Unsettling Colonialism. Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World ed. by N. Michelle Murray and Akiko Tsuchiya (review)

Decolonization has particular currency in today's academy: Spanish departments in the US are working to re-center Spanish major and minor programs away from the Iberian Peninsula and towards indigenous, Afro-descendent, and transatlantic authors and approaches feature prominently in publishers' catalogs. We are striving to keep up with terminology that is in constant evolution in an environment that is ever more fraught with tension.

N. Michelle Murray and Akiko Tsuchiya's edited volume Unsettling Colonialism. Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World joins the conversation with nine carefully researched essays addressing a wide arc of issues and seeking to "tease out the intricacies and contradictions of women's relationship to colonialism in the nineteenth-century Spanish context" (6). The three-part structure of Unsettling Colonialism is flexible enough to include a wide range of discourses, genres, and genders; this makes for a challenge, but it is in this challenge that the potential lies.

From the first group of chapters, women's role in the geopolitical mechanics of colonialism is explored. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya examines the implications of the meteorological work of two Spanish women on the African island of Elobey, contrasting their work with that of male colonial explorers. In her essay, "Eva Canel and the Gender of Hispanism," Lisa Surwillo shows how Canel challenged the broadly held notion that the history of Spain's former colonies was "a story that Spain had the right to tell" (58). Her careful examination of Canel's 1916 travel narrative, Lo que vi en Cuba, a través de la isla, allows us to follow the writer as she denounces Spain's role in the slave trade and attempts to "recover a moral legitimacy" (76) using her "feminine eye" (59), which allows her to engage with the female and subaltern voices and impressions of Cuban life "that fall out of institutions but deserve curation and preservation" (61). In stepping beyond the canonical and officially sanctioned modes of observation and reporting, this essay, like Canel's work itself, presents exciting challenges to colonialist discourse. Tsuchiya's contribution deals with the representation of prostitution in Eugenio Flores's Trata de blancas and Eduardo López Bago's Carne importada. She suggests that the Spanish women in these novels who enter the so-called white slave trade can be read as evidence of how the global trade in prostitutes picked up where chattel slavery ended, reducing women to subaltern, racialized figures.

The representation of race is taken up in the second section. Both Ana Mateos and Mar Soria introduce how blackface has been used to both highlight and call into question racial identity. In the first essay, this technique is used by the fictional Blanca la Extranjera, from Faustina Sáez de Melgar's Los miserables, in her quest to regain her stolen wealth and position. Hailing from Brazil and of mixed race, Alejandrina's choice to seek justice while in blackface "renders the black body visible through the merging of abolitionist and feminist concerns;" her successful suit shows "Afro-Hispanic women as rightful agents of transformation within the social sphere" (128). The use of blackface on the stage is the focus of the second essay, with a careful presentation of racially charged language and tropes in dramatic texts.

The third section centers on the literary and political debates around gender and colonialism. The first essay, from Julia Chang, addresses the notion of masculinity and able-bodied-ness in the context of Spain's imperial campaigns in north Africa; this is followed by Nuria Godón's reading of La Regenta as a metaphor for Spain's anxiety about her American colonies. The third essay in this group is from Joyce Tolliver, who adds another important contribution to a broader understanding of Spain's role in the Philippines. Here Tolliver focuses on the role language and women played...