This module takes on a transhistorical approach engaging with the complex historical and theoretical facets in which race and ethnicity have been experienced and articulated in the Iberian Peninsula. In medieval times, the cohabitation of mixed societies constituted by Muslims, Jews, and Christians produced cultural hybridity. The colonization of the Americas enabled the debate of the very concept of “Spanishness”, with new communities of criollos growing on the other side of the Atlantic. Structural racism develops then as a response to this identitarian crisis, focusing also on the Sub-Saharan black population that was enslaved both in Spain and in the New World. Portugal’s long imperial history was marked by conflicting attitudes to race relations both at home and overseas. While it was at the forefront of the transatlantic slave-trade it also promoted miscegenation in its colonies as a sign of racial democracy. The resulting complex legacy of empire is still at the heart of its own sense of nationhood and current discussions on Lusofonia.
Iberian modernity builds on many of these historical conflicts pursuing old and new forms of expression in the various locales that constitute the Peninsula; in particular, Catalonia and the Basque Country, and urban centres in Portugal. Iberian multiethnic and multilingual realities were severely challenged and repressed during Francisco Franco’s regime (1939-1975). Similarly, the Estado Novo in Portugal (1933-1974) championed ideas of Portuguese exceptionalism in race relations to justify its colonial rule in Africa. Such asphyxiating limitations were not able to fully silence Iberia’s diversity, which, still nowadays, is the subject of much conflict and discussion. New waves of migration have changed the Iberian landscape while debates about the role of the state in the development and repression of Iberia’s national identities have been prominent throughout the latter part of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries.
Preliminary Reading:
- Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya. “Entering the Global Hispanophone: An Introduction”. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 20. 1-2 (2019): 1-16.
- Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1.8 (1989): 139-167.
- Dangler, Jean (2017): Edging toward Iberia, Toronto, Iberic.
- Feros, Antonio, Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World, Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2017.
- Fra-Molinero, Baltasar (2009): “The Suspect Whiteness of Spain”, en Jennings La Vinia Delois (ed.), At Home and Abroad: Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Performance, Knowville, University of Tennessee Press: 147-169.
- Martin-Márquez, Susan, Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
- Mourão, Manuela. “Whitewash: Nationhood, Empire, and the Formation of Portuguese Racial Identity”. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11. 1 (2011): 90-124.
- Vale de Almeida, Miguel (2004): “Longing for Oneself: hybridism and miscegenation in colonial and postcolonial Portugal”, in An Earth-Colored Sea. Race, Culture and the Politics of Identity in the Post-Colonial Portuguese-Speaking World. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books: 65-82.
- Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi (1986): Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, London, James Currey.
- Wack, David A. (2007): Framing Iberia: Maqamat and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain, Leiden, Brill. (esp. introduction)
