In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Shattered Mirror: Colonial Discourse and Counterdiscourse about Spanish Guinea1 Montserrat Alds-Brun is Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Florida. Alás-Brun has published a book on postwar Spanish comedy titled De la comedia del disparate al teatro del absurdo, a critical edition of' Jar diel Poncek's pky El amor sólo dura 2000 metros, and several artichs on contemporary Spanish theater, Latin American narrative, and the representations of Africans in Spanish literature and culture. The function of reading literature, according to Fredric Jameson, is "the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts" (20). Abdul R. JanMohamed applies and expands Jameson's theories, among others, to explain the underlying tensions in post-colonial African literature : The dialectic of negative influence is in fact a literary manifestation of the Manichean socio-political relation between the colonizer and the colonized. The black writer finds that colonialist praxis and literature promote a negative, derogatory image of Africa and its inhabitants, and thus he is motivated to attempt a correction of that image through a symbolic, literary re-creation of an alternate, more just picture of indigenous culrures. (8) In order to better understand the efforts by certain contemporary Equatorial Guiñean authors to correct this distorted image and create one that instead truly reflects their identity, it may be helpful to revisit the different images of black Africans projected by Spanish colonial discourse. In this essay, I present an overview of ambivalent, sometimes ambiguous and even contradictory images of Spanish Guiñean subjects in a variety of colonial texts. I will examine both litetary and non-literary sources from Spain in the twentieth century, placing a special emphasis on the genres and texts that have been mostly overlooked by previous scholars. Finally, I propose to interpret the motif of the mirror, present in some of these texts, as a trope that symbolizes the diverse Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 164 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and occasionally conflicting images of the black African as a colonial subject. Spanish colonial fiction, as well as the travel literature related to the former colony, has been studied recently by Antonio M. Carrasco González (221-55). He devotes a chapter of his book to twentieth-century Spanish prose, since there are very few works related to Spanish Guinea in the previous century due to the remoteness of the area for Europeans and the difficult and perilous access from the metropolis (221-22).2 The first study of Spanish novels and poems linked to Spanish Guinea starting in the 1920s, by Carlos González Echegaray, was published in 1964. He revised and expanded his early contribution twenty-five years latet. Both scholars choose to concentrate on those literary genres, leaving theater and other texts that are not strictly literary outside the scope of their inquiry. Carrasco states that there is only one known play about Spanish Guinea, Bajo el sol de Guinea, by Barrolomé Soria Marco (233).3 However, there is at least another play that deals explicitly with the colony as its central topic: Alejandro Cervantes's El puritano, which Carrasco does not mention. Elpuritano (1945) is still unpublished and temains largely unknown.4 It is a well-intentioned drama that denounces racism and discrimination of Spanish Guineans and condemns die moral hypocrisy of Spaniards, although it does not question the legitimacy of colonialism. It also contains an interesting use of the trope of the mirror, which I will examine latet. Besides the above-mentioned genie gap in colonial studies related to Spanish Guinea, with a noticeable scarcity of studies on theater, there are certain periods and a number of non-litetary texts that have not received substantial critical attention yet.5 For instance, Carrasco does not include the colonial literature produced during the Spanish Civil Wat (1936-1939) in his otherwise well-documented study. He does mention an anti-republican work of propaganda , Estupendos misterios de la Guinea Española, by Eladio Antonio Rebolloa, which is a satirical novel written in the early years of the Second Republic (231-32). The chronological gap in Carrasco's essay is partially covered in La voz...

pdf

Share