Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire / Edition 1

by María DeGuzmán

Overview

England and the Netherlands, Spain’s imperial rivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, imagined Spain as a land of cruel and degenerate barbarians of la leyenda negra (the Black Legend), in league with the powers of “blackest darkness” and driven by “dark motives.” In Spain’s Long Shadow, María DeGuzmán explores how this convenient demonization made its way into American culture—and proved essential to the construction of whiteness. DeGuzmán’s work reaches from the late eighteenth century—in the wake of the American Revolution—to the present. Surveying a broad range of texts and images, from Poe’s “William Wilson” and John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo to Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain and Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote, Spain’s Long Shadow shows how the creation of Anglo-American ethnicity as specifically American has depended on the casting of Spain as a colonial alter ego. The symbolic power of Spain in the American imagination, DeGuzmán argues, is not just a legacy of that nation’s colonial presence in the Americas; it lives on as well in the “blackness” of Spain and Spaniards—in the assigning of people of Spanish origin to an “off-white” racial category that reserves the designation of white for Anglo-Americans. By demonstrating how the Anglo-American imagination needs Spain and Spaniards as figures of attraction and repulsion, DeGuzmán makes a compelling and illuminating case for treating Spain as the imperial alter ego of the United States. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, ambitious in its chronological sweep, and elegant in its interpretation of literary and visual works, DeGuzmán’s book leads us to a powerful new understanding of the nature—and history—of American ethnicity.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816645282
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	08/07/2005
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

María DeGuzmán is assistant professor of English and director of Latina/o studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Shadow of the Black Legend

2. Imperial Visions: Moor, Gypsy, and Indian

3. Consolidating Anglo-American Imperial Identity around the Spanish-American War

4. Sacred Bulls of Modernism

5. (Post) Modern De-Naturalizations of Nationality

6. Afterlives of Empire

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Spain's Long Shadow is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship that attends to both the force of national borders and the intellectual traffic that crosses them." —Michael A. Elliott, author of The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism

From the Publisher