Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire

Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire

Deguzmán, María

Paperback

General Racism & Ethnic StudiesGeneral United States HistorySpainish & Portuguese History

ISBN10: 0816645280
ISBN13: 9780816645282
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: Aug 7 2005
Pages: 408
Weight: 1.18
Height: 0.82 Width: 6.06 Depth: 9.02
Language: English

England and the Netherlands, Spain's imperial rivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, imagined Spain as a land of cruel and degenerate barbarians of la leyenda negra (the Black Legend), in league with the powers of blackest darkness and driven by dark motives. In Spain's Long Shadow, María DeGuzmán explores how this convenient demonization made its way into American culture-and proved essential to the construction of whiteness. DeGuzmán's work reaches from the late eighteenth century-in the wake of the American Revolution-to the present. Surveying a broad range of texts and images, from Poe's William Wilson and John Singer Sargent's El Jaleo to Richard Wright's Pagan Spain and Kathy Acker's Don Quixote, Spain's Long Shadow shows how the creation of Anglo-American ethnicity as specifically American has depended on the casting of Spain as a colonial alter ego. The symbolic power of Spain in the American imagination, DeGuzmán argues, is not just a legacy of that nation's colonial presence in the Americas; it lives on as well in the blackness of Spain and Spaniards-in the assigning of people of Spanish origin to an off-white racial category that reserves the designation of white for Anglo-Americans. By demonstrating how the Anglo-American imagination needs Spain and Spaniards as figures of attraction and repulsion, DeGuzmán makes a compelling and illuminating case for treating Spain as the imperial alter ego of the United States. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, ambitious in its chronological sweep, and elegant in its interpretation of literary and visual works, DeGuzmán's book leads us to a powerful new understanding of the nature-and history-of American ethnicity.

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