Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain

Postscript: Moorish Commonplaces

Postscript: Moorish Commonplaces Given the widespread practices and constructions that I have traced throughout this book, it should come as no surprise that Moorishness continues to define ideas of Spain long after the expulsion of the Moriscos in the early seventeenth century. Whether as a domestic alternative to French cultural influence from the Enlightenment to the nineteenth century , or as the distinctive attraction of Andalusian tourism from the Romantics to our own time, Spain’s Moorish identity proves remarkably resilient and useful in the long term.1 As José Colmeiro and Lou CharnonDeutsch have suggested, Moorishness colors other popular stereotypes about Spain and Andalucı́a, such as the dark, Oriental gypsy.2 The gypsy, the flamenco, the Alhambra—these commonplaces anchor the external construction of Andalucı́a, whose romanticized local culture becomes in these discourses a synecdoche for Spain. Yet the replacement of a sober Castile by a festive Andalucı́a as the sine qua non of Spain, seamless though it might appear, has a long and complex history.3 The perception and valuation of Moorishness varies for specific contexts, from the Napoleonic invasions to the development of high European Orientalism to Spain’s own lamentable colonial adventures in North Africa. These different contexts nonetheless see recurring tensions between internal and external, sympathetic and hostile, views of the place of Moors and their culture within the nation. With the twentieth-century embrace of North Africa by an anti-European Franco, and the delicate contemporary repositioning of Spain in relation to an Islamic world associated with both immigration and terrorism, the dynamics have become ever more fraught.4 Part of the challenge in assessing this complex history is to question over-simplified understandings of Spain as heir of Al-Andalus, however benign they might seem. In this sense, even the most well-meaning arguments for ethnic tolerance in present-day Spain based on a shared genealogical past seem problematic, as do latter-day conversions to Islam by contemporary Andalusians ‘‘rediscovering’’ their ancestral spirituality. 140 Postscript Both within and beyond Spain, these efforts would seem to reinscribe Spanish difference as they argue for cultural flexibility. Instead of essentializing identity, it seems crucial to foreground a shared culture and a shared history, variously hybridized, as the rationale for Spain’s engagement with its North African neighbors. Yet this more sober project, often broached both within Spain and from abroad, is complicated by the profound psychic investments in a romanticized Andalucı́a that often characterize the debates and their institutional context. As the work of anthropologist José Antonio González Alcantud shows, the construction of a Moorish past for Andalucı́a often involves rendering it an orientalized, exotic object of desire.5 Moorishness has long held huge symbolic currency both within and outside Spain. Well-known French and English Romantic fantasies, culminating with the cosmopolitan Washington Irving, celebrated the timeless Spain of the Alhambra. In the late nineteenth-century, Moorishness took on specific regional and national uses, embodying a folk Andalucı́a of eternally Moorish peasants, as in the vision of Archena, in the famous Valley of Ricote near Murcia, by the local poet Vicente Medina: Moriscos los atavı́os y moriscas las maneras y moriscas las costumbres son en mi tierra. . . . . . . . . . . . . Las mujeres en el suelo como las moras se sientan y los hombres en cuclillas se están horas enteras. Los bailes, cosas de moros . . . cosas de moros sus fiestas, y de moros sus pasiones y venganzas y peleas.¿Qué le podrı́a faltar pa ser morisca a mi tierra? Por no faltarle, ni el habla, de palabras moras llena. Murcia, Albacete, Alicante . . . ‘‘Mi tierra morisca’’ es esa, semejante a la de enfrente, su hermana africana tierra. Postscript 141 El paisaje: Tierra de oro, pueblos blancos y palmeras, oasis, huertos, naranjos y la mar azul-turquesa.6 [Moorish is the dress and Moorish the ways, and Moorish the customs of my land. . . . The women sit on the floor like Moors, and the men spend hours squatting down. The dances are Moorish, Moorish are their celebrations, and Moorish their passions and vendettas and quarrels. What could my land be missing to be fully Moorish, when even its language is full of Moorish words? Murcia, Albacete, Alicante . . . . That is ‘‘my Moorish land,’’ just like its sister land in Africa, across the way. The landscape: a golden land of white towns and palm trees, oases, groves, orange trees...