Tracing Morocco: Postcolonialism and Spanish Civil War Literature

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Spanish Republic's refusal to relinquish its colonial control allowed General Franco to exploit Moroccan antipathy and poverty, convincing many Moroccans to join his forces. North American supporters of the Popular Front often depicted the connections between the civil war, European fascism, and American racism. But for some supporters—and particularly for the hundred or so African Americans who fought in Spain on the side of the Republic—the war's stakes were further tied to colonial relationships between Europe, Africa, and the New World. This essay examines literary depictions of these complicated colonial entanglements in the works of Langston Hughes and John A. Williams, contextualizing their writing alongside fictional and biographical representations of Moroccan and African American participation. This essay argues that Williams' and Hughes' writings reveal the war's colonial origins and postcolonial implications, insisting on the intersections of race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality in the transnational fight against fascism. In so doing, these writings present the war as yet another global conflict in which members of the African diaspora often faced greater dangers than their comrades in arms.