Black USA and Spain


Book Description

During the 20th-century, Spaniards and African-Americans shared significant cultural memories forged by the profound impact that various artistic and historical events had on each other. Addressing three crucial periods (the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age, the Spanish Civil War, and Franco's dictatorship), this collection of essays explores the transnational bond and the intercultural exchanges between these two communities, using race as a fundamental critical category. The study of travelogues, memoirs, documentaries, interviews, press coverage, comics, literary works, music, and performances by iconic figures such as Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, as well as the experiences of ordinary individuals such as African American nurse Salaria Kea, invite an examination of the ambiguities and paradoxes that underlie this relationship: among them, the questionable and, at times, surprising racial representations of blacks in Spanish avant-garde texts and in the press during the years of Franco’s dictatorship; African Americans very unique view of the Spanish Civil War in light of their racial identity; and the oscillation between fascination and anxiety when these two communities look at each other.




Spain and the Independence of the United States: An Intrinsic Gift


Book Description

The role of Spain in the birth of the United States is a little known and little understood aspect of U.S. independence. Through actual fighting, provision of supplies, and money, Spain helped the young British colonies succeed in becoming an independent nation. Soldiers were recruited from all over the Spanish empire, from Spain itself and from throughout Spanish America. Many died fighting British soldiers and their allies in Central America, the Caribbean, along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis and as far north as Michigan, along the Gulf Coast to Mobile and Pensacola, as well as in Europe. Based on primary research in the archives of Spain, this book is about United States history at its very inception, placing the war in its broadest international context. In short, the information in this book should provide a clearer understanding of the independence of the United States, correct a longstanding omission in its history, and enrich its patrimony. It will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the Revolutionary War and in Spain's role in the development of the Americas.




The Lincoln Brigade


Book Description

THE LINCOLN BRIGADE The day after Christmas in 1936, a group of ninety-six Americans sailed from New York to help Spain defend its democratic government against fascism. Ultimately, twenty-eight hundred United States volunteers reached Spain to become the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Few Lincolns had any military training. More than half were seriously wounded or died in battle. Most Lincolns were activists and idealists who had worked with and demonstrated for the homeless and unemployed during the Great Depression. They were poets and blue-collar workers, professors and students, seamen and journalists, lawyers and painters, Christians and Jews, blacks and whites. The Brigade was the first fully integrated United States army, and Oliver Law, an African American from Texas, was an early Lincoln commander. William Loren Katz and the late Marc Crawford twice traveled with the Brigade to Spain in the 1980s, interviewed surviving Lincolns on old battlefields, and obtained never-before-published documents and photographs for this book.




African American Women's Literature in Spain


Book Description

This volume brings forward a descriptive approach to the translation and reception of African American women’s literature in Spain. Drawing from a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework, it traces the translation history of literature produced by African American women, seeking to uncover changing strategies in translation policies as well as shifts in interests in the target context, and it examines the topicality of this cohort of authors as frames of reference for Spanish critics and reviewers. Likewise, the reception of the source literature in the Spanish context is described by reconstructing the values that underlie judgements in different reception sources. Finally, this book addresses the specific problem of the translation of Black English into Spanish. More precisely, it pays attention to the ideological and the ethical implications of translation choices and the effect of the latter on the reception of literary texts.




The Spanish Craze


Book Description

The Spanish Craze is the compelling story of the centuries-long U.S. fascination with the history, literature, art, culture, and architecture of Spain. Richard L. Kagan offers a stunningly revisionist understanding of the origins of hispanidad in America, tracing its origins from the early republic to the New Deal. As Spanish power and influence waned in the Atlantic World by the eighteenth century, her rivals created the “Black Legend,” which promoted an image of Spain as a dead and lost civilization rife with innate cruelty and cultural and religious backwardness. The Black Legend and its ambivalences influenced Americans throughout the nineteenth century, reaching a high pitch in the Spanish-American War of 1898. However, the Black Legend retreated soon thereafter, and Spanish culture and heritage became attractive to Americans for its perceived authenticity and antimodernism. Although the Spanish craze infected regions where the Spanish New World presence was most felt—California, the American Southwest, Texas, and Florida—there were also early, quite serious flare-ups of the craze in Chicago, New York, and New England. Kagan revisits early interest in Hispanism among elites such as the Boston book dealer Obadiah Rich, a specialist in the early history of the Americas, and the writers Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also considers later enthusiasts such as Angeleno Charles Lummis and the many writers, artists, and architects of the modern Spanish Colonial Revival in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spain’s political and cultural elites understood that the promotion of Spanish culture in the United States and the Western Hemisphere in general would help overcome imperial defeats while uniting Spaniards and those of Spanish descent into a singular raza whose shared characteristics and interests transcended national boundaries. With elegant prose and verve, The Spanish Craze spans centuries and provides a captivating glimpse into distinct facets of Hispanism in monuments, buildings, and private homes; the visual, performing, and cinematic arts; and the literature, travel journals, and letters of its enthusiasts in the United States.




