Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire: A retrospective

Abstract

Located at the intersection of American Studies, LatinX Studies, and Romance Studies, the scholarly book Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire turns a “critical ethnic studies” lens on Anglo-American culture. It argues that constructions of Anglo-American identity as “American” have depended on figures of Spain. These figurations have been crucial to the dominant Anglo fictions of “American” exceptionalism, revolution, and manifest destiny; to Anglo-America’s articulation of its empire as an anti-empire; and to its fears of racial contamination and hybridity. Spain’s Long Shadow unfolds the story of one imperialist shadowing another. Now, nearly two decades since its publication, what insights and which questions linger, especially as we engage with what Claudia Milian has termed “a globally entangled LatinX Studies”? Pushing off from Spain’s Long Shadow’s concluding thoughts, this essay responds to that question in relation to the more than 3 million-plus people of a heterogeneous LatinX diaspora living in Spain today. This estimate constitutes approximately 6.4% of Spain’s current population, which is also Europe’s largest concentration of LatinXs. This undertaking is conceptualized as a retrospective—a thinking piece that looks at the past, the present time, and the speculative future to postulate and assess global LatinX processes. The piece fleshes out and updates Spain’s Long Shadow’s invitation to develop new perspectives, frameworks, and scholarship on the transatlantic transcultural impetus of LatinX cultural production from South-North and West-East axes of orientation.