Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World

Unsettling Colonialism is a welcome addition to the growing bibliography on Hispanic postcolonial studies through its concentration on the often-neglected role that gender played in the colonial discourse of a crumbling empire. The book’s focus is on the literary and cultural productions of the long nineteenth-century, a period during which Spain struggled to define itself as a nation in the face of the loss of its American colonies and its expansion into Africa. The era is rich in opportunities to discover forgotten female voices, a focus of many of the chapters. Divided into three sections—“Colonialism and Women’s Migrations”; “Race, Performance, and Colonial Ideologies”; “Gender and Colonialism in Literary and Political Debates”—Unsettling Colonialism reconceptualizes the legacy of Spanish colonialism through the prism of the intersections of race and gender. Benita Sampedro Vizcaya’s essay, “The Colonial Politics of Meteorology,” uncovers the scientific contributions of Isabel and Manuela Urquiola while charting the Gulf of Guinea. Whereas Isabel’s husband, Manuel Iradier, was heralded as a great explorer, honored by the Franco regime with stamps commemorating the centenary of his birth, it was his wife and sister-in-law who between 1874 and 1877 gathered the data that facilitated the exploration and settlement of Central Africa. Their erasure from history stands in sharp contrast to the honors garnered by the English Mary Henrietta Kingsley. In the second chapter of this grouping, “Eva Canal and the Gender of Hispanism,” Lisa Surwillo cogently analyzes Lo que vi en Cuba, a trav es de la isla (1916) as a product of neoimperial Hispanism with Canal’s zeal to defend Spain’s centrality to the definition of Cuban culture in the face of U.S. occupation. Canal’s limited access to government funding allowed her to claim full independence from oversight as she produced counternarratives to the incursion of U.S. culture in Cuba. Akiko Tsuchiya studies the “Representations of White Slavery in Eugenio Flores’s Trata de blancas and Eugenio L opez Bago’s Carne importada.” Both novels are studied within the context of the sex trafficking of European women between 1860 and 1930. Under the umbrella of “radical naturalism,” both authors study prostitutes as the detritus of European society in a way that posits their diseased body as an outlet for expressing cultural anxieties about gender, racial impurities, and the loss of empire. The second section, focusing on performance, begins with Ana Mateos’s “A Black Woman Called Blanca la extranjera in Faustina S aez de Melgar’s Los miserables (1862–63),” a study of the abolitionist and feminist concerns of the Isabelline writer. Through her appearance in Madrid wearing blackface, the protagonist’s actions highlight the shared plight of women and slaves, with the added complexity that in her pose as a black woman she has less social constrictions than a white woman of her class. Of added interest is Mateos’s study of the role of philanthropy in granting women, even women of color, greater agency in society. Mar Soria continues the focus on blackface in her chapter on the use of this device in the g enero chico to commodify the black body for the amusement of Spanish audiences who felt themselves as members of an empire by seeing the dynamics of colonialism played out on the stage. The final section begins with Julia Chang’s “Becoming Useless: Masculinity, Able-Bodiedness, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Spain,” which examines the role of the military in defining masculinity as the bodies of soldiers became the visible emblems of empire. Thus, colonialism creates a biopolitical battleground upon which both peninsular as well as colonial bodies are gendered and classified in terms of their utility to the imperial enterprise. Nuria God on’s study of La ROMANCE QUARTERLY 2022, VOL. 69, NO. 4, 230–231