Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain, and: English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (review)

Years ago, my dissertation director used to warn me: "two occurrences do not a pattern make." He was right; but two thematically related books published by the same university press within a year should be enough to make us at least wonder whether a pattern might be in the making. These two excellent studies, in a sense, could be seen to function as mirror opposites: Griffin explores English origins of the Black Legend projected onto Spain, while Fuchs considers maurophilia (literally, the "love of Moors") as central to early modern Spanish self-perception. But Fuchs's book ventures into Black Legend polemics as well, considering Spain perhaps not so much from a specifically English as from a broader European perspective, in order to find out what might have been the role of racial coloring and morisco blackness in the perpetuation of la leyenda negra. Her book, Janus-like, looks both ways at once, seeing how Spain views itself as well as how it is viewed by others. Of the two, it also appears as the more theoretically sophisticated, engaging in extensive dialogue with Edward Said, Paul Julian Smith, and others about the cultural work performed in the process of constructing Otherness. But its goals are more limited: Fuchs may be comparing Spain's self-perceptions to its perceptions by others, but in the end Griffin's project is more complexly comparative. Evidencing a mastery of English Renaissance drama, alongside an easy familiarity with many intertexts from early modern Spain, his study is half again as long as Fuchs's. It is no wonder, considering just how many critical balls he is trying (successfully, for the most part) to keep in the air.

So if there is at least an incipient pattern here, how can it be described? I like very much the term employed in Griffin's title, ethnopoetics. The author is careful to clarify that his use of this word differs significantly from the one current among anthropologists such as Dell Hymes, Richard Tedlock, and Joel Sherzer. These scholars engage the adjectival form ethnopoetic to refer to native (particularly Native American) canons of performance. Instead, Griffin prefers the noun, and defines it rather broadly as "the making or marking of ethnicity" (217 n. 4). Defined so amply, this is a genre that could be said to encompass Fuchs's work as well.

And indeed it does. Taken together, these two books allow us to eavesdrop on one of the liveliest conversations in early modern studies today. This is one of those happy cases where similar or at least comparable books come out at the same time in a field where there is more than enough critical space left for each. The books do not appear to compete with or negate each other (quite the contrary—they complement one another quite nicely), nor does either of them appear to have been generated in a critical vacuum. Griffin and Fuchs are respectfully aware of each other's work. Griffin cites Fuchs repeatedly, as is perhaps appropriate for a scholar who is still junior to her in rank. This is also indicative of the fact that she published a relatively high percentage of her manuscript (two chapters out of five) as articles and book chapters preceding this monograph. She only cites him once; but in that paragraph her argument relies on his scholarship. Griffin also thanks Fuchs explicitly in the acknowledgments for inviting him to participate in a Folger Institute seminar. Here he makes reference to a network of Anglo-Hispanists, and it is this articulation of affiliation that also helps us more precisely to "place" these two books.

These are not the only two authors to fit this...