Spain's Long Shadow

England and the Netherlands, Spains 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 Spains Long Shadow, Mara DeGuzmn explores how this convenient demonization made its way into American cultureand proved essential to the construction of whiteness. DeGuzmns work reaches from the late eighteenth centuryin the wake of the American Revolutionto the present. Surveying a broad range of texts and images, from Poes William Wilson and John Singer Sargents El Jaleo to Richard Wrights Pagan Spain and Kathy Ackers Don Quixote, Spains 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, DeGuzmn argues, is not just a legacy of that nations colonial presence in the Americas; it lives on as well in the blackness of Spain and Spaniardsin 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, DeGuzmn 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, DeGuzmns book leads us to a powerful new understanding of the natureand historyof American ethnicity.