Spain in the African American Imagination

AvRebecca C. Pawel

Inbunden, Engelska, 2027

Del i serien African American Intellectual History

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Revealing how African American intellectuals reframed race, history, and cultural belonging in the modern eraIn 1954, Richard Wright rented a car in France and drove south to the Spanish border on the first of two month-long trips that gave rise to the travelogue Pagan Spain, where Wright declared that the Pyrenees, on the France-Spain border, "mark the termination of Europe and the beginning of Africa." While Spain was not actually seen as an African country, such language suggests instead that Spain would be incomplete without African influences. In the wake of the Spanish-American war of 1898, Americans and Northern Europeans attributed Spain's weakened economy and loss of international clout to an inability to modernize, which they described in highly racialized terms. As African American modernists explored the country, they compared modernist notions coming out of the United States pertaining to race, gender, and other categories against Spain's history and contemporary culture.Spain in the African American Imagination traces how African American intellectuals in the mid-20th century, including Wright, Arthur Schomburg, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Peterson, and Frank Yerby, interpreted Spanish national myths. Rebecca Pawel argues that a literary idea of Spain as eternally "medieval" or "primitive" gave African American writers a conceptual space for thinking about the ways race is constructed through historical narrative. Spain provided a location that was considered ipso facto archaic and thus used racial referents typical of an era removed from the present in a space that was not quite African and not quite European. Ultimately, Pawel argues, Spain became a powerful lens through which African American intellectuals rewrote racial narratives and reimagined modernity across the Atlantic.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2027-02-08
Mått:152 x 229 x undefined mm
Vikt:454 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:African American Intellectual History
Antal sidor:296
Förlag:University of Massachusetts Press
ISBN:9781625349828

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Socialhistoria och kulturhistoria inom Historia och arkeologi
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Mer om författaren

Rebecca C. Pawel teaches composition and African American literature at the University of Bridgeport. Her scholarship has appeared in ConSecuencias: A Journal of Spanish Criticism; Langston Hughes Review, and Post-medieval. She has taught at Columbia University and Vassar College, and held a Fulbright Fellowship, working at Madrid Complutense. She is also the author of a number of historical mystery novels set in Spain.

Recensioner i media

"I have not seen a study of African American engagement with Spain as a lived and imagined space that is as thorough and well-argued as this one. It will be a go-to for understanding Black ex-pats who lived in, studied, and/or took Spain as a fruitful conceptual and ideological space to explore and reposition African American modernist identity."—Veronica T. Watson, author of The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness"Pawel moves confidently between U.S. and Spanish contexts, showing a strong grasp of the cultural and political histories of both. 'Native, Yet Foreign' also demonstrates extensive historical, archival, and literature research, and an excellent ability to place the chosen texts in conversation with one another while offering complex, nuanced close readings."—Rosalia Cornejo-Parriego, editor of Black USA and Spain: Shared Memories in the 20th Century