Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (review)

This book is an ambitious survey of US literature and visual culture, from the late eighteenth century through the 1990s, that foregrounds how “figures of Spain” served as foils for an “Anglo-American identity” understood as “transcendentally or transparently ‘American’” (xii). DeGuzmán begins by arguing that, since the 1980s, a multiculturalist paradigm has dominated American literary and cultural studies. This framework, she suggests, has ironically obscured the existence of “a hegemonic ethnic group in the United States”: the “Anglo-American” (xii). She further suggests that the construction of an Anglo-American identity has crucially depended on figures of Spain. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, especially Freud and Lacan, she argues that figures of Spain functioned as “alter egos in the development of ‘American’ imperial identity” (xvii). Throughout US history, she writes, figures of Spain have been “central to the dominant fictions of ‘American exceptionalism,’ revolution, manifest destiny, and birth/rebirth; to Anglo-America’s articulation of its empire as anti-empire (the ‘good’ empire that is not one); and to its fears of racial contamination and hybridity” (xii). She begins with the literature of the early US republic and the American Renaissance, then moves to the Spanish-Cuban-American War era, next to expatriate US modernist writers from the 1920s to the 1950s, then to “postmodern” literature, film, and photography, including work by Spaniards and Spanish “transplants” to the United States, and finally, turns to late-twentieth-century work by Latina/o writers that uses representations of Spain to respond to US empire and imagine postcolonial identities. Although she suggests that a “double movement” of “romancing” and “repulsion” (xiii) has shaped such figures, for most of the book the emphasis is on the latter, as DeGuzmán examines forms of Anglo-American literature and culture that position Spain as a “vanquished imperialist over and around whose abjected body the Anglo-American empire might be erected” (xxv).

The first chapter, “The Shadow of the Black Legend,” explores several examples of canonical US literature in order to examine what she calls “the blackened figure of alien whiteness, the Spaniard” (1). The decision to begin with the literature of the American Renaissance is a little puzzling, for aside from Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Spain and Spaniards play a relatively minor role in these texts, which were not popular at the time. Much more widely read and influential were W. H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, where Spain and Spaniards are central, as well as dozens of cheap novelettes about Spaniards and Spanish America (including many in the gothic mode, DeGuzmán’s main subject here) that were part of an emergent mass culture. DeGuzmán argues that Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Poe’s “William Wilson” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and Melville’s novella all “manifest an increasingly explicit conjunction of metaphysical and physical taxonomies and thus the progressive racialization of crime culminating in the transformation of the shadow of the Black Legend into a stain” (63). In other words, in this chapter the focus is on how canonical US writers drew on the Black Legend in order to construct racialized figures of Spain that helped to fortify an emerging Anglo-American and national identity.

In the next chapter, DeGuzmán turns from the Black Legend to Orientalism, “the major mode through which Spain, Spaniards, and ‘Spanishness’ were made to signify” (70) in the nineteenth century. While the Orientalized mode “revolved around the fantasy of a colonized or subjugated and exoticized Other” rather than a “hated and feared rival” (70), it still subordinated Spain within imperial hierarchies and produced a sense of US “entitlement” and “aggression” (71). In particular, DeGuzmán suggests, Anglo-American imperial discourse in its orientalizing mode...