciled with the contradictions of degeneration theory: presumably primitive societies needed to be offered the gift of civilization, but this civilization itself might very well lead them back to primitivism again. It is interesting to compare this painting to the several similarly themed versions of the Viejo desnudo al sol (Nude Old Man in Sunlight; González López and Martí Ayxelà I: 305, 348) that Fortuny produced, whose odd markings about the lower torso appear to reveal his indecision

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about whether or not to include drapery over the genitalia (in one, a penis is clearly visible; in another, it remains out of frame). In any case, these paintings, in which the subject is not marked as North African, contrast notably with the showy display of weaponry that covers the genitalia in Jefe árabe. Leo Africanus (whose original name was Al-Hassan Ibn Muhammad Al Wazzan) was born in Granada around 1492 and was brought up in Fez. His narrative was written later in Italy (and first published in Italian), after he had been kidnapped by corsairs and given as a gift to the Medici pope Leo X, at whose behest Leo Africanus converted to Christianity (Fanjul, “Introducción” 38). Mármol was born in Granada around 1520; in 1535 he went to Tunis with Charles V and served the Spanish crown for several decades in Africa. He spent some eight years of that time in captivity after being taken as a slave by the Turks (Monroe 16–17). Mármol’s African narrative would be based on his travels throughout the northern part of Africa, both as a slave and subsequently as a free man, as well as on earlier texts such as Leo’s. Diego de Haedo’s 1612 narrative of his travels through Algeria (which Daniel Eisenberg suggests may actually have been written by Miguel de Cervantes [266, n. 17]) are another important Spanish source on North Africa, and include observations concerning homosexual practices similar to those penned by Leo and Mármol. Late nineteenth-century Spanish writers, however, are more likely to cite the latter, perhaps because Haedo does not discuss Morocco. In his discussion of the sexual mores and experiences of the Iberian conquerors of the Americas, Richard Trexler makes reference to this passage in Leo, but his reading of it is different from mine, arguing that it was female prostitutes who accompanied the sultan’s military forces (54). However, I believe that both Leo and Mármol (whom Trexler does not cite) suggest that it is the innkeepers themselves—and other members of their unusual “guild”—whose services were required. This would seem to be confirmed by the various nineteenth-century sources I cite later in this chapter, as well as by the 1860 travel narrative of Brigadier Salvador Valdés, which indicates that the owners of Fassi transvestite brothels were required to provide male cooks to the army (51). There is, however, another side to this coin: Dunne has suggested that the colonial presence— which openly condemned the “vices” of Islam—in essence “produced” homophobia and thus resulted in the reduced visibility of homosexual practices within Islamic societies (Dunne, “Homosexuality”). It is important to view such phenomena in the light of the schism in the military that emerged in the 1910s and 1920s between the Africanists, who favored promotions based on merit, and the largely peninsula-based Junteros (members of the syndicalized Juntas de Defensa, or Defense Units), who, lacking colonial war experience, preferred a system of promotions based on seniority (Balfour notes that a significant number of Africanists, including those who risked their lives in noncombat roles, such as medics, but would not benefit from the merit system, may also have supported the Juntero position). After violent clashes over the issue in the early 1920s, the Africanists eventually won out. The Rif wars provided countless opportunities for Africanist officers to “perform” acts of bravery, and Spain’s future dictator Francisco Franco himself enjoyed a meteoric rise to the rank of general thanks to his distinguished service in Morocco. Many of the Junteros, by contrast, would ultimately adopt liberal political positions and oppose the Rebel uprising that led to the Civil War (Balfour, Deadly 164–71; G. Jensen, Irrational 143–45). The intertitle reads: “And there are the officers who command [the Moroccans] and whose valor and enthusiasm is only comparable to their youth [. . .] some of whom would be difficult to dis-

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tinguish from their subordinates if it weren’t for the fact that they are even more valiant than the warlike troops under their command.” In a chillingly prescient passage, Luis Berenguer claims that the Regulares “will in future be able to constitute a large and excellent army, that could be employed in the defense of the Nation, just as the French did in the last war [World War I]” (81). Because many of the leaders in the Rif wars, including of course Francisco Franco and José Millán Astray, would later be allied with Spanish fascism, it is important to acknowledge the critical controversy over the linking of homosexuality with fascism. Theorists such as Barbara Spackman and Andrew Hewitt have condemned the homophobic association of “deviant” ideologies and “deviant” sexualities, and their arguments have given me great pause as I explore the relationship between Spanish Africanism and homosociality/homosexuality. However, I believe that Africanism’s symbiotic relationship with Spanish Orientalism distinguishes it from other European fascisms, and complicates the consideration of related constructions of gender and sexuality. Like other European Orientalisms, Spanish Orientalism projects onto Moroccan men an image of fanaticism, barbaric violence, and ultravirile yet “polymorphously perverse” sexuality (Freud, “Three” 191). However, that particular image of masculinity is just as often reassimilated into a Spanish national identity that can never quite manage to assert its fundamental difference from North Africa. The resulting anxieties emerge in full force in the Rif war texts I study here. I return to this controversy later in the chapter. Additional references to cross-dressing can be found in Francesc Arbolí Nadal’s unpublished diary (qtd. in Balfour, Deadly 430). Thematically, these ink drawings are reminiscent of the work of the gay artist Paul Cadmus, an American of Spanish descent on his mother’s side, who had toured Spain with his lover before setting up a studio in Mallorca for several years in the early 1930s. Cadmus is well known for his male portraits and nudes; he also became infamous for his depictions of randy soldiers and sailors. There are striking parallels between Spanish Africanist constructions of race, gender, and sexuality and the Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre’s later formulations. As César Braga-Pinto has shown, Freyre employs the term “fraternization” (used as well by Franco) to refer to the sexualized relationships between Portuguese masters and black (male) slaves, yet often the latter must be cast in a feminized position; the end result is figured, in Braga-Pinto’s words, as “a harmonious balance between the sadism of the elites and the masochism of the masses” (23). Moreover, as we shall see in a moment, Freyre’s characterization of miscegenation as producing “a European with Negro or Indian blood to revive his energy” (qtd. in Braga-Pinto 20) is also anticipated by Isaac Muñoz’s unusually positive description of racial mixing, although in the latter’s view both of the implicated races enjoy an injection of new vigor. It’s important to emphasize, as does Braga-Pinto, that for Freyre (as well as for Muñoz) this particular mestizaje is associated with sexual relations among men, not with the customary reproductive sexuality. Millán Astray was acutely aware of the effectiveness of phrases such as “los novios de la muerte” (the bridegrooms of death) as propaganda, and he devoted a chapter to the subject in his book on the Legion. Madariaga also includes one version of the oft-cited legend concerning a visit made by the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera to the Foreign Legion in Morocco in 1924, at a moment when his support for the war was wavering: the leader was reportedly served up a series of egg dishes, presumably intended to make up for his deficiencies (here it is necessary to recall that the Spanish word for

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eggs—“huevos”—is also slang for “testicles”) (Moros 309; also recounted in Preston 44 and numerous other sources; for an alternative version of this story, see Cordón 111). In 1972, Franco denied the story (Viscarri, Nacionalismo 156, n. 30). Outside the military context, there is also a notable precedent for such conceptualizations of a virile homosexuality in Spain in the 1912 study by Max Bembo, La mala vida en Barcelona (Barcelona’s Lowlife). Although he acknowledges the widespread association of sexual “inversion” with femininity, Bembo insists that most Spaniards would be unable to recognize a homosexual man on the street, asserting that “homosexuality, with some exceptions, is completely virile” (52). The majority of homosexuals in Barcelona, according to Bembo, marry and have children, and thus Spaniards do not realize that the homosexual population is actually quite large. Bembo also asserts that homosexuals engage in homophobic denigration in order to hide their orientation (53). For Richard Cleminson, who is engaging in fascinating work on the history of homosexuality in modern Spain, Bembo’s study clearly sought to legitimize a “respectable” homosexuality. Unfortunately, however, by strategically denigrating the effeminate “fairy,” Bembo ultimately facilitated the continued condemnation of homosexuality (423). There are some notable points of contact and divergence between Muñoz’s texts and Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s later Genio de España (1932), which has been brilliantly analyzed by Jo Labanyi. Giménez Caballero also recognizes the importance of the Islamic legacy to Spanish culture, and he, too, asserts the necessity of miscegenation. But, as Labanyi demonstrates, his conceptualization of revitalization through injections of virility is based strictly upon the heterosexual “norm” of rape of the “other” woman (as I mentioned in passing earlier in this chapter); it lacks the violently homoerotic resonance of Muñoz’s formulations. George Mosse discusses a similarly erotic quality in the German Ernst Jünger’s war literature of the same time period, in which “the feeling of ecstasy as the bayonet sank into the white flesh of a French or English soldier was likened to an orgasm” (Nationalism 124). Although they quite strategically referred to themselves as the “Nacionales” (commonly translated as “Nationalists”) in order to cast themselves as exclusive representatives of the national interest, I have chosen to follow the practice of many contemporary historians who prefer the term “Rebels” (“sublevados” or “rebeldes” in Spanish) in order to emphasize instead their “rebellion” against the democratically elected Republican government To add to the ideological confusion of racialized identities, the military psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera argued in 1938 that “the racial roots of the Spanish Marxists are Jewish-Moorish, a mix of blood that distinguishes them psychologically from the foreign Marxist, a pure Semite” (qtd. in Viscarri, Nacionalismo 158, n. 35). Atrocities were also committed on the Republican side, but my focus remains on the peculiarly racialized and sexualized nature of the brutality of Rebel war rhetoric and practices. While a number of critics have underlined the homoeroticism in ¡Harka!, in his otherwise quite perceptive work Dionisio Viscarri minimizes its significance, insisting that the fascist discourse that informs Spanish Africanism mandates that all sexual desire be channeled exclusively into procreation, or sublimated completely into self-sacrifice for the nation (“¡Harka!” 406–7, 417–18). Viscarri thus accepts at face value one of the more effective examples of propaganda produced by right-wing Spanish ideologues, mentioned on several occasions throughout this chapter: the idea that the sublimely heroic soldiers of the Spanish Legion who were fighting in Africa were “the bridegrooms of death.” Viscarri consistently avoids discussion of allusions to homosexuality in the

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Rif war narratives produced by Spaniards (see for example, Nacionalismo 275), even though at one point he recognizes the importance of homosexual relations within the classical military cultures that inspired Spanish leaders in the Rif (Nacionalismo 120).

C H A P T E R 5. U N M A S K I N G F A M I L Y V A L U E S I N F R A N C O’S A F R I C A N C O L O N I E S 1. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was increasingly difficult to deny the brilliance of the civilization of al-Andalus, but Simonet’s legacy (as detailed in chapter 1) was still palpable, and new efforts were under way to finesse the racial question. The Arabist Julián Ribera, arguing that the Umayyads had completely diluted their Arabic blood by marrying only native Spanish women, created the famous but largely nonsensical metaphor that compared the Arabic influence on the peninsula to the effect on a pond of a drop of red dye. Although the dye colors the entire pond, the chemical composition of water and dye remains unchanged (Monroe 168). In this way, Ribera attempted to acknowledge the complete ethnic transformation that occurred on the peninsula during the medieval period—overwhelming Arabization with respect to language, customs, politics, and religious formations—without admitting to any significant racial “contamination” of Spaniards. His formulation would find favor with a number of his disciples. By the Franco era, though, Spanish Arabists such as Isidro de Cagigas and Juan Vernet Ginés were hard at work correcting the xenophobic excesses of Simonet and Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (see for example Monroe 237–38, 241). The well-known (and ferocious) debate between the exiles Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, which has had a perhaps greater impact in the democratic era than under Francoism, is treated in the following chapter. 2. For example, the Spanish version of Romancero marroquí ends with a military parade, followed by bizarre footage of the Flechas (Falangist youth) of Melilla engaging in war simulation. We witness young boys in ships preparing to attack a beach; when the pint-sized soldiers are “wounded” in battle, a donkey cart of girls dressed in nurses’ uniforms comes to the rescue. Reviews of the film censured the filmmakers for including this material, which, while it had intrinsic merit, had nothing to do with the rest of Romancero. Elena suggests that the German version of the film responded to that criticism by eliminating the sequence and concluding the film, much more logically, with Aalami’s return home and the harvest (Romancero 63–65). 3. María Rosa de Madariaga reproduces several of these songs without citing their provenance; she apparently takes Vega at his word when he claims that these eminently partisan songs were composed by Moroccan women (Moros 181–83). 4. That Hitler’s interest in Imperio Argentina was heavily mythologized is evident from the fact that over the years the actress herself varied the number of times she claims he saw her film: in an earlier interview it was twenty-four times, while in more recent years that number was reduced considerably, to two (qtd. in Sánchez Vidal, Cine 228; Molina Foix 72). Moreover, other even more outlandish stories circulated in Spanish society, including the rumor that Hitler had proposed marriage to Argentina, or that her marriage to Ray had failed because she was having an affair with the Führer (Stone 34). 5. In her brief but incisive treatment of La canción de Aixa, Jo Labanyi also notes that the film rejects European modernity and that, as I discuss in detail later, “Arab values here figure an extreme version of the patriarchal ethos propounded by early Francoism” (“Race” 223). My view of the film’s

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politics of assimilation, however, differs somewhat from Labanyi’s, due to my focus on Spain’s efforts to differentiate its colonial policy from that of France, and on the ever-shifting and contradictory discourse on race circulating during this period. This is one clear case in which Eloy Martín Corrales’s assertion that the advent of photography enabled Spanish representations of North Africa to become more objective is eminently problematic (81). Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste has also briefly described how Spanish policy reified Muslim women’s subordinate position (Hermandad 126). Fatima Mernissi has argued that in their sector of the protectorate the French supported and even extended preexisting gender inequalities, by introducing aspects of the Napoleonic Code that placed women in a disadvantaged position with respect to financial transactions and so-called crimes of passion (Beyond 154). In her autobiographical Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi also describes how Moroccan women expressed their desire to escape from the harem by embroidering images of birds in flight (203–17). In La canción de Aixa, by contrast, Aixa and Zohira work on a piece for the latter’s dowry, which unites Zohira’s name with Hamed’s within the confines of a decorative frame. Indeed, the 1942 film scripted by Francisco Franco himself, originally entitled Raza (Race), was rereleased under the title Espíritu de la raza (Spirit of the Race) in 1950, thus reflecting the ongoing negotiation of biological and spiritual notions of race during the Franco regime. The later version also eliminated all of the fascist salutes (abolished on the peninsula in September 1945 [Payne 402]) and the more incendiary rhetoric of the original. The regime’s efforts to distance itself from German fascism in the late 1940s and early 1950s are reconsidered later in this chapter. In 1946, Spain created a new entity known as África Occidental Española (Spanish West Africa), which included Ifni and the Spanish Sahara. As a consequence of the Ifni War in 1958, the two components were again separated and converted into provinces of Spain. In La llamada de África, which was produced in 1952 but is set in 1940–41, the territory is anachronistically referred to as África Occidental Española. For the sake of historical consistency, here the setting will be referred to as the Spanish Sahara. In a late Franco-era book published by the IDEA, Eduardo Munilla Gómez emphasizes the mixed character of the Saharawi, noting that although their racial substrate is “white” Arab-Berber, they have frequently intermarried with black Senegalese women, due to the combined pressures of demography and polygamy and their economic inequality with neighboring Moroccans (76). César Fernández Ardavín draws upon Hispanotropicalist rhetoric when he characterizes Bens as exemplifying the significant “difference” of Spanish colonizers, who are not racist and therefore are more likely to mix with the native population (Fernández Ardavín). Hispanotropicalism was first introduced in chapter 2, and it will be taken up again later in this chapter. The men all sleep in a common barracks, and when Alfageme first arrives he expresses disgust at the practice and insists that private accommodations be provided him. Later the engineer will warm up to the officers, even engaging in conversation with Ochoa about his preference for sleeping nude, in order to avoid problems with desert fleas. A comic subtext develops when Ochoa waxes poetic on his beloved flea Fermina, who nevertheless abandons him for another soldier; as in homosocial texts, the sharing of “females” is more about the relationships among men than about heterosexual romance. The film’s “poetic” treatment of death also appears to envision a homosocial firmament, as soldiers who have expired in battle are converted into stars (indeed,

