E3W Literature | University of Texas

María DeGuzmán
Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
372 pages
$25

Reviewed by Anna Stewart-Kerr

María DeGuzmán’s Spain’s Long Shadow quickly establishes itself as a critical text in whiteness studies, here interpolated by a third term in what is conventionally a black-white binary. That term, as the book’s title suggests, is the “off-white” Spaniard. While multiple theorists in the last decade have sought to deconstruct whiteness and its supposed black-white binary in America—with arguments about the black as a convenient Other to white “individuality” (Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, 1992), white trash theory (Wray and Newitz’s White Trash, 1997), ethnic groups “turned” white (Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color, 1999 and Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, 1995), and the fundamentals of class and economic stratification (Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness, 1999, and Michaels’s The Trouble with Diversity, 2006), to name a few—DeGuzmán is the first to extend the conversation to include Spain and competing imperial ambitions in the New World, thus offering an innovation within this critical field. What she ultimately, and successfully, accomplishes is not so much a contemporary deconstruction of racially-mediated consciousness as a carefully researched history of developing Anglo-American identity, positioning the Spaniard as a constructed, influential Other that scripted the Anglo-American role within the Americas and came to operate as a racial and moral category of negative difference. As DeGuzmán explains in the introduction:
The fundamental claim of this book is that the construction of Anglo-American identity as “American” has been dependent on figures of Spain. Figures of Spain have been central to the dominant fictions of “American” exceptionalism, revolution, manifest destiny, and birth/rebirth; to Anglo-America’s articulation of its empire as antiempire (the “good” empire that is not one); and to its fears of racial contamination and hybridity.

DeGuzmán’s work also intersects with America(s) studies in terms of positionality: that is, she claims that important America(s) work must not only look to the immediate hemisphere, existing along the North-South axis, but the imperial powers from the Old World that largely constituted Anglo-American identity in the New World as well (the East-West axis). Her reading of nationalistic identity formation, then, becomes a spatial, geographic model that attempts to “move” in all directions. Locating much of her theoretical support in postcolonial studies and psychoanalytic theory, DeGuzmán convincingly claims that Spain functions as both totem and alter ego/imago for Anglo-America—an internalized “mirror image” of identity and disavowal. In framing this methodology in her introduction, DeGuzmán underscores the “double effect of the imago, that it elicits both identification and aggression.” Anglo-American identity, she contends, depended on Spain as an “American-made shadow,” an “image in the mirror experienced as external threat rather than internalized reassurance.” Ironically, though, such an emerging Anglo-American identity ultimately appropriated (and implicitly identified with) many of the imperialistic motives it condescendingly attributed to this anti-modern and violent Other.

In this history of constructed Anglo-American identity and its conscious identification with Manifest Destiny, Spain comes to represent the “bad” empire—think of the aptly titled “Black Legend”—and a certain backward primitivism constituted by the Ibero-Catholic culture. As such, the Spaniard increasingly signifies, as DeGuzmán puts it, an “off-whiteness” or a “not-quite-right-whiteness.” This established, DeGuzmán proceeds chronologically through the book with US representations of Spain, each chapter representing a segment of social history and thought.

Her first chapter, “The Shadow of the Black Legend,” sets up the book’s overall argument by exposing and analyzing the relationship between early American “Gothic” fiction, the critically recognized black-white binaries in this literature, and the ways in which these fictions contributed to “moral and racialized mappings of ‘black’ and ‘white’ (or off-whiteness) onto Spain.” Taking place in the early moments of US nationhood, such mapping helped establish “Anglo-American identity as ‘American.’” Chapter two, “Imperial Visions: Moor, Gypsy, and Indian,” offers a representative example of the cultural reading and interpretation DeGuzmán invites throughout her work. This particular section examines how the Spaniard in nineteenth-century, Anglo-American consciousness proceeded from a figure of “moral blackness and alien whiteness to a figure of dangerous, implosive ‘racial’ mixture.” Spanish racial-national hybridity, represented by the figures of the gypsy and Moor, came to be associated not with “regenerative hybridity” but miscegenation, “contamination,” and ultimately “degeneration”—a construction that further fueled negative stereotypes of the Spanish empire’s legacy in the New World.

Of several works analyzed in this chapter, The Scarlet Letter (1850) stands out as one of DeGuzmán’s prominent—and most well-known—examples of her argument. She contends that the novel foregrounds New England and Old England as the only possibilities for existence: the social outcast, Hester Prynne can only imagine life in the colony or in a decaying, patriarchal land. “The rest of the world,” DeGuzmán writes, “recedes into a nothingness marked merely as ‘that unknown region where Pearl had found a home.’” When the counter, alter-imago empire is identified, it is equated with lawlessness and physical blackness and, thus, materially distanced from the ordered, if hypocritical, Puritan society in New England. DeGuzmán cites Hawthorne’s descriptions of the sailors from the “Spanish Main” on Election Day as evidence. In contrast to the Native Americans—also described in this scene—the sailors from the Spanish Main emerge as a much more “disturbing” presence. Like the Puritans, they represent the products of empire, but with “blackened” faces, golden objects, and ferocious, primitive weapons, the sailors recall miscegenation, exploitation, and barbarism—all of which the Anglo-American empire desperately seeks to distance itself from. Indeed, the sailors emerge as the “wildest feature of the scene,” wilder even than the “painted barbarians.” As DeGuzman’s reading of this canonical text suggests, the presence of the Spaniards implicitly enables and reinforces the potential for the existence of a “good” empire—an empire distinguished by whiteness and right-ness.

This ideological move was amplified at the turn of the century, DeGuzmán argues in chapter three, when the US battled Spain and transformed itself from a mere nation to an imperialistic power. During this period, Spain played a crucial role in America’s development of a “racially encoded imperial vision of manifest destiny,” offering an Other against which the US might emerge as a “superior race” and “civilizer.” In chapter four, “Sacred Bulls of Modernism,” DeGuzmán proceeds chronologically into the early twentieth century to reveal how Modernist writers transmuted the troubled US conception of Spain into “a last frontier,” a “symbol for and destination of the writer-discoverer-and-creator of new worlds.” Even this arguably more positive view of Spain, though, often devolved into passionate reactions to perceived primitivism and paganism—a landscape, essentially, upon which American writers might project fears and fantasies. The art and literature from subsequent periods in American history—the mid 1930s to the late 1940s and the early 1980s to the early 1990s—offer the opportunity, DeGuzmán claims in chapter five, to critically “denaturalize the conceptual categories ‘American’ and ‘Spanish’ and the notion of essential differences between ‘Spaniards’ and ‘Americans.’” Chapter six brings this historical examination of Spain’s “long shadow” to a close, considering America’s “newer obsessions”—extensions of this Spain phobia-fascination—as well as more recent manifestations of American dependence on and nostalgia for certain ideological constructions of an Othered Spain.

As even this brief synopsis suggests, Spain’s Long Shadow offers a new and critical lens for reading US literature and the construction of Anglo-American imperial identity. DeGuzmán’s promising work, I find, provides a new trajectory of thought for—and major contribution to—not only the evolving field of whiteness studies but broader considerations of American literature and culture as well. Indeed, under DeGuzmán’s thoughtful scrutiny of American identity, Spain’s “long shadow” comes to light.