Unsettling Colonialism , livre ebook

UNSETTLING COLONIALISM
SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture

Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary G. Feal, editors
UNSETTLING COLONIALISM
Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World
Edited by
N. Michelle Murray and Akiko Tsuchiya
Cover art: José Tapiró Y Baró, A Tangerian Beauty . Dahesh Museum of Art, New York. 1995.117
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Murray, N. Michelle, editor. | Tsuchiya, Akiko, editor.
Title: Unsettling colonialism : gender and race in the nineteenth-century global Hispanic world / edited by N. Michelle Murray and Akiko Tsuchiya.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, [2019] | Series: SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018056830 | ISBN 9781438476452 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438476476 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Spanish literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Imperialism in literature. | Race in literature. | Gender identity in literature. | Sex in literature.
Classification: LCC PQ6072 .U64 2019 | DDC 860.9/005—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056830
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Colonialism and Women’s Migrations
1. The Colonial Politics of Meteorology: The West African Expedition of the Urquiola Sisters
Benita Sampedro Vizcaya
2. Eva Canel and the Gender of Hispanism
Lisa Surwillo
3. Gender, Race, and Spain’s Colonial Legacy in the Americas: Representations of White Slavery in Eugenio Flores’s Trata de blancas and Eduardo López Bago’s Carne importada
Akiko Tsuchiya
II. Race, Performance, and Colonial Ideologies
4. A Black Woman Called Blanca la extranjera in Faustina Sáez de Melgar’s Los miserables (1862–63)
Ana Mateos
5. Colonial Imaginings on the Stage: Blackface, Gender, and the Economics of Empire in Spanish and Catalan Popular Theater
Mar Soria
III. Gender and Colonialism in Literary and Political Debates
6. Becoming Useless: Masculinity, Able-Bodiedness, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Spain
Julia Chang
7. From Imperial Boots to Naked Feet: Clarín’s Views on Cuban Freedom and Female Independence in La Regenta
Nuria Godón
8. Dalagas and Ilustrados : Gender, Language, and Indigeneity in the Philippine Colonies
Joyce Tolliver
9. The Spanish Carceral Archipelago: Concepción Arenal against Penitentiary Colonization
Aurélie Vialette
Contributors
Index
Illustrations Figure 1.1 Sebastiana Estala at the center, surrounded by her four children; from left to right, Manuela, Esteban, Juliana, and Isabel Urquiola Estala, in Vitoria, Spain. Figure 1.2 Postcard sent from the colonial city of Santa Isabel in Fernando Poo to Seville in 1955. Figure 1.3 Postal stamps commemorating the centenary of the birth of Manuel Iradier, on the first day of circulation. Figure 1.4 Manuel Iradier Bulfy, photograph taken upon his return from the second expedition to Africa. Figure 1.5 Petition to the governor by Manuel Iradier Bulfy, Fernando Poo, January 1, 1877. “Instancia de Manuel Iradier y Bulfy. Fernando Poo, 1 de enero, 1877.” Figure 1.6 Petition to the governor by Isabel Urquiola de Iradier, Fernando Poo, October 16, 1876. “Instancia de Isabel Urquiola de Iradier. Fernando Poo, 16 de octubre de 1876.” Figures 1.7 and 1.8 Unpublished diary of Manuel Iradier Urquiola. This five-page-long diary has been reproduced in the DVD that accompanies Gutiérrez Garitano’s Apuntes de la Guinea . Figure 6.1 O’Donnell junto a las tropas de la Campaña de África pasando por la Puerta del Sol en 1860 (O’Donnell with troops from the African campaign passing through Puerta del Sol in 1860).
Acknowledgments
This project is the fruit of collaboration among a group of specialists on nineteenth-century Iberian studies, who have been meeting over the past few years to exchange ideas and share works in progress on the intersections of gender and empire in the nineteenth-century Iberian world. We would like to acknowledge each and every member of our research group for their contributions to this project, for their collegiality and support.
