Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (review)

Martin-Márquez examines the development of the Spanish national identity in light of Spain's ties with its Islamic and African heritages and explores the ambivalence demonstrated by Spaniards in regard to such relationships. Her investigation incorporates a wide range of sources, including literature, paintings, media articles, and films. The text contains an introduction, six chapters, and an afterword, followed by notes, works cited, and an index.

In "Introduction: Theorizing the Performance of Spanish Identity," the author underscores the pivotal importance that the recovery of the Andalusian tradition of Spain and Spain's colonization of the African continent in Morocco, the West Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea has played in the conception of a Spanish national identity. Martin-Márquez supplies an overview of subsequent chapters by explaining her selection of texts, historical figures, films, writers, and artists.

Chapter 1, "Power Plays: Reformulations of Spanish Identity and the Colonization of Africa," details the historical background of Martin-Márquez's study. The discussion of the development of Spain as a nation begins with the year 1492. The author continues with the period she designates as a "second-wave of nation building" during which Spaniards look into their history to find their identity, in particular into the culture of Al-Andalus, represented by the palace of the Alhambra in Granada. She explains the debate between scholars concerning the significance of the Muslim era in Spain. The author explores the related issues of race, racial purity, and identity, including the perspectives of Galicians, Basques, and Catalans on such topics.

The following chapter, "The 'Savage' Art of Mimicry in Spain's Colonization of Sub-Saharan Africa," explores efforts by anthropologists, scientists, and scholars during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to define the racial makeup of Spain and the effects of colonization on such a composition. In this context, Martin-Márquez discusses the work of the Basque scientist Manuel Iradier titled, África: viajes y trabajos de la Asociación Eúskara La Exploradora. Iradier describes his exploration of Equatorial Guinea as he establishes associations between the geography, language, and people of Africa and the Basques. Years later, Sabino Arana, the founder of the Basque Nationalistic Party, hypothesizes also in El baskuence en toda el África on such Basque and African connections. However, Arana emphasizes the superiority and blood purity of the Basques above all other Spaniards. Martin-Márquez explains Arana's contradiction on blood purity as follows: "Yet within Basque nationalist thought, racial superiority is also often linked to racial primacy—and how better to prove that the Basques constitute one of the oldest and most venerable races on earth, than to claim that Africa itself is actually Basque?" (83).

The next two chapters, titled "Staging the Odalisque's Conquest in the Spanish-Moroccan War" and "The Masculine Role in the Spanish-Moroccan Theater of War," center on representations of the conflict of the Spanish-Moroccan War through literature and artistic works of Spaniards such as Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Benito Pérez Galdós, and the painter María Fortuny. The ambivalence of the imperialistic aspirations of Spain in Africa is reflected in Alarcon's Diario de un testigo de la guerra en África, Aita Tettauen by Benito Pérez Galdós and Batalla de Tetuán by María Fortuny. This section also illustrates the crisis in feminine and masculine gender roles exploring race, gender, and sexuality.

The author analyzes several films produced under Franco's regime in "Unmasking Family Values in Franco's African Colonies." The films include Locura de amor, Romancero marroquí, La canción de Aixa, and La llamada de África. Through an in-depth study of such movies, Martin-Márquez evaluates Spanish racial identity, religion, sexuality, and sexual relations between African natives and colonists, including the purity of Spanish women in their relations with Africans. The author continues with an analysis of two films set in Spanish Guinea, underscoring...