Notes to Pages 282–300

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the film is narrated by the dead Ochoa [and not, as critics have indicated, by Andrade] from his position in the heavens). Even so, La llamada avoids the homosocial excesses of an earlier film like ¡Harka!, discussed in the previous chapter. A 1945 article in the film magazine Primer Plano concerning the production of Afan-Evu, set and shot in Equatorial Guinea (but unfortunately no longer extant), also makes explicit the sexual politics in the colony. Author Augusto Ortiz claims to be perplexed when the director José Neches informs him that as well as adventure the film features a love story: “Our protagonist falling in love with a black woman? Impossible. Nothing could be more improbable and false. Any dealings with black women are quite severely prohibited and punished in our colony, and whoever disobeys is subject at minimum to expulsion. A passionate and clandestine love between him and a colonial lady? And who could imagine that in the colony there are women of such morals?” The only solution, as Ortiz sees it, is the one offered by the film: the protagonist falls in love with the unmarried daughter of one of the colonizers, who will in turn instill love for the colony in him. Janson greets Charles effusively when the latter returns to the region. At this point, we understand the irony of Janson’s exchange with Father Braulio at the beginning of the film, when he delivers the orphaned Mikoa to the mission. Janson tells father Braulio in evident disapproval that Mikoa is probably a plantation escapee, and Braulio replies that it would be no surprise, given how the natives are treated by the plantation owners. In the later scene we realize that the plantation Mikoa escaped from was actually Janson’s, although the owner is so disengaged from his employees that he fails to recognize the boy. Only the film’s viewers, however, are privy to this connection between Janson and Mikoa. As Frantz Fanon has wryly noted, blacks are assumed to carry a cannibalism gene (120). In the case of Equatorial Guinea, white explorers and missionaries most likely mistook the ancestral skulls venerated by the Fang (depicted in Tinieblas’s representation of the narrator’s initiation ceremonies) for proof of cannibalistic practices. In this passage, Abeso makes reference to Fang witch doctors (and not the general population) who consumed the dead in order to incorporate their wisdom and strength; as Max Liniger-Goumaz has noted, this practice is more properly termed “necrophagy” (28). In the second novel of Ndongo-Bidyogo’s trilogy, the narrator explicitly compares himself to Christ, and the torture he suffers in the dictator Macías’s prisons in his thirty-third year is likened to the crucifixion (271). But in this installment, he appears to have failed miserably in his redemptive mission. Statistics concerning Equatorial Guinea’s booming economy just before independence—often marshaled by Spaniards wishing to argue that their nation had bequeathed prosperity to the colony—are eminently misleading. Although it is true that per capita income was the second highest in Africa (behind South Africa), when the per capita income of European colonizers is separated out, it is evident that the Guineans did not benefit from the wealth (Abaga Edjang 50– 54).

C H A P T E R 6. P E R F O R M A N C E A N X I E T I E S O N THE EDGE OF FORTRESS EUROPE 1. A number of Spanish cultural theorists, however, have called into question the apparently spectacular success of the transition, criticizing the promotion of collective amnesia as well as the

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continuation of Franco-era political paradigms. See, for example, Eduardo Subirats (España: Miradas fin de siglo), Teresa Vilarós (El mono del desencanto), and Cristina Moreiras-Menor (Cultura herida), as well as Joan Ramon Resina’s edited volume, Disremembering the Dictatorship. Over the past decade, momentum has been building in Spain to address these issues, likely sparked by the Spanish justice system’s 1996 indictment of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the ensuing testimony of Pinochet’s victims. In 2000, the grandson of a man killed by the Franco regime, Emilio Silva, founded the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory), which has labored on behalf of families who wish to locate relatives buried in mass graves, and exhumations and DNA identifications are now frequently covered in the news. In 2002, the ARHM successfully petitioned the United Nations to have Spain included on the list of countries that have failed to rectify the legacy of politically motivated detentions and “disappeareances” (M. Davis). In July 2006, two years after the ruling conservative Popular Party was replaced by the socialist PSOE, a Law of Historical Memory was introduced in Congress. The proposed law, which survived a first round of discussion in December 2006, affirms Spaniards’ right to recover the remains of their relatives and consult archives concerning them, and provides for modest reparations to victims’ families; it also establishes a procedure for the removal of Francoist monuments and symbols from public property. The Popular Party has repeatedly called for the law to be withdrawn, arguing that it only functions to reopen old wounds, while several minority parties on the left have criticized the legislation for not going far enough, insisting, for instance, that Franco-era sentences should be overturned. The proposed law does not seek to reverse the blanket amnesty granted in 1977 to all those responsible for assassinations and other forms of repression during the war and under Franco. 2. Spanish converts hold a diverse range of beliefs, some of which may be considered heterodox within the equally diverse Muslim immigrant communities. Converts have also been accused of adopting elitist attitudes. Members of the al-Murabitún group in particular may see themselves as superior to other Muslims in Spain (including immigrants) because of their supposedly stricter adherence to religious doctrine. Abdel-Hakim Vásquez has remarked incisively that many of his fellow Spanish Muslims distance themselves from immigrants, failing to understand “how the colonial experience and the ever-present racism affects migrant communities” (qtd. in AbdelLatif ). 3. Márquez Villanueva indicates that as a university student of history in 1950s Spain, he never once heard Castro mentioned in class (“Américo” 131). Although critics often attribute the lack of Spanish editions of Castro’s work to his revisionist view of history, it’s important to note that the author’s most impassioned critic, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, who was also a Republican exile, published his major works of the 1940s and 1950s, which defended a traditional pro-Catholic view of the nation, outside Spain as well. 4. I believe that Eduardo Subirats overstates his case when he claims that even after the death of Franco “Castro’s work has meant a big nothing in Spain” (“la obra de Castro ha significado en España un sonoro no-lugar”; Américo 215; also 53, 213–18). Although it may be true that, as Subirats argues, Américo Castro has been neglected by many Spanish scholars (some of whom may also discount the importance of Hispanists and historians working in North American institutions who have studied and continued to develop his arguments), it is undeniable that his ideas have had a major impact upon Spanish cultural and political discourse during the democratic era—even when they have been truncated, simplified, bastardized, or denigrated—as I set out in detail in

Notes to Pages 304–319

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the following paragraphs. The influence of Castro’s work is also evident in contemporary efforts to market Spain as a destination for Jewish heritage tourism, a phenomenon that Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa are studying in an ongoing book project. Spaniards have not been the only ones to seek inspiration for the creation of a multicultural society in an idealized reading of al-Andalus. As Hisham Aidi has shown, young people throughout the West, most but not all of them Muslims or recent converts, have followed Malcolm X’s earlier lead and seized upon “Islamic” culture in order to fashion for themselves a new identity, often in opposition to the Western world’s ongoing racist and imperialist tendencies. Aidi cites a plethora of examples, including Latin Americans and Latinos who have sought to return to their “Morisco roots” (drawing upon some historians’ claims—largely discredited—that a large number of Moriscos abandoned Spain, not for North Africa but rather for the New World), concluding that “for many of the minority convert communities and the diaspora Muslim communities, Islamic Spain has emerged as an anchor for their identity” (52). In an article published in El País, Jerónimo Páez reveals his discomfort with current Muslim society, arguing that “the West is becoming multicultural, and the Islamic world, monocultural” (“Islam”). Thus it is not surprising that Páez prefers to emphasize the “multicultural” Andalusi past, rather than focusing on the fundamentalism he views as now dominant in Islamic countries, and present as well among more reactionary figures in the West, such as Serafín Fanjul (whose work I discuss later in this chapter). El manuscrito carmesí plays with the literary tradition of the found manuscript, feigning to present the memoirs of Boabdil, the last Muslim leader of the Kingdom of Granada (J. Ortega 87). Alberto Egea Fernández-Montesinos views Gala’s work, which emphasizes Spain’s multiethnic Andalusi past, as exemplifying the tendency of Andalusian nationalists to advocate an open and pluralistic conceptualization of identity (189). Similarly, Daniela Flesler has analyzed how two popular novels of the 1990s, set in the Spanish Middle Ages and written by women (Ángeles de Irisarri and Magdalena Lasala), dismantle the clear border between Christians and Muslims they ostensibly set out to affirm. Hybridity of identity comes to the fore as the ambivalent attitudes that are the product of convivencia emerge (“Cristianas”). Guerín’s editor on En construcción, Mercedes Álvarez, subsequently directed a first feature, El cielo gira (The Sky Turns, 2004), which has some preoccupations in common with the earlier work. Centered on another community on the verge of extinction—in this case, the filmmaker’s own tiny rural home town of Aldealseñor in Soria, whose last residents are dying off one by one— the film also works through the efforts of inhabitants and “outsiders” to come to terms with the area’s history, both recent and remote. The first half of the work incorporates a tour of Numancia, site of a famous second-century BCE siege, which is traditionally invoked to represent the “essence” of the indomitable Spanish spirit in the face of foreign invaders. Later in the film, however, the camera encounters two Moroccan immigrants who reveal that the castle that has dominated a number of scenes throughout the film is an Arab structure dating from before the Reconquest. Their decision to settle in the area may in fact help to offset Spain’s rural depopulation crisis (a phenomenon that Juan Goytisolo has also discussed [“Encuentro” 224]). Notwithstanding the dramatic increase in visibility of anti-Muslim cultural texts, in a fall 2005 roundtable in New York City members of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s government insisted that, in contrast to the post-9/11 atmosphere in the United States, in Spain there was no xenophobic reaction after 3/11. Minister of Justice Juan Fernando López Aguilar, for example,

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Notes to Pages 324–336 argued that because of their experience of ETA, Spaniards have been accustomed to distinguishing Basques from terrorists, and they have been able to transfer that ability to Muslims as well. Judge Baltasar Garzón also emphasized that there had been “an exemplary response by citizens,” noting that after the Madrid attacks no laws had been changed or created to alter the status of Spanish residents (Garzón). As with nearly everything else involving the situation of the Saharawis, the number of refugees residing in the camps near Tindouf has been highly politicized. Commonly cited figures range from the 160,000 I give here (also found, for example, in Bárbulo 319; Shelley 2) to two hundred thousand or more; it must be noted, however, that proponents of Saharawi incorporation into Morocco argue that refugee numbers have been significantly inflated (A. Hernández 153–54). Examples abound in texts discussed earlier in this book. In his Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de África, for example, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón expresses great ambivalence concerning the Moroccans he assumes are both threateningly resentful of the expulsion and lulled by sweet memories of al-Andalus (50, 147). Alarcón quotes General Ros de Olano, who in turn recounts a Moroccan friend’s description of the foundation of the city of Tetuán by Andalusis expelled from the Kingdom of Granada, who carried with them keys to their former houses and sang a ballad calling upon Allah to return them to their beloved Granada (419–21). By contrast, in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Aita Tettauen a cosmopolitan Moroccan character who preserves the keys to his ancestors’ house in Granada values his friendship with the cultured Ros de Olano, but clearly enjoys a comfortable status in Tetuán and has no interest in either conquering or being conquered by Spain (Pérez Galdós, Aita 143–44). Patricia Seed discusses the modern-day tales of keys from Granada shared by Jewish and Muslim descendents of Andalusis, which remind them that their current homes are “a kind of home under erasure, a home that is home, but not the homeland” (90; Seed’s emphasis). I have considered other aspects of the representation of Saharawi women and the construction of national identity in Los baúles del retorno in Feminist Discourse 284–87. Canarians have historically been the ones to exploit the rich fishing resources in the waters between the archipelago and the Western Sahara, and although in the past they may sometimes have employed Saharawi natives as crewmen, “fishing has never been a mainstream Sahrawi occupation.” Since taking control of the territory, Morocco has brought in seasonal workers to sustain the industry (Shelley 73–74). Here some of the material stakes of Spain’s involvement in the conflict become clearer. For example, Philip Silver refers to the Basque-Algerian connection: “A violent new rival protagonist has appeared to contest conservative Basque Nationalism: the radical Marxist-Leninist Movement for the Liberation of the Basque Nation (MLNV) (comprising ETA, HB, KAS [Nationalist Socialist Coalition] and LAB [Commission of Patriotic Workers]) which once liked to compare itself with the Third World revolutionary movement in Algiers” (57–58). Currently, however, Spaniards opposed to peripheral separatist movements prefer not to recognize any equivalence between the demands of Saharawis and Basques. Joan Ramon Resina mentions polls conducted by the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia in which nearly 70 percent of respondents agree that the Saharawis should be allowed to vote in a referendum on self-determination, while well over 70 percent deny that the Basques have the same right (“Nationalism” 390). The POLISARIO surprised everyone involved by agreeing to consider the peace plan after their initial vehement rejection of Baker’s document. Although the plan appears guaranteed to tip

Notes to Pages 337–342

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the referendum in Morocco’s favor, POLISARIO leaders believe that because Moroccan settlers would lose their generous government subsidies as soon as the territory was incorporated into Morocco, they could be convinced that voting for full independence for the resource-rich Western Sahara would be in their best interest. However, POLISARIO’s capitulation to the plan has only augmented Morocco’s suspicious opposition (Mundy). In his article, published in 1987 in the Revista de Occidente, Fernaud draws upon “our” Spanish language’s “delicately nuanced differentiation between ser and estar” in order to persuade his fellow Canarians that “the Canaries are located in Africa, but they are not [essentially] African” (“las Canarias están en África, pero no son África”; 100). Fernaud appears to suggest that the Canaries were not colonies in the same sense that the Americas were, since the archipelago was “incorporated” into Castile before the unification of the Spanish nation and were thus already an integral part of the entity that conquered the New World (104). In his critique of Canarian nationalism, Fernaud also emphasizes the complete and rapid assimilation of the Guanches by the Castilian settlers (114). As C. O. C. Amate explains, the subcommittee did not actually meet until nine years later, in 1977. Despite the strong support of Algeria, Libya, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, and Madagascar, Spanish protests, together with the reservations expressed by Morocco and Mauritania, and the general indifference of the remaining OAU members, prevented the Canarian separatists from ever receiving the full support of the Liberation Committee, which had played such a vital role in the final decolonization of Africa. In 1978, members of the OAU began to express the idea that proximity to the African continent was not sufficient cause to consider an island an African colony (311–14). Even so, “Afrocentric” Canarian independence movements have since multiplied. While in exile in Algeria, Cubillo would be severely injured in an assassination attempt by the Spanish national police. Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika characterized the attempt as a “criminal attempt against the African peoples’ independence process” (qtd in Goytisolo, Problema 98). Juan Goytisolo has claimed that the Algerians have used their support for Cubillo and the Canarian independence movement as a bargaining chip with Spain (Problema 89, 97). Given Spain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1986, both the Socialists (PSOE) who governed throughout the 1980s and early 1990s as well as the center-right (PP) politicians who held power from the mid-1990s to 2004 were anxious to comply with greater European demands regarding the control of immigration; the Foreigners Act thus tended to reflect the desire to police immigrants rather than a concern for integrating them. The double layer of concertina wire fences around Ceuta and Melilla that were erected in 1998, as well as the 2003 launch of “Operation Ulysses” and the SIVE electronic surveillance system to control illicit traffic across the strait and the Saharan Atlantic, reflected a hardening of that approach to immigration, as military forces were increasingly drawn into efforts to secure the borders (White). Meanwhile, relatively few resources were devoted to serving the needs of both the receiving communities and the dramatically increasing number of immigrants who viewed Spain not as a way station to the rest of Europe but rather as a destination of choice. As Ricard Zapata-Barrero wrote in 2003, “It would be desirable to see a shift from the prevailing language of law and order to a language of cohesion” (32). Since the spring 2004 elections, the new Socialist-led government of Prime Minister Zapatero appears to be responding to such criticisms, supplementing the emphasis on border control with a recognition that immigration is not a temporary phenomenon. A new foundation has been created, for example, to facilitate the integration of “minority religions” into Spanish society

