Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Muslims, Jews, and the Boundaries of the Spanish Nation
- 1 An Anxious Nation: The Rif War, National Identity, and Print Culture
- 2 ‘Muslim Brothers and Spanish Jews’: Race, Literature, and History in Discourses of Affinity between Spain and North Africa
- 3 ‘Just as Uncivilised as We are’: Affinity, National Fragility, and Socialist and Fascist Narratives of Colonialism in La ruta and Notas marruecas de un soldado
- 4 The ‘Other’ Races that Define Us: Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and National Anxieties in Catholic Traditionalism and Africanist Orientalism
- 5 Un-making Spanish Men in Literature and Photography of the Colonial ‘Disasters’
- 6 Conquering the ‘Indecipherable Soul’ of Morocco: Women behind the Veil, Urban Spaces, and Colonial Power
- Afterword: Theorising Cultural Vulnerability in a Multicultural World
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The ‘Other’ Races that Define Us: Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and National Anxieties in Catholic Traditionalism and Africanist Orientalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Muslims, Jews, and the Boundaries of the Spanish Nation
- 1 An Anxious Nation: The Rif War, National Identity, and Print Culture
- 2 ‘Muslim Brothers and Spanish Jews’: Race, Literature, and History in Discourses of Affinity between Spain and North Africa
- 3 ‘Just as Uncivilised as We are’: Affinity, National Fragility, and Socialist and Fascist Narratives of Colonialism in La ruta and Notas marruecas de un soldado
- 4 The ‘Other’ Races that Define Us: Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and National Anxieties in Catholic Traditionalism and Africanist Orientalism
- 5 Un-making Spanish Men in Literature and Photography of the Colonial ‘Disasters’
- 6 Conquering the ‘Indecipherable Soul’ of Morocco: Women behind the Veil, Urban Spaces, and Colonial Power
- Afterword: Theorising Cultural Vulnerability in a Multicultural World
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the 1925 edition of the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, ‘raza’ is defined as ‘groups of human beings that are categorised as white, yellow, copper, or black races according to their skin colour and other features’. Although this definition of race prioritises the biological aspect of racial categories, it is the inclusion of ‘other features’ that allows the term to become fluid and malleable and able to be defined in manifold, often contradictory ways. Joshua Goode notes that in early twentieth-century Spanish racial thought, race was a much more unstable concept than previous theorists have argued, and that faith, culture, history, morality, and temperament often carried more weight than ethnicity in definitions of the Spanish race.
The malleability of the term ‘raza’ allows Spanish commentators to claim racial commonality with Moroccan Muslim and Jewish cultures while at the same time establishing what Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper have termed ‘grammars of difference’: categories of ethnicity, gender, class, and religion that are used in colonial relationships to define the superiority of the colonising culture, and in many cases, to justify the use of violence in colonial regimes. As we shall see, the same colonialist ideologies and press and literary narratives that emphasised the ties between Spain and North Africa often also highlighted their fundamental difference. This malleability also allowed Catholic traditionalists in the 1920s and later Francoist ideologues to claim to be colour-blind and racially inclusive while crafting an ethno-national narrative of Spanish identity, as Ramiro de Maeztu does in his manifesto of Catholic nationalism, Defensa de la hispanidad (1931), where he defines race as follows:
We Spaniards do not give importance to blood or skin colour, because what we define as race is not constituted by characteristics that can be transmitted by biological obscurities, but by those that are the light of the spirit, such as language and faith.
Maeztu's claim, which becomes a mantra of Spanish fascism and later Francoism and is still invoked by the Spanish right, is often referenced to argue that in opposition to British and French colonial rhetoric, Spanish colonial discourse was characterised by a complete absence of racial attitudes.
- Type
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- Information
- Spanish National Identity, Colonial Power, and the Portrayal of Muslims and Jews during the Rif War (1909–27) , pp. 105 - 124Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021