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1 The Quotidian and the Exotic Sang, moeurs, langage, manière de vivre et de combattre, en Espagne tout est africain. Si l’Espagnol était mahome ́tan il serait un Africain complet. —Stendhal Cultural transformations do not align themselves neatly even with such major events as the end of the Christian conquest of Granada. The gradual nature of Christian military advances meant that Christian and Moorish practices coexisted more or less uneasily for centuries in Iberia, even in areas where the Christians had triumphed. In terms of everyday life, the fall of Granada was far from decisive: the treaty known as Capitulaciones de Santa Fe, which detailed the terms of the Moors’ surrender, included significant protections for Moorish culture and religious practices .1 Although these terms were not respected for long, and Muslims were increasingly persecuted, Andalusi cultural forms nonetheless survived for decades in a variety of guises. The neat model of supersession that appears so frequently in official historiographies is thus primarily a rhetorical fiction designed to consolidate an emerging sense of national identity. And yet, for all that, it has been extraordinarily powerful: for centuries Spain’s self-fashioning has been predicated on the strict boundary between then and now, mapped onto Moors versus Christians. Even from our own more sophisticated historiographical purview, we tend to assume that everything changed in 1492. Yet a culture profoundly marked by Andalusi forms survived in sixteenth-century Spain, long after the fall of Granada, and stood as an often unacknowledged challenge to the official narrative of supersession. Its various quotidian practices, often linked to Moorishness by Spaniards and especially by travelers to Spain, usefully complicate our understanding of historical rupture and the construction of national identity, by showing how daily life confutes or modifies ideological strictures . 12 Chapter 1 The effort to recover these practices poses significant methodological challenges. First, there are several distinct geographical spaces in which Andalusi-derived cultural practices appear: the valence of Moorish costume , for example, is very different in Granada—a border zone only gradually incorporated into the new nation—and elsewhere in Castile. In Granada, the Moorish survivals not only counter the supersessionist narrative , but also exemplify the larger problem of center versus periphery, or regional versus national culture. As the Morisco advocate Francisco Núñez Muley, whom I discuss in Chapter 2, powerfully argued, ‘‘Moorish’’ practices were also the local, Granadan culture. Similarly vexed is the issue of how to read the Christians’ continued embrace of many self-consciously Moorish practices, such as the juegos de cañas, or jousting games, which I discuss in Chapter 4. Should this be read as a nostalgic revival of a culture safely defeated, or as a ceremonial, symbolic enactment of the other that helps to solidify the self? These explanations, while plausible in some cases, fail to account for the complex self-identification of Spain with Moorishness in certain situations, or for Arab-derived domestic practices, such as sitting on cushions among braziers, so commonplace that they are not even recognized as such by Spaniards themselves. One solution is to turn to travelers’ accounts of Spain, which describe its self-presentation to foreigners as well as the everyday practices that, while invisible to Spaniards, are strikingly unfamiliar to other Europeans of the time. These narratives, at the intersection of the quotidian and the exotic, provide the most signi ficant evidence of Spain’s continuity with its Moorish past. But of course the methodological challenge does not end here. Travel narratives—a heterogeneous category in their own right—are themselves invested in constructing a particular version of Spain. Courtiers, merchants , and ambassadors all come to Spain with specific agendas and preconceptions . As I note in Chapter 5, over the course of the sixteenth century the difference and specificity of Spain often become part of hostile accounts of its exceptional cruelty or greed—the war of words we refer to as the ‘‘Black Legend.’’ Thus the appearance of Spanish difference in the travel accounts, and particularly in any discussion of Moorishness, must always be handled with great care, for the travel literature often reflects primarily what foreigners wish to find in an exoticized, racialized Spain.2 Nonetheless, and despite all these caveats, the travel narratives remain a key source for recovering the persistent hybridity of everyday culture in early modern Spain, however occluded it might be by the opposed prejudices of Spaniards and of foreigners. [3.15.156...

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