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(Simons, “Spain”). In 2005, an amnesty program was instituted offering regularization to those of the estimated one million immigrants illegally in Spain who held a six-month labor contract and had no criminal record. Several European nations, which were not consulted beforehand, complained, and conservative politicians in Spain have also warned that the measure will simply attract more illegal immigrants, citing the violent confrontations at the border between Morocco and Melilla in the fall of 2005 as evidence (McLean; C. Smith). But the move has also been heralded for its potential to provide the rest of Europe an effective and “more enlightened” model for the management of immigration, by openly acknowledging the very real labor needs of European employers, while insisting that immigrants be afforded the same protections—and shoulder the same responsibility to pay into the social welfare system—as other workers (Unger). Jordi Moreras notes that Pujol has tended to articulate sentiments that many might share but few would dare to express in public, including the notion that Arabs are simply incapable of assimilating into Spanish society. For Moreras, Pujol’s words “are hardly exemplary for the construction of a model of convivencia” (119). Pujol’s wife Marta Ferrusola also caused a scandal in early 2001 when she made a number of openly racist remarks at an event in Girona. Although Copito’s white skin may have afforded him certain privileges, it also quite literally killed him: he died of skin cancer in the fall of 2003. After his demise, a fierce debate ensued over the treatment of his remains. While some, including Sabater Pi, wished to see him stuffed and placed on display, others insisted that Copito’s dignity must be preserved (Villoro). The zoo ultimately decided to cremate the gorilla. It is most ironic that such pronounced concern over the treatment of the white gorilla’s remains emerged so shortly after the residents of the nearby town of Banyoles had fiercely defended their right to keep their “own” stuffed African, the man known as the “Negro de Banyoles” (discussed in chapter 2). Teresa Vilarós has traced the complicated interweaving of nationalist and class politics in this debate, including Francesc Candel’s condemnation of the derogatory term “xarnego,” applied to internal immigrants from impoverished southern and western areas of Spain, in his 1964 Els altres catalans (The Other Catalans), and Miquel Arimany’s subsequent promotion of a French-style linguistic and cultural assimilation of those he viewed as ethnic and economic “others” in his I els també Catalans (“Passing”). The Abbasid revolution, which led to the massacre of most of the ruling Umayyad family in 750 and the transfer of the caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad, originated in the region of Khorasan in what is today northeastern Iran. Abd-el-Rahman I survived the massacre and made his way to the Iberian Peninsular, where he established the rival Umayyad dynasty. This passage recalls a central motif of Nassera Chohra’s testimonial Volevo diventare bianca (I Want to Become White, 1993). Chohra, a Saharawi woman who immigrated to France as a child, and later moved to Italy, details her struggle to come to terms with her blackness (including her excruciating effort to pretend that her mother, who is darker than she, is her nanny). However, Chohra’s text exemplifies the mediated immigrants’ narrations that have tended to dominate in Italy as well as in Spain; for Caterina Romeo, Volevo appears to have been “colonized” through the intervention of the author’s husband-translator and of her editor, Alessandra Atti di Sarro. El Hachmi’s text, by contrast, presumably escapes that problematic. Under the family reunification policy, spouses and children receive residence papers without working permits. This is the problem that El Hachmi encounters when she first looks for a job and learns that she will not be able to apply for a working permit until she is offered a job contract—a

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veritable Catch-22—and that even then the working permit will be a temporary one (82–83). The policy has made it particularly difficult for wives to gain a measure of independence from their husbands, and it has thus contributed to the ongoing subjugation of women. Moreover, as Teresa Pereira Rodríguez has argued, under the Foreigners Act the status of “foreigner” has become hereditary, as the legislation has failed to provide for the full integration of immigrants into Spanish society (272–74). 26. In this sense, too, Rida’s circumcision contrasts dramatically with the one I cited at the opening of this book. The Catalan Domingo Badía’s circumcision is conceived of as the “crowning” act in a very public conversion; it allows him more perfectly to “pass” as “Alí Bey,” and hence to pursue his desire to conquer Morroco.

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I

“A ba’ele”/The Foreigners, 340–42 ¡A los pies del Salvador!/ At the Feet of the Savior (Cutanda), 38 Aanerud, Rebecca, 133 Abbadie, Anton, 366n12 Abbasid revolution, 384n23 Abd-el-Krim, Mohammed, 174 Abd-el-Rahman I, 384n23 Aben Humeya, o la rebelión de los moriscos/Aben Humeya, or the Rebellion of the Moriscos (Martínez de la Rosa), 25 Abencerrajes massacre, 20, 360n4 Abortion, 356 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 333, 334 Adorno, Rolena, 361n7 Adventures of the Last Abencerrage (Chateaubriand), 106 Afan-Evu, 379n13 Africa. See specific countries and regions África (Iradier), 71, 91 África: Revista de Acción Española, 223, 233, 239–40, 242 África: Viajes y trabajos de la Asociación Eúskara La Exploradora/Africa: Travels and Works of the Basque Explorers’ Association, 71–72, 74–77, 79–84, 91–92 Agawu-Kakraba, Yaw, 96, 367n18 Agency, definition of, 11

Águilas de acero o los misterios de Tánger/ Steel Eagles, or The Mysteries of Tangier, 235 Aguirre, Ruperto de, 53–54 Ahmed, Emboirik, 336 Aidi, Hisham, 381n5 Aita Tettauen/The War of Tetuán (Pérez Galdós): and Alarcón’s Diario, 124, 125, 126, 133, 368n1, 369n5, 370n10; on colonized female body, 131–34, 138, 149–50; Islam in, 128; Judaism in, 132–34; Moroccan character in, 382n11; race in, 133–41, 371n17; on Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60), 123–29, 367n14, 370n11; title of, 370n9 Aka Pygmies, 93–95, 97 Alal, Nayim, 334–35 Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de: on Catholicism, 145–46; on colonized female body, 131–32; on expulsion of Moriscos from Spain, 103; and Fortuny, 118, 119; on Iberian race, 107; illustrations in Diario by, 114–17; on Inquisition, 146; on Islam, 205; metaphorical references to photography by, 113–14; on Morocco, 105–6, 113–17; and Neo-Catholicism and neocolonialism, 103, 104–17, 356, 368–69n2; and O’Donnell, 115, 116,

419

420

Index

Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de (continued) 118; on racial makeup of Spaniards and Alpujarrans, 372n26; servants of, 369n5; and Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60), 101, 104–13, 119, 126, 127, 146, 167, 177; theatrical metaphors of, 113 —works: La Alpujarra, 143–47; “Una conversación en la Alhambra”/A Conversation in the Alhambra, 101–4, 108–9, 110, 368n1, 370n12; De Madrid a Nápoles/From Madrid to Naples, 118. See also Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de África/Diary of an Eyewitness to the African War (Alarcón) Albet i Mas, Abel, 239 Aldea Vaquero, Quintín, 321 Alfonso XII, King, 30, 77, 365n9 Algeria and Algerians, 50–52, 54, 106, 108, 112, 118, 125, 171, 183, 239, 250, 306, 324, 329–31, 335, 337, 374n7, 369n6, 382n14, 383n17, 383n18 Alhambra, 3, 18–20, 22, 23, 27, 29, 34, 151– 52, 193, 235, 302, 360n5 The Alhambra (Irving), 16, 24, 26, 27, 41, 361n7 Aline and Valcour, or The Philosophical Novel (Sade), 367n15 Aljamiada literature, 29 Alma rifeña/Riffian Soul, 235 La Alpujarra (Alarcón), 143–47 Alpujarras War (1568–70), 15, 143–44, 181, 360n2 Els altres catalans/The Other Catalans (Candel), 384n22 Álvarez, Mercedes, 381n8 Álvarez Junco, José, 25, 175–77 Amador de los Ríos, José, 29, 362n11 Amate, C. O. C., 383n17 Amazigh (Berber language), 345, 348–49 Amin, Idi, 298 Al-Andalus: Aguirre on, 53–54; and Alarcón, 105; and Alhambra, 18–20, 22, 23, 27; and Arabism in nineteenth century,

27–38; and architecture, 27, 34–35; artists, writers, and intellectuals on, 20–27; Conde’s history of, 28–29, 30; and Enlightenment, 26–27; Fanjul on demythification of, 321; and homosexuality, 207–8; and multiculturalism, 381nn6–7; and music, 306–7; and poetry, 349– 50; and scientific and technological advances, 26–27; and Spanish identity generally, 4, 11; and Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60), 55–56 Al-Andalus contra España/Al-Andalus against Spain (Fanjul), 321 Andalusi (term), 359n2 Andalusia and Andalusians: Alarcón on, 369n3; and convivencia, 301–3; and Fortuny, 151; and Fundación Tres Culturas, 305; Iradier on, 75–76; Moriscos in, 48; and peripheral nationalism, 46, 48, 84, 301–3, 335 Anderson, Benedict, 5–6, 7 Anes Álvarez, Gonzalo, 320 Angola, 383n17 Annan, Kofi, 336 Annobón, 52 Anthropology and natural history museums, 64–65, 66–71, 77 Antigüedades árabes de España/Arab Antiquities of Spain, 19 Antigüedades árabes de Granada y Córdoba/Arab Antiquities of Granada and Córdoba, 19 Anti-Semitism, 13, 110–11, 217, 295–96. See also Judaism Antón y Ferrándiz, Manuel, 33, 43, 57, 67 Apo, Piruchi, 340–42, 354 Apter, Emily, 371n20 Arab League, 276 Arabism: and Fernández y González, 31– 33, 35–37, 39, 70, 361n10, 362n11; and reconsideration of Spanish history and identity in nineteenth century, 27–38. See also Islam; Moriscos

Index Arana, Sabino, 45, 49, 83–84, 85, 366n12 Aranzadi y Unamuno, Telesforo, 45, 70, 362n12 Arbolí Nadal, Francesc, 375n14 Arcelin, Alphonse, 64 Archaeology, 34 Architecture: of Alhambra, 18–20, 22, 23, 27, 34, 360n5; Andalusi architecture, 27, 34–35; Gothic architecture, 42; of Seville’s Giralda tower, 34, 226, 227 Arco Aguilar, María del Carmen del, 47 Areilza, José María, 249–50 Arencibia, Yolanda, 128 Arévalo, Carlos, 209 Argentina, Imperio, 236, 244, 377n4 ARHM, 380n1 Arias Anglés, Enrique, 364n20 Arimany, Miquel, 384n22 Arqués, Enrique, 249 Arribas Palau, Mariano, 359n1 Art: casta paintings, 285; cave paintings, 223; and colonized female body, 130–31, 134–37, 141, 142; on expulsion of Moriscos, 35, 38; “Fantasias” genre, 177–80; nude (painting genre), 130–31, 134, 135, 153–59; odalisque paintings, 130–31, 134–37, 141, 155, 371nn18–19; Orientalist painters, 20–22, 119, 121, 134–36, 152, 153–54, 363n19; panorama painting, 122–23; Spanish-Morrocan War illustrations, 114–17; Spanish-Morrocan War paintings, 117–23, 125, 129–30, 157, 371–72n22. See also Architecture; Photography; and specific artists Aryanism, 43–44, 69, 176, 203 Asenjo Alonso, José, 189 Asín Palacios, Miguel, 205–6, 237 Asís, Francisco de, 157–58 El Asmani, 168–69 Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica/Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARHM), 380n1

421

Asselineau, Jean-Auguste, 22 Assimilation, 240, 297, 298, 352, 378n5, 384n22 Asturian miners’ strike, 202–3 Asturians, 343 Atti di Sarro, Alessandra, 384n24 Automobiles, 238 Aviation, 238 Aznar, José María, 317–18 Azorín, 61–62, 63 Bachoud, Andrée, 195 Bacwezi myth, 82–83, 92, 366n11 Badía, Domingo/Alí Bey, 1–4, 18, 58, 129, 385n26 Baker, James, 336, 382n15 Balfour, Sebastian, 170, 188, 193, 197, 198, 202–4, 374n10 Balibar, Etienne, 40, 72, 258, 263 Bambú, 244 Bantu-family languages, 82, 83, 90, 366n10 Barandiarán, José Miguel de, 45 Barcelona Olympic Games (1992), 64 Bardina, Joan, 44 Barea, Arturo, 187–88 Baroja, Pío, 368n20 Barradas, José Pérez de, 48 Barth, Heinz, 240 Basque language, 44–45, 82, 366n10 Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), 83 Basques: Broca’s craniometric analyses of, 69–70; in Canary Islands, 77, 365n6; connections between Africans and, 45, 77, 83–84, 92; and Constitution (1978), 301; and peripheral nationalism, 44–45, 71, 76, 335, 343, 362n12, 382n14; and Tubalist myth, 44, 45, 83–84, 366n12 Bastián, Carmen, 152, 153, 155–60 Battle of Smalah/Capture of Ahd-el-Kader’s Train by the Duc d’Aumale (Vernet), 369n6 Battle of Tetuán (Fortuny), 119, 120, 122– 23, 125, 129–30, 177

422

Index

Battle of the Pyramids (Lejeune), 119, 121 Los baúles del retorno/The Return Trunks, 329–31, 332 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 157 Beddoe, John, 46–47 Beigbeder, Juan, 204, 222, 225, 228, 235 Belgian Congo, 368n20 Belgium, 89, 90, 98 Bembo, Max, 376n19 Ben Abd Allah, Sultan Muhammad, 1 Ben Arafa, Sultan Mohammed, 276 Ben Yusuf, Sultan Mohammed, 276–77 Bender, Gerald, 364n4 Benedict XVI, Pope, 356, 357 Benga language, 82 Bens, Francisco, 262, 378n11 Berber language, 44–45 Berbers: branches of, 223, 256; IberoBerber racial heritage, 57–59, 76, 327; Iradier on, 77; and Judaism, 372n23; kinship of Basques and, 44–45; language of, 44–45; Lombroso on, 175; masculinity of Berber warriors, 172; Saharawis as Arab-Berbers, 378n10; Unamuno on, 61, 362n12; whiteness of Hispano-Berber race, 223 Berenguer, Luis, 185, 375n12 Berkeley, Busby, 245 Bernal, Antonio-Miguel, 63 Bersani, Leo, 192 Bertrana, Aurora, 238 Bethancourt, Elva de, 285 Bethencourt, Juan, 47 Beusterien, John, 14 Bey, Alí. See Badía, Domingo/Alí Bey Bhabha, Homi, 10–11, 291–92 Bin Laden, Osama, 319 Bioko. See Fernando Po Black Irish, 362n13 Black Legend, 39–41, 66, 72, 84, 107, 365n4 Black outside/white inside paradigm, 80, 344, 365n8