Kinky Gazpacho


Book Description

Recounts the author's experiences living in Spain as a young black woman, where she learns about the country's racial prejudices against blacks and falls in love with a Spaniard.




An African American and Latinx History of the United States


Book Description

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers’ Day, when migrant laborers—Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth—united in resistance on the first “Day Without Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights. 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award




Rereading the Black Legend


Book Description

The phrase “The Black Legend” was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. Challenging this stereotype, Rereading the Black Legend contextualizes Spain’s uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the “Black Legend.” A distinguished group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration. The geographic reach and linguistic breadth of this ambitious collection will make it a valuable resource for any discussion of race, national identity, and religious belief in the European Renaissance.




Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886


Book Description

This book explores the abolition of African slavery in Spanish Cuba from 1817 to 1886—from the first Anglo-Spanish agreement to abolish the slave trade until the removal from Cuba of the last vestige of black servitude. Making extensive use of heretofore untapped research sources from the Spanish archives, the author has developed new perspectives on nineteenth-century Spanish policy in Cuba. He skillfully interrelates the problem of slavery with international politics, with Cuban conservative and liberal movements, and with political and economic developments in Spain itself. Arthur Corwin finds that the study of this problem falls naturally into two phases, the first of which, 1817–1860, traces the gradual reduction of the African traffic to the Spanish Antilles and constitutes, in effect, a study in Anglo-Spanish diplomacy. He gives special attention here to the aggressive nature of British abolitionist diplomacy and the mounting but generally ineffective indignation resulting from Spanish failure to apply sanctions against the traffic, as well as the increasing North American interest in the annexation of Cuba. The first phase has for its principal theme the manner in which for decades Spain feigned compliance with agreements to end the slave trade while actually protecting slaveholding interests as the best means of holding Cuba. The American Civil War, which destroyed the greatest bulwark of black slavery in the New World, marked the opening of a new phase, 1860–1886. The author strongly emphasizes here such influences as the rise of the Creole reform movement in Cuba and Puerto Rico, which, reading the signs of the times, gave the initial impulse to a Spanish abolitionist movement and contributed to closing the Cuban slave trade in 1866; the liberal revolution of 1868 in Spain and its promise of colonial reforms; the outbreak of the great Creole rebellion in Cuba, 1868–1878, and the abolitionist promises of the rebel chieftains; the threat of American intervention and the abolitionist pressure of American diplomacy; and the protests of the Spanish reactionaries in Spain and Cuba, leading to further procrastination in Madrid. The second phase has as its principal theme the shaping, through all these intertwined factors, of Spain’s first measure of gradual emancipation, the Moret Law of 1870, and all subsequent steps toward abolition.




América


Book Description

An epic history of the Spanish empire in North America from 1493 to 1898 by Robert Goodwin, author of Spain: The Centre of the World. At the conclusion of the American Revolution, half the modern United States was part of the vast Spanish Empire. The year after Columbus's great voyage of discovery, in 1492, he claimed Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands for Spain. For the next three hundred years, thousands of proud Spanish conquistadors and their largely forgotten Mexican allies went in search of glory and riches from Florida to California. Many died, few triumphed. Some were cruel, some were curious, some were kind. Missionaries and priests yearned to harvest Indian souls for God through baptism and Christian teaching. Theirs was a frontier world which Spain struggled to control in the face of Indian resistance and competition from France, Britain, and finally the United States. In the 1800s, Spain lost it all. Goodwin tells this history through the lives of the people who made it happen and the literature and art with which they celebrated their successes and mourned their failures. He weaves an epic tapestry from these intimate biographies of explorers and conquerors, like Columbus and Coronado, but also lesser known characters, like the powerful Gálvez family who gave invaluable and largely forgotten support to the American Patriots during the Revolutionary War; the great Pueblo leader Popay; and Esteban, the first documented African American. Like characters in a great play or a novel, Goodwin's protagonists walk the stage of history with heroism and brio and much tragedy.