Disorientations

Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity

Susan Martin-Marquez

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780300152524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book explores from a new perspective the fraught processes of Spaniards' efforts to formulate a national identity, from the Enlightenment to the present day. Focusing on the nation's Islamic-African legacy, Susan Martin-Márquez disputes received wisdom that Spain has consistently rejected its historical relationship to Muslims and Africans. Instead, she argues, Spaniards have sometimes denied and sometimes embraced this legacy, and that vacillation has served to destabilize presumably fixed borders between Europe and the Muslim world and between Europe and Africa.

Martin-Márquez analyzes a wealth of texts produced by Spaniards as well as by Africans and Afro-Spaniards from the early nineteenth century forward. She illuminates the complexities and disorientations of Spanish identity and shows how its evolution has important implications for current debates not only in Spanish culture but also in other countries involved in negotiating a modern identity.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Theorizing the Performance of Spanish Identity
• ONE. Power Plays: Reformulations of Spanish Identity and the Colonization of Africa
• TWO. The “Savage” Art of Mimicry in Spain’s Colonization of Sub-Saharan Africa
• THREE. Staging the Odalisque’s Conquest in the Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–60)
• 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
• Works Cited
• Index