Blackface, 285 Blanco, Tomás, 257 Bleys, Rudi, 182 “El blocao” (Díaz Fernández), 373n3 Blood brotherhood/sisterhood: and Bertrana’s critique of Spanish colonialism, 238; Costa on, 57–59, 76, 93; Fernández y González on, 56; of Franco and Macías Nguema, 299; Franco regime, 222–24, 252; Iradier on, 93; male bonding and blood brotherhood, 209; and peripheral nationalisms, 49; and purity of Spanish women, 268–79; and Romancero marroquí/Moroccan Ballad Book, 225; of Spain and Morocco, 222– 24; Spanish-Moroccan brotherhood, 327; Spanish-Saharawi brotherhood/ sisterhood, 325–39 Blood purity, 13–15, 40–42, 43, 57, 76, 83. See also Race Boabdil, King, 105, 342, 360n4 Body: colonized female body, 130–42, 149–50; display of Canarian bodies, 77–78; of El Negro de Banyoles, 64–67, 73, 364n1, 384n21; and nude (painting genre), 130–31, 134, 135, 153–59; Spanish male body, 257–58 Bolaños, María, 362n11 Boncoro, Manuel, 79–80 Boncoro II, King, 79 Boncoro III, King, 79 Bonelli, Emilio, 59 Boone, Joseph, 192 Booth, Wayne, 96–97 Borbón, Faustino de, 28 Los Borbones en pelota/The Bourbons in the Raw, 157–59, 372n27 Border thinking, 346–47, 354 Borrás, Tomás, 223, 229, 232, 259–60 Bosch, Alfred, 250, 252 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz, 383n18 Boyd, Carolyn, 163 Braga-Pinto, César, 375n16

Index Brazil, 73, 375n16 Bretz, Mary Lee, 62, 368n20 Brevíssima relación de la destrucción de las Indias/Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas), 39–41 Britain: colonization by, 40, 72, 81, 84; and end of slave trade, 52; and Fernando Po, 52; Iradier’s criticisms of British ship, 72; and Morocco, 51, 54, 55, 161, 163; and World War II, 250 Broca, Paul, 69–70 Brooks, Peter, 153 Bubi, 298, 340–42 Buchs, José, 235 Buñuel, Luis, 228 Burdiel, Isabel, 157–58 Burgos, Carmen de, 164–76, 181, 193, 195 Burguete, Ricardo, 173 Burshatin, Israel, 177 Butler, Judith, 360n3 Byron, George Gordon Lord, 113 Los caballeros de la Legión/The Gentlemen of the Legion (Micó), 192 Cadalso, José, 359n1 Cadmus, Paul, 375n15 Cagigas, Isidro de, 377n1 Calella sen saída/Dead-End Street (Omgbá), 345 Calila y Dimna, 29 Cameroon and Cameroonians, 250, 251, 293, 345 Campbell-Dunn, Graham James K., 366n10 Canalejas, José, 195 Canarian Archipelago Liberation/Liberación Archipiélago Canario, 338 Canary Islands: baptism of Canary Islanders, 78–79; Basques in, 77, 365n6; display of natives from, in Europe, 78; and fishing, 382n13; and Germany, 251, 253–54; independence movement in, 337–38, 365n7, 383nn16–18; Iradier’s

423

travels in, 74, 76–79; mummies in, 77; mythology on, 76–77; and peripheral nationalism, 47–48, 335, 383nn16–18; Spanish conquest of, 53 La canción de Aixa/Aixa’s Song, 224–25, 234–37, 240–49, 261, 277, 283, 377– 78n5, 378n7 Candel, Francesc, 384n22 Cannibalism, 298, 379n15 El Cañón Rayado, 111 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio, 30–31, 51, 58, 59, 361n8 Cansinos-Asséns, Rafael, 194 Cantabria, 69, 343 Cardwell, Richard, 196 Carlist Wars, 71 Carlos VI en la Rápita/Carlos VI in La Rápita (Pérez Galdós), 134, 137–41, 143, 146–51, 258 “Carmen, la de Fortuny”/Fortuny’s Carmen (Castro y Serrano), 160 Carmen Bastián (Fortuny), 152, 153, 155– 60, 372n27 Carmen la de Triana, 236 Caro Baroja, Julio, 304 Carrasco, Abdelkarim, 357 Carrero Blanco, Luis, 249, 284 Casas-Carbó, Joachim, 43–44 Casiri, Miguel, 18, 28 Casta paintings, 285 Castelar, Emilio, 116 Castiella, Fernando María, 249–50 Castilian War of Succession (1474–79), 53 “Castilla” (Unamuno), 61 Castillejos, Battle of, 117, 122 Castration, 193, 204 Castro, Américo, 48, 148–49, 303, 322, 362n14, 377n1, 380–81n3–4 Castro, Rosalía de, 46 Castro de Paz, José Luis, 288 Castro Villacañas, Demetrio, 100 Castro y Serrano, José de, 160

424

Index

Catalan language, 310, 316, 320, 345, 348–51, 353 Catalonia and Catalans: in En Construcción/Under Construction (or Work in Progress), 311; language of, 310, 316, 320, 345, 348–51; Moroccan immigrants in, 348–54; and El Negro de Banyoles scandal, 64–65; and peripheral nationalism, 43–44, 301, 335, 372–73n1; and Rif campaigns, 162, 372–73n1; and Saharawi refugees, 325; and Snowflake albino gorilla, 343–44, 384n21; Unamuno on, 76; working-class women in, 347 Catholicism: in Alarcón’s La Alpujarra, 145–46; baptism of Canary Islanders, 78–79; and Constitution of 1978 in Spain, 356; and conversos, 13–14; in Cristo negro/Black Christ, 282–93, 294; of France compared with Spain, 52; Franco and National Catholicism, 206, 218, 252, 299, 356; and Hispanotropicalism, 73; and Inquisition, 13–14, 40, 41, 146; Menéndez Pelayo on, and racial mixing, 39; and missionaries, 280, 281– 84; and mixed-race relationships, 270, 276; in Ndongo-Bidyogo’s Los poderes de la tempestad/The Powers of the Tempest, 298–99; in Ndongo-Bidyogo’s Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra/The Shadows of Your Black Memory, 294–97; and Neo-Catholicism, 101, 103, 104–13, 356, 368–69n2; Pérez Galdós on, 146–51; in Pérez Galdós’s Carlos VI, 148–50; and secular state, 353; and Spanish colonialism, 73, 280; in Spanish Guinea, 280; statistics on, 356; in twenty-first century in Spain, 356 Cavanna, Alberto, 249 Cave paintings, 223 CEA Film Studios, 225 Celtiberian, 47, 134, 148 Celtic “race,” 46–47 Cervantes, Miguel de, 343, 374n7

Ceuta, 317, 323, 338, 383n19 Chao, Manu, 340 Charles III, King, 1, 18 Charles IV, King, 1 Charles V, King, 17 Charnon-Deutsch, Lou, 135, 136, 156–60, 364n20 Chateaubriand, 106, 113, 360n4 Chile, 380n1 Chohra, Nassera, 384n24 Christianity. See Catholicism El cielo gira/The Sky Turns, 381n8 Circumcision, 1, 353, 385n26 Cities of the Dead (Roach), 78 Civil War in Spain. See Spanish Civil War Clairin, Georges, 20, 360n4 Clark, T. J., 154–55, 156 Cleinow, Marcel, 226 Codera, Francisco, 35 Colegio Libre de Eméritos, 320 El collar de la paloma/The Neck Ring of the Dove (Ibn Hazm), 149 Colman, Samuel, 20 Colonialism. See Spanish Conquest and Spanish American colonies; and specific African countries and regions Columbus, Christopher, 17, 50, 78 Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca/How To Be Black and Not Die in Aravaca (Zamora Loboch), 342–43 Comunidad Islámica en España/Islamic Community in Spain, 302 Concubinage, 261–62 Conde, José Antonio, 26, 28–29, 30, 54 Congo Free State, 90 La conquista del reino de Maya por el último conquistador español Pío Cid/ The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya by the Last Spanish Conquerer Pío Cid (Ganivet), 85–100, 367nn17–18, 368n22 “Una Conversación en la Alhambra”/ A Conversation in the Alhambra (Alarcón), 101–4, 108–9, 110, 368n1, 370n12

Index Conversos, 13–14 Convivencia: Afro-Spaniards and restaging of identities, 339–55; celebrating, 300– 307; in Cristo negro, 292; education on, 304–7; in En Construcción, 307–16; and Three Cultures, 269, 303–6; violent resignification of, 316–23 Copito de Nieve/Snowflake (albino gorilla), 343–45, 351, 384n21 Cordero Torres, José María, 249 Corisco, 75, 81, 91 Correa Ramón, Amelina, 194 La Corresondencia Militar, 167 Corriente, Federico, 303, 304 Cortés, Donoso, 52, 368n2 Cortés, Hernán, 40, 97–98, 103 Corydon (Gide), 195 Costa, Joaquín: on blood brotherhood, 57–59, 63, 76, 93; on Hispano-Berber race, 223; influence of generally, 249; and Iradier, 81, 365n9 Courbet, Gustave, 159 Covarrubias, Sebastián de, 16, 17 Craniometric study, 42, 69–70, 74 Criado, Ramón, 338 Cristo negro/Black Christ, 282–93, 294, 298, 379n14 Cro-Magnon Man, 45, 47–48 Crónica del Ejército y Armada de África/ Chronicle of the African Army and Armada, 115–16 Cross-dressing, 25, 181, 189, 232, 360–61n6, 374n8 CSIC (High Council of Scientific Research), 223 Cuba, 49, 59, 99, 161, 236 Cubillo, Antonio, 337, 338, 383n18 Cultural racism, 258 Curtis, Liz, 47 Cutanda, Vicente, 38 D.A.I. (Delegation of Indigenous Affairs), 261, 269–72, 276

425

Dallas, Ian, 302 Darder, Francesc, 64 Darder Museum of Natural History, 64– 65, 67 Darwinism, 42, 47, 68, 166 Davis, Kathleen, 128, 147, 150 Day of the Race, 50 De Felipe, Helena, 269, 275 De Hispania a España/From Hispania to Spain, 320–21, 322 De la Andalucía islámica a la de hoy/From Islamic Andalusia to the Andalusia of Today (Sánchez Albornoz), 323 De la Joyosa, Barón, 30 De Madrid a Nápoles/From Madrid to Naples (Alarcón), 118 De Nador a Vic/From Nador to Vic (Karrouch), 345–46 Decolonization of Western Sahara, 323–35, 382n10 El Defensor de Granada, 98–99 Degen, Monica, 316 Degeneration: Fernández y González on, 56, 196; Labanyi on, 175, 373n5; and masculinity, 174–83; Muñoz on, 196, 375n16; Pick on, 373n5; racial degeneration, 49, 56, 175–77, 195–96 Dehodencq, Alfred, 20 Delacroix, Eugène, 22, 177–78, 371n21 Delgado, Eduardo, 268 Delgado, Elena, 61, 317, 318–19 Delgado, Luis, 306 Derrida, Jacques, 140, 371n20 Descartes, René, 354 Diario de Barcelona, 130 Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de África/ Diary of an Eyewitness to the African War (Alarcón): on colonized female body, 131–32, 133, 139; on Jews, 110–11, 371n16; on Morocco and Moroccans, 105–6, 113–17, 382n11; on Muslim men and women, 110, 111–12; and Pérez Galdós’s Aita Tettauen, 124, 125, 126,

426

Index

Diario de un testigo (continued) 133, 368n1, 369n5, 370n10; and Pérez Galdós’s Carlos VI, 139; on SpanishMoroccan War (1859–60), 101, 104–19, 126, 127 Diario de una bandera/Diary of a Battalion (Franco), 186–89, 206 El Diario Español, 53 Díaz-Andreu, Margarita, 34, 361n9 Díaz de Villegas, José, 249 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 98 Díaz Fernández, José, 373n3 Díez Torre, Alejandro, 32–33 Discent, 8 Divorce, 356 Diwan modernista (Djbilou), 363n17 Djbilou, Abdellah, 363n17 Domíngez Rodiño, Enrique, 225, 230 Domínguez Bécquer, Joaquín, 157 Domínguez Bécquer, Valeriano, 157 Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio, 304 Dopico, Georgina, 15 Doré, Gustave, 22 Dormir al raso/Sleeping in the Open (Moreno Torregrosa and El Gheryb), 345 Douglass, William, 45 Drake, Sir Francis, 40 Dream of the Odalisque (Fortuny), 371n19 Dreams of Trespass (Mernissi), 378n7 Driessen, Henk, 275, 373n2 Duara, Prasenjit, 7–8, 9 Duffy, Dennis, 188 Dunne, Bruce, 182, 374n9 Dyer, Richard, 134, 257, 258 Echagüe, General, 54, 238 El Eco de Tetuán, 109 Education: of Africans by Spanish colonizers, 280–81, 294–96; on convivencia and multiculturalism, 304–7; in Equatorial Guinea/Gulf of Guinea, 297; in Western Sahara, 234, 328

Egea Fernández-Montesinos, Alberto, 48–49, 381n7 Eguilaz, Leopoldo, 361n9 Eisenberg, Daniel, 374n7 Eisenhower, Dwight, 255 Elena, Alberto, 225, 228, 229, 262, 377n2 Elliott, John, 17 Elobey (Grande and Pequeño), 75, 80, 81, 91 Elombuangani, 74, 75, 80 En Construcción/Under Construction (or Work in Progress), 307–16, 318, 381n8 En el país de las kassidas/In the Land of the Kassidas (Fernández-Caro), 272 “En la guerra”/In War (Burgos), 164–75 England. See Britain Enlightenment, 1, 4, 6, 8, 19, 26–27, 39, 51, 103, 109, 117, 182, 316, 321, 353–54, 359n1, 361n6, 361n8 Entartung/Degeneration (Nordau), 175, 176 Equatorial Africa, 250 Equatorial Guinea/Gulf of Guinea: Boncoro dynasty in, 79–80; Boncoro II’s tomb in, 79; and Costa, 59; coup (1979) in, 340; economy of, 297, 298, 379n17; education in, 297; ethnic groups in, 298; and Franco regime, 224, 339; immigrants from, 339–42; independence for, 100, 293; Iradier’s expeditions to, 59, 71, 75, 79–81, 84, 92–93, 365n9; Macías Nguema regime in, 298, 299, 339, 340, 379n16; missionaries in, 280, 281–82; nationalist groups in, 292–93; sexual politics in, 379n13; Spain’s colonial interests in, 52, 53. See also Spanish Guinea Escriu, Jaime, 118 La Esfera, 195 España, un enigma histórico/Spain, a Historical Enigma (Sánchez Albornoz), 322–23 La España completa (Borrás), 232, 259