Michelle would like to thank her colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University who encouraged her while she worked on the project, especially Andrés Zamora, who generously shared his expertise in nineteenth-century Spanish studies. She is also thankful for Jeffrey Coleman, Ana Corbalán, Elena Delgado, Kathy Everly, Jessica Folkart, Jo Labanyi, Jill Robbins, Rosi Song, Akiko Tsuchiya, and the members of her writing group for giving her ideas and feedback as she edited the volume. She is most grateful for Joshua Murray’s daily insights, inspiration, and support.
Akiko would like to thank the many colleagues in the field, who have inspired her through intellectual dialogue, assisted her in locating research materials, and made invaluable suggestions along the way, as this project took life. She is especially grateful to Billy Acree, Pura Fernández, Michelle Murray, Íñigo Sánchez-Llama, the late Chris Schmidt-Nowara, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Lisa Surwillo, Joyce Tolliver, and Aurélie Vialette for the conversations and for their advice during various stages of the project.
We thank Rebecca Colesworthy, Acquisitions Editor at SUNY Press, for having faith in the project and for her unflagging support throughout the editorial process. Finally, we are very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of the press, whose suggestions helped to improve the final manuscript.
Introduction
N. M ICHELLE M URRAY AND A KIKO T SUCHIYA
Colonialism, its aftermath, and its discontents have long posed a challenge to scholars across the disciplines, given the androcentric and northern European focus through which these problems have often been approached. In contrast, Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World , examines the entanglements of gender and race in the cultural productions of the long nineteenth century, 1 as they relate to Spanish imperialism. Our approach is feminist, insofar as our aim is to critically shed light on the multifaceted role of gender in discourses on Spain’s colonies. By drawing our attention to women’s central place as agents, symbols, or even objects of representation in colonial discourse, we scrutinize the ways in which women both upheld and destabilized colonial designs in the fin-de-siècle Hispanic world. The studies in this anthology unsettle monolithic narratives on the relationship between gender and colonialism, exposing the complex and oftentimes unpredictable tensions of identities and positionalities in cultural representations of nineteenth-century Spain.
The Iberian world has occupied a marginal place in feminist postcolonial studies, despite the geographical reach and global impact of the Spanish empire. Since the origins of its colonial enterprise in the fifteenth century, Spain has maintained most of its imperial holdings for nearly four hundred years. Spain embarked upon the first colonial voyage in 1492, 2 when Queen Isabella of Castile sponsored Christopher Columbus’s journey to the Americas. The colonial era instituted social hierarchies around gender, nationalism, race, and sexuality in alignment with Eurocentric principles. Indeed, overseas expansion and local religious expulsions—coextensive, violent colonization that united the Spanish nation to overseas territories—worked together to consolidate the nation.
The nineteenth century marks a crucial turning point in Spain’s imperial narrative, as the entry of Napoleonic forces into the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 triggered a series of independence movements in the Americas that led to the fracturing of an empire that had existed for more than three hundred years. 3 The loss of some of Spain’s largest colonies in Spanish America, following the formation of independent juntas in 1810 in Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, would culminate later in the century in the Spanish-American War, with the loss of Cuba and Puerto Rico—Spain’s last colonies in the Americas—and of the Philippines in the Pacific. As a response to these losses—and after unsuccessful attempts to reconquer parts of its old empire between 1840 and 1860 (Balfour 2)—Spain launched a pursuit of a “new imperial future” in Africa as a compensatory gesture, leading to repeated attempts to recolonize northern Africa (Martin-Márquez 17–18). In Sebastian Balfour’s view, even as Spain found itself in imperial decline while its European counterparts were expanding their empires, “Spanish nationalism took pride in asserting old-fashioned imperial values as opposed to those of the new colonial expansionism of other European powers” (2). 4 For Balfour, Spanish nation building and national identities in the nineteenth century and beyond were inextricably tied to i