"Here's Spain Looking at You": Shifting Perspectives on North African Otherness in Galdós and Fortuny

"Here's Spain Looking at You Shifting Perspectives on North African Otherness in Galdós and Fortuny // Susan Martin-Márquez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a member of the Cinema Studies program at Rutgers University. Her book Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen was recently published by Oxford University Press, and she is currently preparing another manuscript, Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Cultural Mapping of Identity, from which the present articL· is excerpted. She is also working on a collaborative book/CD-ROM project, an oral history of cinema -going in Spain in the 1940s and 1950s, under the direction of Jo Labanyi. The violence directed against African immigrants in Spain in recent years has provoked shock and outrage in many quarters; some of the journalistic and academic treatments of these events would seem to imply that it is only now, as a result of new patterns of global migration , that Spaniards have been forced to confront their own racist sentiments. In fact, however, the conceptualization of race has always played an essential role in constructions of identity in Spain, particularly since the modern nation-state was founded upon a brutal effort to "purify" Spanish blood after eight centuries of Muslim, Jewish and Christian coexistence . Some periods of Spanish history, of course, have been characterized by a more pronounced obsession with racial issues than others. For example, race also moved to the forefront in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, when the growing sense of national crisis that reached its apogee after the liberation of Spain's last overseas colonies, and the concomitant debates over the urgency of Europeanization, coincided with a renewed colonialist impulse in North Africa. While the racist claims of criminal anthropologists and eugenicists, who sought to reverse the effects of a perceived social and biological degeneration , began to circulate in Spain, myriad Spanish politicians , essayists, and literary and visual artists struggled to characterize the precise nature of Spain's African legacy, and to envision the nation's future role in North Africa. Many of the resulting texts demonstrated a tremendous anxiety concerning Spanish identity, including the presumed racial makeup of Spaniards. Joaquin Costa, for instance, reappropriated Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 5, 2001 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies the superimposition of earthly and human cerrain common to colonialist rhetoric, defending the legitimacy of Spanish predominance in Morocco by transposing the derogatory geographical metaphor coined by the French "Africa begins in the Pyrenees," into a passionately affirmative corporeal one—"el Africa, para cada español, empieza en las plantas de los pies y acaba en los pelos de la cabeza" ("Los intereses" 160). Initially, Costa took great pains to define his romantically idealized "African" Spaniard as IberoBerber (white) rather than sub-Saharan (black), but in later texts the Berbers also came to be associated with racial decadence, and Costa's bias emerged in even more virulent fashion as he exhorted his fellow Spaniards to exorcise the African within, or even (employing a curiously multivalent and disturbing image) to "mudar de piel" ("El actual problema" 219; "Quiénes" 261). The deeply conflicted nature of this socio-political discourse could not help but surface in contemporaneous Spanish cultural representations of North Africa. That is, if Spaniards demonstrated ambivalence concerning their own "African-ness," then their artistic and literary depictions of Africa and Africans—oftentimes linked to the neo-colonialist project—might be expected to reveal acute tensions as well. This article will begin to tease out some of the complexity of those depictions through the analysis of a number of paintings by Maria Fortuny and several historical novels by Benito Pérez Galdós, set in the SpanishMoroccan War of 1859-60. Despite the roughly forty-year interval in time of production (Fortuny's paintings were created in the 1860s, while Galdós's novels appeared in 1905), and despite the difference in artistic genre, the works are in fact remarkably similar, for they repeatedly attempt to deploy established Anglo-European colonialist rhetorical strategies to depict Morocco, only to meet with resistance. And this resistance , as we shall...