Index La España convertida al islam/Spain Converted to Islam (Rodríguez Magda), 357 España en su historia: Cristianos, moros, judíos/Spain in Its History: Christians, Moors, Jews (Castro), 303–4 España frente al Islam: De Mahoma a Bin Laden/Spain opposite Islam: From Mohammed to Bin Laden (Vidal), 323 “España y África”/Spain and Africa (Azorín), 61–62, 63 Espíritu de la raza/Spirit of the Race, 378n8 Espósito, Anthony, 232 Espronceda, 113 Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (Gobineau), 43, 175 Estébanez Calderón, Serafín, 51–52 Ethiopia, 366n12, 383n17 European Economic Community, 302, 383n19 European Union, 317, 318, 341–42 Evans, Peter, 212–13 Evaristo San Miguel, Duke, 30 Execution without Trial under the Moor Kings of Granada (Regnault), 19–20, 21 La Exploradora/The Explorers’ Association, 71, 82, 365n9 Expulsión de los judíos de España/ Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Sala), 38 Expulsión de los moriscos/Expulsion of the Moriscos (Puig y Roda), 38 Expulsions: of Jews, 12, 15, 38, 39, 342–43; of Moriscos, 15–16, 30–31, 35, 38, 39, 95–96, 103, 147, 152, 320, 343, 361n8, 368n1; of Spanish residents and Nigerian workers from Equatorial Guinea, 298 Fabian, Johannes, 365n5 Facio, 369n7 Faith in Nation (Marx), 12–13 Family: in La canción de Aixa/Aixa’s Song,

427

246–47; immigrants and family reunification policy, 384–85n25; in Romancero marroquí/Moroccan Ballad Book, 225– 27, 230–32 Fang, 298, 379n15 Fanjul, Salvador, 321–22 Fanon, Frantz, 292, 379n15 Fantasía árabe/Arab Fantasy (Fortuny), 178–79 “Fantasias” genre, 177–80 Farrujía, José, 47 Fascism and defascistization, 201–2, 252– 68, 375n13, 378n8 Femininity. See Gender Ferdinand and Isabella, 12, 16–17, 43, 53, 55, 124, 220, 368n1 Ferdinand VI, King, 18, 28 Ferdinand VII, King, 25 Fernández, James, 317 Fernández Ardavín, César, 253, 255, 262, 378n11 Fernández Ardavín, Eusebio, 253 Fernández-Caro, Antonio, 233–34, 269, 272 Fernández Cifuentes, Luis, 113 Fernández y González, Francisco: and Arabism, 31–33, 35–37, 39, 70, 148–49, 361n10, 362n11; brother of, 26; on racial and cultural mixing, 56–57; on racial degeneration, 56, 196; on Semitic race, 56; on Spaniards, 75–76; and Spanish Anthropological Society, 70; on Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60), 56 Fernández y González, Manuel, 26 Fernando Po, 52, 53, 280, 281, 283, 298. See also Santa Isabel Fernando VII, King, 147, 150 Fernaud, Pedro, 337, 383n16 Ferrer, Francesc, 163 Ferreras, Juan Ignacio, 128 Ferrusola, Marta, 384n20 Festivals of Moors and Christians, 16, 144 Fetish, 74, 139, 288

428

Index

Fez, 3, 55, 181, 251, 277, 374n7 La fiesta de la sangre/Festival of Blood (Muñoz), 196–97 Films. See specific films First-wave nation building, 6–7, 12–18, 43 Flesler, Daniela, 16, 319, 329, 345, 361n6, 381n4, 381n7 Fletcher, Richard, 359n2 Floridablanca, Count of, 19 Fontán, Juan, 251 Ford, Richard, 22, 39, 360n5 Foreigners Act, 341–42, 383n19, 385n25 Forner, Juan Pablo, 27 Fortunata y Jacinta (Pérez Galdós), 373n5 Fortuny, Marià: and Alarcón, 118, 119; childhood of, 369–70n8; death of, 159; experimental techniques of, 372n24; as eyewitness of Spanish-Moroccan War, 371–72n22; and “Fantasia” genre, 178– 80, 208; in Granada, 151–52; Gypsies as models for, 152, 159; influences on, 20, 22; Madrazo on, 159–60; Martín Corrales on, 363n19; Spanish-Morrocan War (1859–60) paintings by, 117–23, 125, 129–30 —paintings: Arab Chief, 179–80; Battle of Tetuán, 119, 120, 122–23, 125, 129– 30; Carmen Bastián, 152, 153, 155–60, 372n27; Dream of the Odalisque, 371n19; Fantasía árabe/Arab Fantasy, 178–79; Gitana bailando en un jardín/ Gypsy Dancing in the Garden, 152; La matanza de los Abencerrajes/The Massacre of the Abencerrages, 151,360n4; Moroccans, 141; Odalisque, 130–31, 136–37; Portrait of a Girl or Joven judía/ Young Jewish Woman or Young Moroccan Woman, 141, 142; Viejo desnudo al sol/Nude Old Man in Sunlight, 373– 74n6 Foucault, Michel, 182 Fox, Inman, 61 Fraile, Ramón Jiménez, 366n10

Fra-Molinero, Baltasar, 297 France: African colonization by, 81, 84, 162, 240; Catholicism of, 52; colonization by generally, 53, 72; colonization of Algeria by, 50, 51, 52, 54, 239; and Morocco, 161, 162, 163, 184, 239, 276, 277; national identity of, 5–6; persecution of Huguenots in, 108; and Rif campaigns, 239; and World War II, 250–51, 254 Franco, Francisco: and African colonies, 224, 239, 249–52, 280–81, 283, 339; and blood brotherhood, 222–24, 252; compared with Macías Nguema, 299; Diary of a Battalion by, 186–89, 206; dying and death of, 300, 302, 323–24, 338; and Eisenhower, 255; and film Raza/Race, 262, 378n8; in García Figueras’s story, 246; and Hispanotropicalism, 364n4; and Hitler, 251–52, 254; and La llamada de África/The Call of Africa, 262; and miners’ strike in Asturias, 202–3; ministers of foreign affairs under, 249–50; and Morocco, 229, 230, 276–77; and National Catholicism, 206, 218, 252, 299; and nationalism, 300; regulation of homosexuality by regime of, 218, 222; and respect for Islam, 280; in Rif campaign, 186–91, 374n10; and Romancero marroquí/Moroccan Ballad Book, 226, 230–31; and Spanish Civil War, 204–6, 220, 226; Vega on, 233; violence and repression under, 379–80n1; and Western Sahara, 323–24, 327; and World War II, 224, 249, 250–52, 254, 255 Franco, Jean, 90 Franco, Ramón, 187 Fray Escoba/Brother Broom, 288 French Congo, 250 French West Africa, 368n20 FREPIC-AWAÑAK, 338 Freud, Sigmund, 139, 197, 204, 375n13 Freyre, Gilberto, 73, 375n16

Index Friedman, Jerome, 13–14 Friedman, John, 140 Fundación Tres Culturas/Three Cultures Foundation, 305 Fusco, Coco, 73, 78 Gabilondo, Joseba, 44–45, 366n12 Gabon, 250, 251, 293 Gala, Antonio, 306, 381n7 Galdós, Benito Pérez. See Pérez Galdós, Benito Galicia, 45–47, 69, 84, 301, 335, 343 Galician language, 46, 314, 345 Gambaragara, 81, 82, 366n10, 367n16 Gandolfi, Nicoletta, 333 Ganivet, Ángel: and Hispanotropicalism, 96–100; influence of generally, 249; influences on, 366–67n13, 367n15; on Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60), 88; and Unamuno, 98, 100, 357 —works: La conquista del reino de Maya/ The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya, 61, 85–100, 367n17, 368n22; Idearium español, 89, 98–100 García de Cortázar Ruiz de Aguirre, Fernando, 321 García-Elvite, Dosinda, 340 García-Felguera, María de los Santos, 119, 122, 369n7 García Figueras, Tomás: and Franco, 197, 246, 251; homosexuality and homoeroticism in fiction by, 215–18; at military post in Morocco, 197; “Mística” by, 223, 233; “Moroccan songs” anthologized by, 232; on Morocco and Moroccan-Spanish relationship, 223, 249; and Romancero marroquí, 225; Spanish Civil War in Ramadán de paz by, 215–18, 226 García Gómez, Emilio, 207–8, 232, 349– 50 García Ortega, Luis, 209 Garrigues, Eduardo, 73 Garzón, Baltasar, 382n9

429

Gatell, Joaquín, 182–83, 249, 366n13 Gay marriage, 356 Gayangos, Pascual, 26, 29, 56 Gaze: Bhabha on, 291–92; in Cristo negro/ Black Christ, 287–93; and homoeroticism, 208, 211, 215; in “monarch-ofall-I-survey” scenes (Pratt), 125–26; in Olympia (Manet), 154–55; in Orientalist painting and Orientalism in general, 134–37, 168, 246 Gellner, Ernest, 6, 7 Gender: Alarcón on Jewish men and women, 110–11; Alarcón on Muslim men and women, 110, 111–12; in Los baúles del retorno/The Return Trunks, 329–31, 332, 382n12; blood brothers and purity of Spanish women, 268–79; in Burgos’s Rif war narratives, 164–74; burka worn by Muslim women, 334; in La canción de Aixa/Aixa’s Song, 224–25, 234–35, 241–47; and collective soul as feminine, 173–74; and colonized female body, 130–42, 149–50; in El Hachmi’s Jo també sóc catalana/I Am Also Catalan, 346–54; and feminization of the Alhambra, 22; and feminization of the colonized, 209, 257; Irigaray on, 10, 360n3; in Lalia, 332–33; McClintock on, 10– 11, 360n3; Moroccan women, 131–32, 133, 139, 168–71, 174, 187, 209, 225–27, 230–32, 330–31, 348; and nude (painting genre), 130–31, 134, 135, 153–59; in Pérez Galdós’s novels, 131–41, 149–51; sexual politics in Spanish Guinea, 279–81, 379n13; Spanish Guinea and women, 279–93; Vallejo Nágera on, 248; Western Sahara and women, 329–34, 348; women in La llamada de África/The Call of Africa, 263–68; and women warriors, 170–71, 181, 200–201, 373n3. See also Masculinity Gener, Pompeu, 43 “Generation of ’98,” 60–61

430

Index

Genio de España (Giménez Caballero), 376n20 The Geography of Perversion (Bleys), 182 Georacial unity of Spain and North Africa, 58–59, 63, 259–60 Germany: and African colonization, 81, 84, 162, 250–51; and Aryanism, 176; fascism in, 201–2, 378n8; film studios in, 224–26, 235; Freikorps paramilitary soldiers in, 189, 200; Nazism in, 201–2, 218, 224, 236, 250–51, 254; and World War II, 224, 250–54 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 134 El Gheryb, Mohamed, 345 Gibraltar, 250, 251. See also Strait of Gibraltar Gibson, Charles, 40 Gibson, Mary, 175–76, 373n4 Gide, André, 195 Gil Benumeya, Rodolfo, 223, 259 Gillespie, Richard, 317–18 Gilman, Sander, 155 Gilman, Stephen, 124, 148 Gilroy, Paul, 258, 314 Giménez Caballero, Ernesto, 192, 224, 242, 285, 376n20 Giralda tower, 34, 226, 227 Gitana bailando en un jardín/Gypsy Dancing in the Garden (Fortuny), 152 El Globo, 123 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, comte de, 43, 45, 175, 176, 195–96 Goebbels, Josef, 236 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 73, 78 Góngora, Manuel de, 235 González Alcantud, José Antonio, 22, 105, 305, 361n9, 367n17, 370n12, 372n25 Goode, Joshua, 57 Gorilla (Copito de Nieve/Snowflake), 343–45, 351, 384n21 Gothic (“race”), 42–43 Goury, Jules, 29 Goya, Francisco, 155

Goytisolo, Juan, 113, 129, 339, 349, 362– 63n14, 370n14, 383n18 Gracián, Baltasar, 360n1 Granada: Abencerrajes massacre in, 20, 360n4; Festivals of Moors and Christians in, 16; Fortuny in, 151–52; Great Mosque in, 302; Muslims in, 302; Reconquest celebrations in, 16; Reconquest of, 6–7, 12, 38, 40, 48, 105; tourism in, 34. See also Alhambra Granada, poema oriental/Granada, An Oriental Poem (Zorrilla), 26 Great Britain. See Britain Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo, 371n21 Guanarteme, Fernando, 78–79 Guanches, 337 Guerín, José Luis, 307, 316, 357, 381n8 Guerrero, Pablo, 341 Gulf of Guinea. See Equatorial Guinea/ Gulf of Guinea Gypsies, 15, 22, 24, 152, 156, 159, 244, 318 El Hachmi, Najat, 346–54, 357, 384– 85nn24–25 Haedo, Diego de, 374n7 Haggard, Henry Rider, 10 Halstead, Charles and Carolyn, 250 Hamitic hypothesis, 45, 82–84, 92 ¡Harka!, 209–15, 376n25, 379n12 Harvey, L. P., 368n19 Hassan II, King, 323–24, 327 Hassaniya language, 255–56, 262, 335 Hayes, Jarrod, 182 El Heraldo de Madrid, 164–67, 169, 170, 173, 195 Heregías/Heresies (Gener), 43 Hermic Films, 239 Hernández, Ángela, 331 Hernández, Octavio, 338 Hernández, Tony, 258 Un héroe del Magreb/A Hero from the Maghreb (Muñoz), 196–97 Hewitt, Andrew, 375n13

Index High Council of Scientific Research (CSIC), 223 Las Hijas del Sol/The Daughters of the Sun, 340–42, 345, 346 Hispanidad/Hispanicity, 49–50, 335, 363n15 Hispano-Arabic, as term, 359n2 Hispanotropicalism: and Bens, 378n11; and black outside/white inside paradigm, 80, 344, 365n8; and Catholicism, 73; and Cristo negro/Black Christ, 284, 291; definition of, 73; and Elombuangani, 74, 75, 80; and Franco, 364n4; and Ganivet, 96–100; and Iradier, 70–85; and mestizaje, 196, 285–86; Nerín on, 283; and Spaniards’ presumed “African sensibility,” 74–75, 92 Historia de Galicia/History of Galicia (Murguía), 46 Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España/History of the Dominion of the Arabs in Spain (Conde), 28–29 Historia de los heterodoxos españoles/History of Heterodox Spaniards (Menéndez Pelayo), 39 History of the Mohammedan Dynasties (alMaqqari), 29 Hitler, Adolf, 218, 224, 236, 250–53, 377n4. See also Nazism Hitler Youth movement, 236 Hobsbawm, Eric, 6 Holden, Philip, 196 Homosexuality and homoeroticism: and Andalusi poetry, 207–8; and fascism, 201–2, 375n13; in García Figueras’s Ramadán de paz/Ramadan of Peace, 215–18; Greek model of, 188, 195; in ¡Harka!, 209–15, 376n25, 379n12; in Kipling’s works, 212, 215; in Muñoz’s works, 194–95; and Nazism, 201, 218; regulation of homosexuality by Franco regime, 218, 222; in Rif campaigns, 171–72, 182–92; Rojas y Moreno on, 207,

431

208; and Spanish-Morrocan fraternal relations after Spanish Civil War, 206; and violence against women, 201; virile homosexuality, 195, 376n19 Hopewell, John, 212 Housefield, Jim, 372n23 How I Found Livingstone (Stanley), 89 Hugo, Victor, 22 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 44 I els també Catalans/They Are Also Catalan (Arimany), 384n22 Ibarra, Eduardo, 100 Ibn al-Awwam, Abu Zakariya, 26–27 Ibn Amira, 307 Ibn Báya Ensemble, 306 Ibn Hazm, 149 IDEA (Institute for African Studies), 223, 378n10 Ideal andaluz/Andalusian Ideal (Infante), 48 Idearium español (Ganivet), 89, 98–100 Ifni, 54 Ifni War (1957–58), 239, 378n9 Ilonbé, Raquel, 344 Ilustración Española y Americana, 33, 160, 195, 361n10, 368n21 La imagen del magrebí en España/The Image of the Maghrebian in Spain (Martín Corrales), 62–63 Immigration: of Afro-Spaniards and restaging of identities, 339–55; attitudes of Spanish converts to Islam toward, 380n2; and border thinking, 346–47, 354; from Cameroon, 345; and Chohra’s Volevo diventare bianca/I Want to Become White, 384n24; in El cielo gira/ The Sky Turns, 381n8; in El Hachmi’s Jo també sóc catalana/I Am Also Catalan, 346–54; employment for immigrants, 384–85n25; in En Construcción/Under Construction (or Work in Progress), 313; from Equatorial Guinea, 339–42; and

