Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. I should note at the outset that throughout this book I alternate the more precise but cumbersome ‘‘Andalusi-derived’’ with the term ‘‘Moorish’’ since the latter most closely approximates the Spanish term moro, used in the period, and because it captures the ambiguity in how these practices relate to the Muslim religion, the various states of Al-Andalus, and an increasingly marginalized ‘‘race’’ of Moriscos. All translations are mine unless otherwise specified. 2. See among others Paul Julian Smith, Representing the Other: ‘‘Race,’’ Text, and Gender in Spanish and Spanish American Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon , 1992), 45–56, and David Nirenberg, ‘‘El concepto de raza en el estudio del antijudaismo ibérico medieval,’’ Edad Media 3 (2000): 39–60, especially 46–49, reprised in ‘‘Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and Its Jews,’’ in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, ed. Margaret Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 71–87. John Beverley, for his part, notes that Castro’s focus on religious ‘‘caste’’ ignored the many other kinds of exclusion in medieval and early modern Spain, and in particular that of the lower classes. See his ‘‘Class or Caste: A Critique of the Castro Thesis,’’ in Américo Castro, the Impact of His Thought: Essays to Mark the Centenary of His Birth, ed. Ronald E. Surtz, Jaime Ferrán, and Daniel P. Testa (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1988), 141–49. 3. For a rich reevaluation of Castro’s legacy in the context of contemporary Spanish cultural politics, see Eduardo Subirats, ed., Américo Castro y la revisión de la memoria: el Islam en España (Madrid: Libertarias, 2003). 4. The most explicit account of hybridity appears in the work of Homi Bhabha. See, for example, ‘‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,’’ in ‘‘Race,’’ Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Critical Inquiry 12, 1 (1985): 144–65. The essay is reprinted in Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 102– 22. For the currency of the term in Iberian studies, see Marı́a Judith Feliciano and Leyla Rouhi’s introduction to Interrogating Iberian Frontiers, ed. Barbara F. Weissberger with Feliciano, Rouhi, and Cynthia Robinson, Medieval Encounters 12, 3 (2006). For some potential problems with the term, see my ‘‘A Mirror Across the Water: Mimetic Racism, Hybridity, and Cultural Survival,’’ in Writing Race Across the Atlantic World, 1492–1763, ed. Gary Taylor and Philip Beidler (London: Palgrave, 2005), 9–26. On Granada as a frontier society, see David Coleman, Cre- 146 Notes to Pages 2–5 ating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture in an Old-World Frontier City, 1492–1600 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). 5. On the mudéjar, see Cynthia Robinson, ‘‘Mudéjar Revisited: A Prolegomena to the Reconstruction of Perception, Devotion and Experience at the Mudéjar Convent of Clarisas, Tordesillas, Spain (14th Century AD),’’ Res 43 (Spring 2003): 51–77; Marı́a Judith Feliciano Chaves, ‘‘Mudejarismo in Its Colonial Context: Iberian Cultural Display, Viceregal Luxury Consumption, and the Negotiation of Identities in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2004; and Weissberger et al., eds., Interrogating Iberian Frontiers. For a careful assessment of the actual contemporary ‘‘heritage’’ of alAndalus versus its romanticization, see José A. González Alcantud, ‘‘Mythos y techne: sobre las presuntas supervivencias moriscas en la contemporaneidad,’’ in his Lo moro: las lógicas de la derrota y la formación del estereotipo islámico (Barcelona : Anthropos, 2002), 90–112. 6. ‘‘Yo habı́a dicho muy poco sobre la extremadamente compleja y densa relación entre España y el islam, que ciertamente no se podı́a caracterizar simplemente como una relación imperial’’ [‘‘I had said very little about the extremely complex and dense relationship between Spain and Islam, which certainly cannot be characterized simply as an imperial relationship’’], Edward Said, ‘‘Prólogo a la nueva edición española,’’ in Orientalismo, Spanish trans. Marı́a Luisa Fuentes (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2003), 9; Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). Note the asymmetry in Said’s formulation between ‘‘Spain’’ and ‘‘Islam.’’ For responses to Said, see José Colmeiro, ‘‘Exorcising Exoticism: Carmen and the Construction of Oriental Spain,’’ Comparative Literature 54, 2 (2002): 127–43, and José A. González Alcantud, ed., El orientalismo desde el sur (Barcelona: Anthropos , 2006), especially his introduction, ‘‘El orientalismo: ge...