Feminism and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega

Chapter Seven "Race," Masculinity, and National Identity

Chapter Seven "Race," Masculinity, and National Identity In his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha speaks of "nation" as "an idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as symbolic force" (1). 1 The apparently cohesive and homogeneous identity of"SPanishness " depends on the simultaneous exclusion of the Other, not only woman, but Jew and Moor, feudal lord and heretic as well (El Sarfar 165).2 Collapsing the orders of nationality and gender (not Woman), and nationality and ethnicity (not Jew, not Moor), the Spaniard of the early modem state defines himself in terms of what he is not. The construction of the Jewish and Moorish presence as problem or threat makes possible a unified notion of "Spanishness" that clearly demarc.ates "authentic and inauthentic types of national belonging" (Gilroy 49). This national identity is then naturalized by appealing to the authority of biology to rationalize relations of dominance and subordination (woman is by nature inferior; Jews and Moors lack the pure blood that would grant them social superiority). The imagined unity of the "Spanish" male subject comes at a very high price, the persecution ofone part of Spain by another (Poliakov 107). For example, Spanish Jews, according to Americo Castro, at the same time were and were not Spain (Realidad 521). Leon Poliakov cites the Spanish case as the first historical -instance of legalized racism. For the fIrst time, religious and cultural differences were construed as genetic or biological differences. Contrasting the development of racism in France and Spain in this period, Jaime Concha remarks that while the French nobility manifested the first two of the three phases of racism (prejudice and theory), in Spain the direct step from 199 Chapter Seven prejudice to institutionalization derives from the power of the nobility and theircontrol ofthe state apparatus (63n74). The practices of the Inquisition and the statutes of pure blood contributed to the institutionalization of racism, in that they created a pool of "statutory suspects": those of Jewish blood "were credited with an irresistible tendency to heresy, due to their ancestry" (Poliakov 221, my emphasis). In response to the large ~umbers of conversos in Spanish society, a new theological discourse emerged at the beginning of the fifteenth century, transforming "sectarian hatred" into "racial hatred" (poliakov 181). Since the efficacy of baptism could not be questioned, it was necessary to conclude that the Jews were evil by their very nature and not only because of their beliefs. [For the Franciscan Alfonso de Espinal there were two types of Jews, public Jews and hidden Jews, and ... both had the same nature. Thus, by means of an implacable dialectic, the ill fame of those who had become Christians in spite of themselves ... redounded on the Jews, whom earlier Spanish theologians had merely reproached for their erroneous beliefs.... (Poliakov 181) The semantic evolution of the term converso itself documents the rise ofracist concepts. Originally the term referred to a Jewish or Moorish convert, but over time it came to designate anyone with a Jewish or Moorish ancestor (222). As Poliakov notes, there is "nothing more revealing than this anti-Semitism without Jews" (290), constituting a kind of"ritual attitude" that proved allegiance to Spanish values.3 C~rrent theory postulates that race is reducible neither to biological difference nor to economic factors. Race, like gender , functions as a category of relative autonomy; not all forms and histories of subordination are related exclusively to socioeconomic class (Gilroy 18). While race c~nnot be reduced to the effects of other social relations, it is understood only if not divorced from these other relations (14). In early modern Spain, race enters into the ideology protecting dominant economic interests; in this sense, the subject/object relations of literary representation and political discourse reproduce the subject/ object relations in the economic sphere.4 As representatives of a more dynamic mode of production, conversos were systematically persecuted under the guise of religious heresy. The 200 "Race," Masculinity, and National Identity dominant estates used the Inquisition to block the development of economic activity that would have represented a threat to their hegemony: Por supuesto, la justificaci6n religiosa hace ver cristianos nuevos donde hay, socialmente hablando, plebeyos ligados al comercio 0 a las profesiones liberales.(Concha 54 [93]) At the bottom of the social hierarchy, the peasant classes opposed the social and economic success of conversos, perceived as blocking their own upward mobility. For Henry...