432

Index

Immigration (continued) European Union/European Economic Community, 318, 341–42, 383n19; and family reunification policy, 384–85n25; Flesler on, 319, 345; and Foreigners Act in Spain, 341–42, 383n19, 385n25; and integration policy, 352–53; and Karrouch’s De Nador a Vic, 345–46; management of, in Spain, 300, 383–84n19; from Morocco, 345–54; music on, 340– 42; Muslim immigrants in Spain, 302, 323; Omgbá’s fiction on, 345; otherness of immigrants in Spain, 318; poetry on, 343–45; Vidal on, 323; violence against immigrants, 342; Zamora Loboch on, 342–45 Imperial Leather (McClintock), 10 Imperialism. See Spanish Conquest and Spanish American colonies; and specific African countries and regions In Darkest Africa (Stanley), 81, 89, 367n16 Infante, Blas, 48–49, 301, 302, 303 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 134, 135, 136 Inquisition, 13–14, 40, 41, 146 Institute for African Studies (IDEA), 223, 378n10 International Olympic Committee, 64 Invagination, 140, 371n20 Iradier, Manuel: and African hygiene, 365n8; on African natives as tricksters, 75; on Benga language, 82; on black outside/white inside paradigm, 80; on British ships, 72; on Cádiz sailors, 75; in Canary Islands, 74, 76–79; and companion Elombuangani, 74, 75, 80; on connections between Basques and Africans, 83–84; and craniometric analysis, 74; expeditions of, to Equatorial Guinea, 59, 71–72, 75, 79–81, 84, 92–93, 365n9; and La Exploradora/The Explorers’ Association, 71, 82, 365n9; finances for African expeditions of, 81, 365n9; and Ganivet’s writings, 91–93;

and Hamitic hypothesis, 82–83; and Hispanotropicalism, 70–85; illnesses of, 74, 81, 365n5; infuence of, 249; women on first expedition of, 72, 364n3; writings by, 71–72, 91, 366n10 Ireland, 47 Irigaray, Luce, 10, 360n3 Irisarri, Ángeles de, 381n7 Irving, Washington, 16, 24, 26, 27, 39, 41, 361n7 Isabel de Solís, reina de Granada/Isabel de Solís, Queen of Granada (Martínez de la Rosa), 26 Isabella I, Queen, 12, 16–17, 43, 53, 55, 124, 320 Isabella II, Queen, 30, 53, 55, 147, 157–59, 372n27 Islam: Alarcón on, 205; Alarcón on Muslim men and women, 110, 111–12; in Alarcón’s La Alpujarra, 143–44; and burka worn by women, 334; and Córdoba mosque, 3, 4, 18, 302, 357; and El Hachmi, 351–55; Fanjul on, 321–23; Fortuny’s paintings of Muslim women, 141; and fundamentalism, 381n6; and identity formation, 381n5; and marital practices, 185; and Moroccan immigrants in, Catalonia, 351–54; in Pérez Galdós’s novel, 128; and Ramadan, 351, 352; respect for, by Franco’s regime, 280; Sánchez Albornoz on, 322–23; sexual “perversions” and Muslims, 180–83, 374n9; in Spain, 301, 302, 357; and Spanish Civil War, 205–6; Spanish converts to, 301, 302, 357, 380n2; and terrorism, 318, 319, 381–82n9; Vidal on, 323. See also Arabism; Moriscos; Morocco Italy, 202, 251, 252 Japan, 188 Jara, Antonio, 302 Jensen, Geoffrey, 173 Jews. See Judaism

Index Jiménez Lucena, Isabel, 248 Jo també sóc catalana/I Am Also Catalan (El Hachmi), 346–54, 357 Johnson, Courtney, 363n15 Jones, Owen, 29 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de, 19, 27 Joven judía/Young Jewish Woman (Fortuny), 141, 142 Juan Carlos, King, 342 Juana de Beltraneja, 53 Juaristi, Jon, 366n12 Jubran, Carl, 363n17 Judaism: Alarcón on Jewish men and women, 110–11, 371n16; Berber Jews, 372n23; and blood purity norms, 13–15; in Borgos’s novella, 171; as conversos, 13–14; expulsion of Jews from Spain, 12, 15, 38, 39, 342–43; Fortuny’s paintings of Jewish women, 141; García Figueras on, 217; Holocaust against Jews, 207; Lombroso on Jews, 176; in Pérez Galdós’s fiction, 132–34, 137–38; and Semitic race, 56–57; Spain and Jewish heritage tourism, 381n4; and Spanish Inquisition, 13–14; and Zionism, 368n20. See also Anti-Semitism Juderías, Julián, 40 Junco, José Álvarez, 25, 175–77 Jünger, Ernst, 376n21 Kabbani, Rana, 370–71n15, 371n18 El Kaíd Ismail. See Gatell, Joaquín Kamen, Henry, 53 Karrouch, Laila, 345–46 Khalil-Bey, 159 Kinder, Marsha, 308 King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 10 Kipling, Rudyard, 50, 72, 212, 215 Ki-Zerbo, Joseph, 66 Labanyi, Jo: on La canción de Aixa/Aixa’s Song, 377–78n5; on degeneration, 175, 373n5; on Franco’s internal colonization, 299; on Giménez Caballero, 285,

433

376n20; on national identity, 30, 68; on Spanish missionary films, 282, 286; on Spanish Romantic writers, 24–27, 361n8 Labra, Rafael María de, 93 Lacan, Jacques, 159 Lafuente Alcántara, Miguel, 26, 27, 55 Lahrech, Oumama Aouad, 372n23 Lalia, 332–33 Land Without Bread, 228 Lane, Christopher, 214, 215 Lane, Edward William, 370–71n15 Larache, 232, 235, 268 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 39–41, 343 Lasala, Magdalena, 381n7 Law of Blood, 163 Law of Historical Memory, 380n1 Lawrence, T. E., 192, 208 Lazarillo de Tormes, 238 Lécuyer, Marie-Claude, 113, 115 Ledesma, Navarro, 85–86, 88, 99, 367n15 Legado Andalusí/Andalusi Legacy, 305 Leila/Perejil incident, 317–18 Lejeune, Louis-François, 119, 121, 369n6 Leo Africanus, 181, 374nn7–8 Leopold II, King, 90, 98 Lettres persanes (Montesquieu), 17, 41 Lewis, John Frederick, 20 Lezra, Jacques, 16, 63 Liberación Andaluza/Andalusian Liberation, 302–3 Libya, 383n17 The Light That Failed (Kipling), 215 Liniger-Goumaz, Max, 379n15 Liquor trade, 91 Liszt, Franz, 236 Litvak, Lily, 364n20 Livingstone, David, 71, 364n2 La llamada de África/The Call of Africa, 252–68, 274, 278, 291, 327, 378n9, 378– 79n12 Local Histories/Global Designs (Mignolo), 346–47 The Location of Culture (Bhabha), 10–11 Locura de amor/Love Crazy, 220–21

434

Index

Lombroso, Cesare, 69, 175–76, 373nn4–5 Loomba, Ania, 14–15, 360n1 López, Harold, 152 López Aguilar, Juan Fernando, 381–82n9 López Baralt, Luce, 322 López de Gómara, Francisco, 40 López García, Bernabé, 28, 33, 239, 362n14 Loribó, Paloma, 340–42, 354 Loureiro, Ángel, 363n15 Ludwig, King of Bavaria, 236 Luna, Manuel, 236 Lusotropicalism, 73, 364n4 Machado, Manuel, 60, 194 Macià, Francesc, 372–73n1 Macías Nguema, Francisco, 298, 299, 339, 340, 379n16 Madagascar, 383n17 Madariaga, María Rosa de, 193, 206, 303, 319, 375–76n18, 377n3 Madrazo, Cecilia de, 151, 159 Madrazo, Pedro de, 159 Maeztu, Ramiro de, 49 Maja desnuda/Nude Maja (Goya), 155 Majid, Anouar, 325 Maketos (non-Basque Spaniards), 45 Malabo. See Santa Isabel Malcolm X, 381n5 Male Fantasies (Theweleit), 200, 201 Mañé, Benito, 343 Manet, Edouard, 154–55, 156 Manuscript Found in Saragossa (Potocki), 24 El manuscrito carmesí/The Crimson Manuscript (Gala), 306, 381n7 al-Maqqari, 29 Marañón, Gregorio, 320, 361n8 Marín, Manuela, 304 Marina, José, 162, 167, 168, 170 Mariné, Juan, 255 Mármol Carvajal, Luis del, 181–83, 187, 374nn7–8 Márquez Villanueva, Francisco, 128, 148, 303–4, 370n13, 380n3

Marsh, R. O., 366n10 Martí Ayxelà, Montse, 156, 369n6 Martín Corrales, Eloy, 62–63, 363– 64nn18–20, 378n6 Martín Muñoz, Gema, 304 Martínez, María Elena, 14–15 Martínez de la Rosa, Francisco, 25, 26 Martínez Santa-Olalla, Julio, 223 Marx, Anthony, 12–13, 16 Marxism, 300, 313 Marxist-Leninist Movement for the Liberation of the Basque Nation (MLNV), 382n14 Masculinity: of Berber warriors, 172; bodies of Spanish colonizers versus natives, 257–58; in Burgos’s Rif war narratives, 171–74; in La canción de Aixa/ Aixa’s Song, 234–37, 241–43; degenerate masculinities, 174–83; in ¡Harka!, 209–15, 376n25, 379n12; of Moroccan soldiers, 172–73, 174, 177–80, 203; and sadomasochism, 191–202; sexual “perversions” and Muslims, 180–83, 374n9; of Spanish Foreign Legion, 186–92, 198–200; of Spanish soldiers, 173–74; Spanish-Moroccan fraternal relations after Spanish Civil War, 206–19; and Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60), 177. See also Gender; Homosexuality and homoeroticism The Massacre of the Abencerrages (Clairin), 360n4 Massacres of Chios (Delacroix), 371n21 La matanza de los Abencerrajes/The Massacre of the Abencerrages (Fortuny), 151, 360n4 Mateo Dieste, Josep Lluís, 220, 230, 261, 378n7 Maura, Antonio, 162–63 Mauritania, 250, 324, 327, 383n17 Mayas, in Ganivet’s novel, 85–99 Mayo, Alfredo, 209–10 McClintock, Anne, 10–11, 288, 360n3 Meabe, Tomás, 238

Index Medina Molera, Abderrahman, 302, 303 Melilla, 161–62, 317, 323, 338, 383n19, 384n19 Memory places, 305 Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino, 39, 320, 377n1 Las Meninas (Velázquez), 371n19 Menocal, María Rosa, 321, 359n2 Mercer, John, 78 Merino, Ricardo, 236 Mernissi, Fatima, 246, 378n7 Mestizaje, 196, 209, 262–63, 375n16 Metioui, Omar, 306 Micó, Carlos, 192 Mignolo, Walter, 346–47, 354 Millán Astray, José, 186, 188–89, 191, 237, 375n13, 375n17 Milszyn, Natalia, 98 Mimicry, 10–11, 63, 65–66, 100, 169, 242, 266, 360n3 Mines. See Asturian miners’ strike; Rif mines Mira, Alberto, 194–95, 208, 212–15, 218 Miró, María, 329–31 Miscegenation, 56–57, 175, 195–96, 261– 63, 285, 287, 375n16, 376n20. See also Mulattos; Race Misión blanca/White Mission, 282, 283, 284, 285 Missionaries and missions, 55, 97, 182, 280, 281–84, 286–88, 294, 298–99, 379n15 Mistral, Jorge, 285 Mitchell, Timothy, 126 MLNV, 382n14 Moa, Pío, 46 Mojatar, Maimón, 168 Monroe, James, 26, 28–29, 30, 33, 207 Montes, Lola, 236 Montesquieu, Baron de, 17, 41 Montiel, Sara, 220 “Moor’s last sigh,” 360n4 Mora, Consuelo, 65 Moratinos, Miguel Ángel, 352 Morató, Cristina, 364n3

435

Moreiras-Menor, Cristina, 380n1 Morel, Bénédict Augustine, 175 Moreno, Isidoro, 15 Moreno Torregrosa, Pasqual, 345 Moreno Torroba, Federico, 235 Moreras, Jordi, 351–52, 384n20 Moriscos: in Alarcón’s La Alpujarra, 143–46; aljamiada literature by, 29; and Alpujarras War (1568–70), 15, 143–44, 181, 360n2; in Andalusia, 48; and blood purity, 12, 13, 15; children of, and expulsion of parents, 15; descendants of, 302–3; expulsion of, from Spain, 15–16, 30–31, 39, 95–96, 103, 147, 152, 320, 343, 361n8, 368n1; and Ganivet’s novel, 95–96; and sexual “perversions,” 181; slavery of, 15; Spanish writers on, 24–26. See also Islam El moro expósito/The Foundling Moor (Rivas), 25–26 El Moro Vizcaíno. See Murga, José María de Moroccans (Fortuny), 141 Moroccans Conducting Military Exercises (Fantasia) (Delacroix), 178 Morocco: Alarcón on, 105–6, 113–17; Annual disaster (1922) in, 197–98; Badía’s plot to conquer, 1–2, 18, 58, 129; Badía’s travels in, 2–4; and Britain, 51, 54, 55, 161, 163; Costa on, 57–59; educational programs on, 305–6; Estébanez Calderón on, 51–52; and fishing industry, 382n13; and France, 161, 162, 163, 184, 239, 276, 277; immigrants from, 345– 54; independence for, 276, 277, 328; and independence of Canary Islands, 383n17; mosques in, 3; music in, 306; Napoleonic Code in, 378n7; nationalism in, 229–30; relationship between Spain and, 1–4, 51, 54, 359n1; Spanish Civil War and Spanish-Moroccan relations, 206–19, 224–34; Spanish Foreign Legion in, 186–92, 198–200; and Spanish invasion of Leila/Perejil, 317–18;

436

Index

Morocco (continued) and Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60), 30; Spanish officers “going native” in, 184–86; Spanish population of, 268–69; Suleiman as sultan of, 1–2; and Western Sahara, 323–24, 327, 331–32, 338, 382–83n15; women in, 131–32, 133, 139, 168–71, 174, 187, 209, 225–27, 230–32, 330–31, 348. See also Rif campaigns; Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60) Mosques, 3, 4, 18, 302, 357. See also Islam Mosse, George, 172, 173, 186, 376n21 Motamid, último rey de Sevilla/Motamid, the Last King of Seville (Infante), 48–49 Movement for the Independence of the Canarian Archipelago (MPAIAC), 337–38 Movimiento de Musulmanes Europeos alMurabitún/al-Murabitún Movement of Muslim Europeans, 302, 380n2 Mozambique, 383n17 Mozárabes (Christians in Muslim territory), 33 MPAIAC, 337–38 Mudéjares (Muslims in Christian territory), 33, 234, 306 Mulattos, 15, 50, 86, 139, 244, 298, 371n17, 371n21 Muley Abd-er-Rahman, Sultan, 54, 104 Muley-el-Abbas, General, 115, 116, 157 Muley El-Hassan, 207 Multiculturalism, 302, 303–7, 381n5, 381n6 Mummies, 77 Munilla Gómez, Eduardo, 378n10 Muñoz, Isaac, 193–99, 209, 259, 375n16 Muñoz, René, 284, 288 Muñoz Lorente, Gerardo, 345 Munt, Silvia, 332–33 al-Murabit, Abdel Kader, 302 al-Murabitún Movement of Muslim Europeans, 302, 380n2 Murga, José María de, 366–67n13

