Rereading the Black Legend. The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (review)

As the subtitle of this handsome volume indicates, its objective is to illuminate the darker spaces in Western European historiography occupied by players on the world stage during the time when the Black Legend was created and began to engender an even darker mythology about Spain. The fine introduction (also called chapter 1) provides an overview of the legend's origins in Bartolomé de Las Casas's account of Spanish brutality in the New World colonies, the Brevisima relación of 1552. Intended for a Spanish public, the treatise was picked up by the English and then by others, who found in it ample justification for believing what they wanted about Spain, for economic and political reasons: the worst. The introduction traces the influence of Las Casas's text on the evolution of racial discourse, race being the real subject of most of the essays. Thus the book has particular value for those interested in how and why the notion of race passed from its Renaissance definition based on breeding (as in the race of a horse), to distinctions based on such things as skin color, religious beliefs, and types of writing or lack thereof.

The book is divided into four parts, about (I) eastern empires, (II) Spain, (III) Holland (IV) England. The two essays in the first part address the importance of Christian converts in the Ottoman empire (Leslie Peirce) and the hidden mixing of cultures inside the harem in the Muhgal one (Ruby Lal). The editors qualify these chapters, not apparently related to the issue at hand, as an estranging frame, implicitly to destabilize more traditional points of reference.

Chapters 1 through 3 of part 2 are devoted to Spain: the first interrogates racism in the medieval period that "blackened" the country by associations with Africa and Islam (David Nirenberg); the second asserts that the Spaniards' assimilation of Moorish culture was at odds with the country's political, religious, and demographic rejection of them (Barbara Fuchs); and the third presents the Spanish Inquisition's powerful bureaucracy as a symptom of Spanish modernity (Irene Silverblatt). Gonzalo Lamana offers a most informative study of the ways in which different representations of a single event across time and place manipulate and embellish those events to serve particular agendas, drawing a parallel between various accounts of a 1532 violent encounter between Spaniards and Incas in Peru and the Bush administration's justifications for the war in Iraq. SilverMoon and Michael Ennis provide a revisionist interpretation of the conquest of the Nahua. Their essay problematizes the notion of conquest and erasure by highlighting enduring records of Nahua cosmology and cellular social structure (altepetl) as well as by calling attention to evidence of native subversive resistance to colonization. Yolanda Fabiola Orquera's contribution presents a broad-stroke overview of the colonial period, divided into conquest and consolidation, attempts at accommodation, and the eruption of violence. Part 2 concludes with Kathryn Burns's essay entitled "Unfixing Race." Burns's excellent contribution points to the problems inherent in the Spaniards' need to coexist with multiple races in the colonies, having ethnically cleansed their own country of Jews and Moors from 1492 to 1609.

The contributions on Holland in part 3 are especially fine, beginning with Carmen Nocentelli's rereading of Dutchman Jan Huygen van Linschoten's extremely influential Itinerario, a critical account of Portuguese colonial practices in Asia. Linschoten relates the seduction of the Portuguese by things Indian, which compromised Portuguese notions of superiority, and documents the persistence of Asian erotic customs that the conquerors were more than willing to assimilate rather than vanquish. It was not all seduction, however. As Nocentelli indicates, Linschoten and other European males endorse the Chinese practice of binding women's feet to keep them (women and feet) nicely in place, and they write approvingly of sati, Brahman widows' self...