Murguía, Manuel, 46 Murphy, James C., 19 Museo Español de Antigüedades/Spanish Museum of Antiquities, 35, 362n11 Museo Universal, 104, 115, 116 Music, 306–7, 334–35, 340–42 Muslims. See Islam Mussolini, Benito, 251 Nador, 200, 345 Narváez, Prime Minister, 51, 52 El Nasiri, Ahmed ben Jálid, 370n13 National Archaeology Museum, 34–35, 362n11 National Catholicism, 206, 218, 252, 299, 356. See also Catholicism National identities, 5–7. See also specific countries and peripheral nations National Museum of Anthropology, 65, 66–70, 71, 77 Nationalism. See Peripheral nationalism Navarro, Carlos, 113 Nazism, 201–2, 207, 218, 224, 236, 250–51, 254 Ndongo-Bidyogo, Donato, 293–99, 339, 340, 354, 379n16 Nebrija, Antonio de, 12–13 Neches, José, 379n13 Necrophagy, 379n15 El Negro de Banyoles scandal, 64–67, 73, 364n1, 384n21 Neo-Catholicism, 101, 103, 104–13, 356, 368–69n2. See also Catholicism Neolithic Age, 223 Nerín, Gustau, 73, 202, 250, 252, 283 Netherlands, 40 Neutralidad/Neutrality, 253 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 173 Nigeria, 250, 251, 293, 298 Nobleza baturra/Aragonese Virtue, 236 Nochlin, Linda, 131, 134 Nonell, Carmen, 272–79, 299 Nora, Pierre, 305

Index Nordau, Max, 175, 176, 373n5 North Africa. See specific countries Nude (painting genre), 130–31, 134, 135, 153–59 El Nuevo Mundo, 195 Núñez de Arce, Gaspar, 50–51, 113 Núñez de Lara, Álvar, 38 Oar, Pedro, 82 OAU. See Organization of African Unity (OAU) Obiang, Teodoro, 340 Odalisque (Fortuny), 130–31, 136–37 Odalisque with Slave (Ingres), 134, 135, 136 O’Donnell, Leopoldo, 54, 55, 104, 108, 115, 116, 118, 119, 157 Olavide, Begoña, 306 Olavide, Rosa, 306 Olivo y Canales, Felipe, 183 Olmedo Moreno, Miguel, 89, 367n18 Olóriz y Aguilera, Federico, 42 Olympia (Manet), 154–55, 156 Omgbá, Víctor, 345 Orduña, Juan de, 220, 282 Organization of African Unity (OAU), 64; Liberation Committee of, 337, 383n17 Orgaz, Luis, 204 Orientalism: and Alarcón, 105, 144; and La canción de Aixa/Aixa’s Song, 244– 46; definition of, 8; and “Fantasias” genre, 177–80; metaphor of, as staging, 9; and Nonell’s Zoco Grande, 272–73; and odalisque paintings, 130–31, 134– 37, 141, 155, 371nn18–19; and painters, 20–22, 119, 121, 134–36, 152–54, 177, 363n19; Said on, 8–9, 135, 363n20; and Spain, 8–9, 363–64n20, 375n13; and Spanish view of Moroccan men, 375n13; and Spanish writers, 24–25; SpanishMoroccan fraternal relations after Spanish Civil War, 206–19; Spurr on definition of orient, 9

437

The Origin of the World (Courbet), 159 Ortega, Marie-Linda, 116–17 Ortega y Gasset, José, 61 Ortego, Francisco, 117, 157 Ortiz, Augusto, 379n13 Ortiz Echagüe, José, 237–38 Osorio Zabala, Amado, 81–82, 279, 365n9 Ossuna, Manuel de, 47 Otero, Xabi, 336 Otherness: Apter on, 371n20; Balfour on external versus internal Other, 203; Balibar on stigmata of, 263; of Basques, 44; desire for racial other, 287–88; feminized colonial other, 192; of immigrants in Spain, 318; incorporation of the other within the self, 28; Las Casas on Spanish conquerors as other, 41; in La llamada de África/The Call of Africa, 266; of Moors and Moriscos, 25; Moroccans as other, 327; of nomads, 330; and Orientalism, 9; and shift in boundaries, 8; and Spanish converts to Islam, 357; in Western museums of anthropology and natural history, 66–67 O’Wisiedo, Mayrata, 263 Páez, Jerónimo, 305, 381n6 Pagden, Anthony, 40–41 The Painting of Modern Life (Clark), 154–55, 156 Paintings. See Art Pan-Arabism, 300 Paniagua, Carlos, 306 Paniagua, Cecilio, 225 Paniagua, Eduardo, 306 Panopticon, 126 Panorama painting, 122–23 Panoramas (visual spectacle), 125–26, 369n4 Paradox, rey (Baroja), 368n20 Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 46, 166, 370n12 Pareja amorosa en un taller/Amorous Couple in a Studio (Fortuny), 159

438

Index

Paseos por Granada/Strolls Through Granada, 18–19 Patronato de Indígenas, 281 Patronato de Protección a la Mujer/National Council for the Protection of Women, 270 Pavlović, Tatjana, 186, 212 Payne, Stanley, 252 Pedraz Marcos, Azucena, 366n10 Peña, Luis, 212 Pena Pérez, Jaime, 288 Peninsular War (1808–14), 25, 28, 169, 112 Perceval, José María, 15–16, 25, 39 Pereira Rodríguez, Teresa, 385n25 Pérez, Lucrecia, 342 Pérez Barradas, José, 337 Pérez Galdós, Benito: and Alarcón’s Diario, 368n1, 370n10; on Catholicism, 146–51; colonized female body in fiction of, 131–41; Jews in fiction of, 132–34, 137–38; Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60) in fiction of, 123–29, 367n14, 370n13; women in fiction of, 131–41, 149–51 —works: Carlos VI en la Rápita/Carlos VI in La Rápita, 134, 137–41, 143, 146–51, 258; Fortunata y Jacinta, 373n5. See also Aita Tettauen/The War of Tetuán (Pérez Galdós) Pérez Melgosa, Adrián, 16, 381n4 Performance: academic disciplines underlying, 9; Afro-Spaniards and restaging of identities, 339–55; and celebrating convivencia, 300–307; convivencia in En Construcción, 307–16; and decolonization of Western Sahara, 323–35; Hispanotropicalism and performance art, 73, 77–78; McClintock on performance of gendered identities, 10; and surrogation, 78, 79, 103; and violent resignification of convivencia, 316–23 Peripheral nationalism: Andalusian, 46, 48, 301, 335; Asturian, 343; Basque, 44–

45, 71, 76, 301, 335, 343, 362n12, 382n14; Canarian, 47–48, 335, 383nn16–18; Cantabrian, 343; Catalan, 43–44, 301, 335, 372–73n1; and Franco regime, 300; Galician, 45–47, 301, 335, 343; García de Cortázar Ruiz de Aguirre on, 321; and internal colonization, 203; Zamora Loboch on, 343 Perry, Mary Elizabeth, 14, 181–82, 368n19 Peters, John Durham, 330 Philip II, King, 17, 108, 144 Philip III, King, 144, 146, 152, 368n1 Philip V, King, 18 Philippines, 49, 99, 308, 363n15 Photography, 113–14, 122, 336, 369n7, 378n6 Picazo, Ángel, 257 Pick, Daniel, 373n5 Pinedo Herrero, Carmen, 122 Pinochet, Augusto, 380n1 PNV. See Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) Los poderes de la tempestad/The Powers of the Tempest (Ndongo-Bidyogo), 298–99 Poem of My Cid, 177 Poemas arábigoandaluces/Arabo-Andalusi Poems (García Gómez), 207–8 POLISARIO, 134, 324–26, 328, 329, 331, 334–39, 382–83n15 Pollock, Griselda, 155 Popular Front for the Independence of the Canaries (FREPIC-AWAÑAK), 338 Popular Party (PP), 317–18, 380n1, 383n19 Por tierras de Marruecos (aroma de recuerdos)/Through Moroccan Lands (Aroma of Memories) (Rojas y Moreno), 206–9 Porres, Martín de, Saint, 284, 288; Portrait of a Girl or Joven judía/Young Jewish Woman or Young Moroccan Woman (Fortuny), 141, 142 Portugal, 52, 53, 73, 364–65n4 Potocki, Jan, 24 Pozzi, Gabriela, 168, 169, 171 PP. See Popular Party (PP)

Index Prangey, Girault de, 19, 22, 23 Pratt, Mary Louise, 71–72, 125, 126 Práxedes Sagasta, 31 Prieto, Indalecio, 193 Prim, General, 54, 117, 118, 119 Primo de Rivera, José Antonio, 284 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 375–76n18 Print capitalism, 7 “Prisionero de la Gran Vía” (Zamora Loboch), 344 PSOE. See Socialist Party La puerta entornada/The Open Door, 100 Puerto Rico, 49, 236 Puig y Roda, Gabriel, 38 Pujol, Jordi, 350, 384n20 Pulido, Ángel, 69 Purity of blood. See Blood purity Al-Qaeda, 318, 319 Queipo de Llano, Gonzalo, 202–4, 208–9 Quesada, Eduardo, 156 Quevedo, Francisco de, 176, 343 Quílez, Francesc, 159 La quimera de al-Andalus/The Chimera of al-Andalus (Fanjul), 321 Race: African colonization by Spain and negotiation of Spanish race, 50–60; in Aita Tettauen, 133–41, 371n17; Arabic influence compared with drop of red dye in pond, 377n1; Aryan race, 43–44, 69, 176, 203; and black outside/white inside paradigm, 80, 344, 365n8; and blackface, 285; and blood purity, 13–15, 40–42, 43, 57, 76, 83; in La canción de Aixa/Aixa’s Song, 247–49; and craniometric study, 42, 69–70, 74; and cultural racism, 258; and culture, 13–14; and Darwinism, 42, 47; definition of, 13; Fernández y González on racial and cultural mixing, 56–57; and French colonial policy of assimilation, 240, 297,

439

352, 378n5; Gobineau on, 43, 45, 175, 176, 195–96; and Hamitic hypothesis, 45, 82–84, 92; and Hispanidad/Hispanicity, 49–50; in La llamada de África/ The Call of Africa, 252–68; and miscegenation, 56–57, 175, 195–96, 261–63, 285, 287, 375n16, 376n20; and mulattos, 15, 50, 86, 139, 244, 298, 371n17, 371n21; Muñoz on racial mixing, 196, 375n16; Nonell’s Zoco Grande on mixed-race relationships, 272–79, 286; and racial degeneration, 56, 175–77, 195–96; and “scientific racism,” 39, 42, 47, 56–57, 69, 74, 355; Semitic race, 56–57, 175, 373n4; in Spain’s National Museum of Anthropology, 65, 66–70; Spain’s racial panic in late nineteenth century, 39–50; and Spanish policy against mixed-race relationships, 269–72, 379n13; and Spanish regional differences, 68–69; white inheritance of Spanish racial stock, 42– 43, 223; in Zamora Loboch’s Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca/How To Be Black and Not Die in Aravaca, 342–43. See also Blood brotherhood/sisterhood; Whiteness Rada y Delgado, Juan de Dios de la, 35, 362n11 Radio Tarifa, 307 El Raisuni, 184 Ramadán de paz/Ramadan of Peace (García Figueras), 215–18, 226 Ramito de hierbabuena/Mint Sprig (Muñoz Lorente), 345 Ramsden, Herbert, 100 Rape, 187, 192, 201, 203, 204, 242, 289, 342, 376n20 RASD. See Sahawari Arab Democratic Republic (RASD) Ravenel, Jean, 155 Raza/Race, 262, 378n8 Re, Gustavo, 257 Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fer-

440

Index

Real Academia (continued) nando/San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, 18–19, 27, 28 La realidad histórica de España/The Historic Reality of Spain (Castro), 303–4 Reconquest, 6–7, 12, 38, 40, 48, 55, 93, 105, 124, 203, 220, 259–60 Red Cross, 167 Regnault, Henri, 19–20, 21 Reinvindicaciones de España/Spain’s Revindications, 249–50 Religion. See Catholicism; Islam; Judaism Renan, Ernest, 5–6, 16 Reparaz, Gonzalo de, 40, 58, 368n21 Resina, Joan Ramon, 317, 380n1, 382n14 Retzius, Anders, 69 Revista de Antropología, 68, 69 Revista de Cataluña, 130 Revista de Occidente, 321, 383n16 Rey, Florián, 235–36, 377n4 Reyero, Carlos, 38 A Rhetoric of Irony (Booth), 96–97 Ribera, Julián, 306, 377n1 Riego Amézaga, Bernardo, 114–15, 122 Riera Ferrer, Luis, 255 Rif campaigns: Burgos on, 164–74, 193; casualties during, 162; and Catalans, 372–73n1; censorship or banning of writings on, 206; and conscription system in Spain, 162–63; and degenerate masculinities, 174–83; and France, 239; and Franco, 186–91, 374n10; historical details on, 162–63; and homosexuality and homoeroticism, 171–72, 182–92; and military promotions, 374n10; mustard gas used in, 198; and sadomasochism, 191–202; and Santa Marina, 198–200, 206; Vidal on, 323; and war atrocities, 170–71, 174, 192–93, 200, 204 Rif mines, 162, 163, 230 Río Muni, 283, 298 Rivas, Duque de, 25–26 Riviere, Joan, 360n3

Rivière Gómez, Aurora, 27–28 Roach, Joseph, 65, 78, 79, 103 Robert, Bartomeu, 44 Roberts, David, 20 Rocamora, José, 164, 168–69 Rodríguez, Delfín, 360n3 Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María, 356, 357 Rodríguez Mediano, Fernando, 269, 271, 275 Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis, 335, 381n9, 383n19 Roehm, Ernst, 218 El Rogui, 162, 169 Rojas y Moreno, José, 206–9, 232 Rokeby Venus (Velázquez), 371n19 Romancero colonial/Colonial Ballad-Book (Vega), 233 Romancero marroquí/Moroccan Ballad Book, 224–32, 235, 237, 239, 377n2 Romanones, Count of, 195 Romeo, Caterina, 384n24 Root, Deborah, 14, 368n19 Ros Agudo, Manuel, 250 Ros de Olano, Antonio, 54, 104, 382n11 Royal Academy of History, 29–31, 33, 55, 319–20 Ruiz Miguel, Carlos, 335 Ruiz Orsatti, Ricardo, 123, 370n9, 370n13 Ruppel, Richard J., 196 Rwanda, 82, 85, 89, 92, 367n16 Saavedra, Eduardo, 30, 31, 35, 55, 56 Sabater Pi, Jordi, 343–44, 384n21 Sade, Marquis de, 367n15 Sadomasochism, 191–202 Sahawari Arab Democratic Republic (RASD), 324 Saharawis. See Spanish Sahara/Spanish West Africa; Western Sahara Said, Edward, 8–9, 10, 135, 363n20 Sala, Emilio, 38 Salafranca Ortega, Jesús, 269 Salazar, Antonio, 364n4

Index Salmerón y García, Nicolás, 176 “Salutación a los Rifeños”/Greeting to the Riffians (Unamuno), 61 “Salvad a Copito”/Save Snowflake (Zamora Loboch), 343–45 Salvatore, Armando, 357 Sampedro, Benita, 339, 341 San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, 18–19, 27, 28 San Ildefonso and Pardo Treaties (1777– 78), 52 San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Unamuno), 368n23 Sánchez Albornoz, Claudio, 322–23, 362n14, 377n1, 380n3 Sánchez Ruano, Francisco, 205 Sánchez Vidal, Agustín, 122 Sandoval, Fray Prudencio de, 14–15, 360n1 Sanjurjo, José, 202 Santa Isabel, 53, 280 Santa Marina, Luys, 198–201, 206 Santamaría, Carlos, 38 Santiáñez-Tió, Nil, 367n18 Savirón y Estévan, Paulino, 362n11 Sayahi, Lotfi, 240 Scarlett, Elizabeth, 359n1 Schaefer-Rodríguez, Claudia, 362n14 Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, 363n15 Schools. See Education Scoular, Bryan, 40 SEAT, 238 Sebold, Russell, 24 Second contact of postcolonial era, 66 Second-wave nation building, 6, 17–27 Sedgwick, Eve, 182, 197, 202 Seed, Patricia, 382n11 Semidan, 78–79 Semitic race, 56–57, 175, 373n4 Serna, Alfonso de la, 54 Serrano, Carlos, 113, 115 Serrano Suñer, Ramón, 251 Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence), 208 Sexual assault. See Rape

441

Sexuality: in Cristo negro/Black Christ, 287–88; Muslims and sexual “perversions,” 180–83, 374n9; Nonell’s Zoco Grande on mixed-race relationships, 272–79, 286; and Spanish policy against mixed-race relationships, 269–72, 379n13; of women in Spanish Guinea, 279–81. See also Gender; Homosexuality and homoeroticism; Miscegenation Sibèba, 340–42 Silva, Emilio, 380n1 Silver, Philip, 382n14 Silverman, Kaja, 208 Simonet, Francisco Javier: and Arabism, 31–33, 39, 361nn9–10, 377n1; compared with Fanjul, 321; Estébanez Calderón as teacher of, 51; exclusion of, from journal of Museo Español de Antigüedades, 35; influence of generally, 317, 320; on Spanish racial stock, 42 Sirena de pólvora/Siren of Dust (Vega), 232, 271 Slavery and slave trade, 14–15, 52, 53, 96, 280, 343 Smith, Paul Julian, 360n1, 362n14 Smithsonian Institute, 366n10 Snowflake/Copito de Nieve (albino gorilla), 343–45, 351, 384n21 Socialist Party, 301, 317, 318, 356, 380n1, 383n19 Sociedad Antropológica Española/Spanish Anthropological Society, 56, 68, 70, 93 Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonistas/Spanish Society of Africanists and Colonialists, 55, 57, 81, 92–93, 365n9 Sociedad Viajera/Traveling Society, 71 “Soledad”/Loneliness (Ilonbé), 344 Sorel, Andrés, 345 Sotomayor, Carmen, 362n14 Sous la tente (Yriarte), 115 Spackman, Barbara, 375n13 Spain: ambivalence in relationship between Africa and, 60–63; antiwar pro-

442

Index

Spain (continued) tests and strikes in, 163; and Arabism, 27–38; autonomous regions and cities in, 301–3, 322, 335; colonization of Americas by, 40–42, 49, 59; conscription system in, 162–63; Constitutions of, 301, 338, 356; economic development of, 238–39; erasure of Islamic and African influence from, 3–4; as European Union member, 317, 318, 341–42; film production facilities in, 224–25; firstwave nation building in, 6–7, 12–18, 43; georacial unity of North Africa and, 58–59, 63, 259–60; “Glorious” Revolution in, 30; invasion of Leila/Perejil by, 317–18; and Law of Historical Memory, 380n1; and Nazi Germany, 224–25, 236, 239–40, 250–51, 254; and Reconquest, 6–7, 12, 38, 40, 48, 55, 93, 105, 124, 203, 259–60; Reconquest celebrations in, 16; religious freedom in, 39, 301–2, 355–56; Restoration of Bourbon monarchy in, 30, 31, 361n8; Second Republic of, 202, 222, 246, 301, 356; second-wave nation building in, 6, 17–27; and slave trade, 14, 280; as United Nations member, 252, 276, 283; women’s rights in, 168; and World War II, 224, 249, 250–68. See also Franco, Francisco; Immigration; Morocco; Race; Spanish Civil War; Spanish-American War; SpanishMoroccan War (1859–60) Spanish-American War (1898), 42, 49, 59, 60, 161–62, 174–75 Spanish Anthropological Society/Sociedad Antropológica Española, 56, 68, 70, 93 Spanish Association for the Exploration of Africa, 55 Spanish Civil War (1936–39): beginning of, 317; and Franco, 204–6, 220, 226; in García Figueras’s Ramadán de paz/ Ramadan of Peace, 215–18, 226; and Moroccan women, 225–27, 230–34; and

Nazi Germany, 236; poetry on, 232–34; in Romancero marroquí/Moroccan Ballad Book, 224–32; and Spanish women, 246; and Spanish-Moroccan relations, 202–6, 208–9, 220, 224–34, 327, 373n1; Vega’s writings on, 232–33 Spanish Conquest and Spanish American colonies, 40–42, 49, 59, 98, 161–62, 363n15 Spanish Foreign Legion, 186–202, 375– 76n18 Spanish Guinea, 222, 223, 251, 279–93, 378n10. See also Equatorial Guinea Spanish Inquisition, 13–14, 40, 41, 146 Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60): and Alarcón, 101, 104–17, 119, 126, 127, 146, 167, 177; and legacy of al-Andalus, 55–56; and Arabic studies in Spain, 30; artists’ illustrations of, 114–17; Battle of Castillejos in, 117, 122; Battle of Wad-Ras in, 54; and Britain, 54, 55; and colonized female body, 130–42; events leading up to, 54, 104; Ganivet on, 88; goals of, 55; and masculinity of Spaniards, 177; overview of, 54; paintings on, 117–23, 157; in Pérez Galdós’s Aita Tettauen/The War of Tetuán, 123–29, 367n14, 370n11; photography of, 122, 369n7; Treaty of Tetuán ending, 54–55; Vidal on, 323 Spanish Museum of Antiquities/Museo Español de Antigüedades, 35, 362n11 Spanish Sahara/Spanish West Africa, 222, 253–68, 280, 378n9. See also Western Sahara Spanish Society of Africanists and Colonialists, 55, 57, 81, 92–93, 365n9 Spanish West Africa. See Spanish Sahara/ Spanish West Africa; Western Sahara Special Committee on Decolonization, 293 Spivak, Gayatri, 326, 330, 333, 334 Spurr, David, 9 Stallaert, Christiane, 302

Index Stanley, Henry: and Bacwezi myth, 366n11; and Carlist Wars, 71; on Gambaragara, 81; and Ganivet, 85, 89, 90, 92, 367n17; journey to central Africa by, 80–81; map of Africa by, 72; and treatment of Africans, 96; writings by, 81, 89, 364n2, 367n16, 367n18 State of Autonomies, 301–3, 322, 335–36 Stem cell research, 356 Stepan, Nancy, 47 Stoler, Ann Laura, 222, 233, 258, 364n4 Strait of Gibraltar, 51, 165, 259, 307, 317. See also Gibraltar Suárez Fernández, Luis, 320 Subirats, Eduardo, 4, 380n1, 380n4 Sufi brotherhoods, 230 Suleiman, Sultan, 1–2 Surrogation, 78, 79, 80, 87, 98, 103, 104, 110 Swift, Jonathan, 90 Swinburne, Henry, 19 Tambor africano/African Drum (Fernández-Caro), 233–34, 269, 272 Tangier, 20, 54, 112, 123, 147, 151, 207, 226, 235, 250, 268, 272–73, 275, 277–78 Taussig, Michael, 65, 66, 100, 266, 366n10 Terrorism, 317, 318, 319, 381–82n9 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española/ Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language (Covarrubias), 16 Tetuán, 54–55, 105–6, 108–9, 112–13, 118, 123, 128, 131–33, 137–39, 143–44, 147, 151, 161, 187–88, 214, 216–18, 229, 230, 232, 235–36, 244, 247, 261, 268–69, 274–75, 370n10, 370n12, 371n15, 371n16, 382n11 Tetuán, Battle of. See Battle of Tetuán (Fortuny) Theweleit, Klaus, 189, 200, 201 Three Cultures, 269, 303–6, 320 Through the Dark Continent (Stanley), 81, 89, 364n2, 367n16, 367n18

443

Tichy, Gerard, 253 Tindouf, 324, 325, 329, 382n10 Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra/The Shadows of Your Black Memory (Ndongo-Bidyogo), 293–99, 379n15 “Tirso de Molina,” 340–42 Titian, 155 Toledo School of Translators, 305 La toma de Alhucemas/The Capture of Alhucemas, 185 Torquemada, 38 Torrado, Román, 282–83, 284, 288 Torrecilla, Jesús, 27 Torres, Rafael, 345 Torres, Ricardo, 225–26 Torres Nebrera, Gregorio, 370n10 Tortajada, Ana, 325–26, 331, 333–34, 348 Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine/ Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species (Morel), 175 Tras el águila del César: Elegía del Tercio/ In Pursuit of Caesar’s Eagle: Elegy of the Tercio (Santa Marina), 198–200 Traveler’s and Explorer’s Handbook to Africa (Gatell), 183 Traveling Society/Sociedad Viajera, 71 Treaty of Tetuán, 54–55 Tren de sombras/Train of Shadows, 308 Las tres culturas, 320 Trexler, Richard, 374n8 Tripartite Treaty, 324 Troubadour poetry, 42 Tubalist myth, 44, 45, 83–84, 366n12 Tunisia, 306 Tussell, Javier, 250 Ucelay da Cal, Enric, 372–73n1 Uganda, 80, 82, 89, 92, 298, 367n16 Unamuno, Miguel de: on Basque exclusivity/superiority, 76, 83, 362n12; on Berbers, 61, 362n12; on Europeaniza-

444

Index

Unamuno, Miguel de (continued) tion, 61; and Ganivet, 98, 100, 357; on Hispanidad, 49–50; on language versus blood, 49–50, 334; Millán Astray versus, 237; poetry by, 61; San Manuel Bueno, mártir by, 368n23 Unidad Marroquí, 227–30 Unión General de Trabajadores de Guinea Ecuatorial/General Union of Workers of Equatorial Guinea, 292–93 United Arab Emirates, 302 United Nations: and countries failing to rectify past politically motivated violence and oppression, 380n1; and Equatorial Guinea, 293; and independence for Spain’s colonies in Africa, 224, 230; International Court of Justice of, 327; and El Negro de Banyoles scandal, 64; Security Council of, 336; Spain as member of, 252, 276, 283; and Western Sahara, 324–25, 327, 336 United States, 254–55 Urquiola, Isabel de, 364n3 Valdés, Salvador, 374n8 Vallejo, José, 116 Vallejo Nágera, Antonio, 248, 376n23 La Vanguardia, 382n14 Vascoiberismo, 44, 45 Vásquez, Abdel-Hakim, 380n2 Vauzelle, Jean-Lubin, 19 Vega, Luis Antonio de, 232–34, 243, 271– 72, 377n3 Velasco, Pedro González y, 67–70, 73–74 Velázquez, Diego, 371n19 Velázquez de Echeverría, Juan, 19 Velo, Carlos, 225–27, 231 Ventura Agudiez, Juan, 367n18 Vernet, Horace, 369n6 Vernet Ginés, Juan, 377n1 Verreaux, Edouard and Jules, 64, 65, 67 Vidal, César, 323–24, 332 Viejo desnudo al sol/Nude Old Man in Sunlight (Fortuny), 373–74n6

Vilarós, Teresa, 380n1, 384n22 Villa Cisneros, 254, 329 Villaespesa, Francisco, 60, 193–94, 363n17 Violence: under Franco regime, 379– 80n1; against immigrants, 342; rape, 187, 192, 201, 203, 204, 242, 289, 342, 376n20; against Saharawi women by Morrocan men, 331–32; United Nations and countries failing to rectify past politically motivated violence and oppression, 380n1; violent resignification of convivencia, 316–23. See also specific wars Virility. See Masculinity Viscarri, Dionisio: on Franco’s Diario, 186–87, 189; on ¡Harka!, 210, 376– 77n25; on Santa Marina’s Tras el águila del César: Elegía del Tercio/In Pursuit of Caesar’s Eagle: Elegy of the Tercio, 198, 199, 201, 206 Vives, Rosa, 372n24 Las voces del estrecho/Voices of the Strait (Sorel), 345 Volevo diventare bianca/I Want to Become White (Chohra), 384n24 La Voz de Galicia, 345 Wad-Ras, Battle of, 54 Al-Wahda al-Maghribiya, 228 War atrocities, 170–71, 174, 192–93, 200, 204, 376n24. See also specific wars Weeks, Edwin Lord, 20 Westermann, Diedrich, 239–40 Western Sahara: in Los baúles del retorno/ The Return Trunks, 329–31, 332; decolonization of, 300, 323–35, 382n10; education in, 234, 328; and fishing, 382n13; and Franco, 224, 323–24, 327; in Lalia, 332–33; and Morocco, 323–24, 327, 331–32, 338, 382–83n15; and POLISARIO, 134, 324–26, 328, 329, 331, 334–39, 382–83n15; refugees from, and refugee camps, 324–25, 329–32, 382n2, 382n10; Spanish-Saharawi blood brotherhood/

Index sisterhood, 325–39; and United Nations, 324–25, 327, 336; women in, 329–34, 348. See also Spanish Sahara/Spanish West Africa “What Is a Nation?” (Renan), 5 White, José Blanco, 43 White Legend, 72–73, 196 “White Man’s Burden,” 50–51 Whiteness: of Basques, 44, 83; black outside/white inside paradigm, 80, 344, 365n8; black’s identification with, 291; in Castro y Serrano’s “Carmen, la de Fortuny,” 160; and Chohra’s Volevo diventare bianca/I Want to Become White (Chohra), 384n24; of female body in Pérez Galdós’s novels, 133–41; of Gambaragara, 81, 82, 366n10, 367n16; gaze of white eyes, 291–92; of gorilla Copito de Nieve/Snowflake, 343–45, 351, 384n21; of Hispano-Berber race, 223; in La llamada de África/The Call of Africa, 259, 263–65; of odalisque paintings, 131, 134–36, 371nn18–19; of Spanish male body, 257–58; and Spanish racial stock, 42–43, 223. See also Race Whitening, 56–57, 76, 196, 285 Wilkie, David, 20

445

Wittenberg, Hermann, 80 Women. See Gender; Rape Woolf, Virginia, 212 World War II, 224, 249, 250–52, 253–68 Xarnego, 384n22 “Xarq al-Andalus,” 307 Yagüe, Juan, 202 Yo, Mohamed/I, Mohammed (Torres), 345 Young, Robert, 287 Young Moroccan Woman (Fortuny), 141, 142 Yriarte, Charles, 115, 116, 118, 139 Yugoslavia, 311 Yxart, José, 129–30 Zabala, General, 54 Zamora Loboch, Francisco, 340, 342–45, 351, 354 Zapata-Barrero, Ricard, 383n19 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 319 Zionism, 368n20 Zoco Grande (Nonell), 272–79, 286, 299 Zorrilla, José, 26, 113 Zumalde Arregi, Imanol, 262