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

Abstract

Smith reviews Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-century Global Hispanic World edited by N. Michelle Murray and Akiko Tsuchiya.

Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenthcentury Global Hispanic World N. Michelle Murray and Akiko Tsuchiya (eds.) New York, SUNY University Press, 2019, 291 pp. ISBN: 978-1438476452

Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World breaks new ground by bringing the questions of gender and race to the forefront in discussions of colonial and postcolonial relations in fin-de-siglo Spain. N. Michelle Murray and Akiko Tsuchiya situate the emergence of Global Hispanophone studies at the turn of the 21st century and assert that the present anthology expands on this recent line of inquiry by focusing more on geographical areas beyond the Americas, such as the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea (3), and by foregrounding "the role of gender in generating narratives about the colonial condition" (5). Murray and Tsuchiya use the expression "unsettle colonialism", which forms part of the volume's title, to mean to "interrogate monolithic or totalizing narratives, representational paradigms, and ideologies underlying approaches to colonialism and imperialism" (6).

The individual chapters examine works, events, and performances from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, with a primary focus on Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, and the Philippines. The essays study fictional and non-fictional works by canonical authors such as Leopoldo Alas, Concepción Arenal, and Benito Pérez Galdós, and works by lesser-known writers such as Eva Canel, Faustina Sáez de Melgar, Antonio Flores, Eduardo López Bago, José Rizal, and Pedro Paterno. The genres studied vary greatly: novels, a short story, scientific writings, medical discourses, the género chico (specifically a short one-act play and one-act zarzuela), travel writings, essays, and political treatises. All discourses are explored within the historical context of the time and in relation to the power dynamics of colonialism, gender, race, and nationalism. The volume is divided into three sections as follows.

Part I, "Colonialism and Women's Migration", contains three essays that explore questions of women's movement, coerced and voluntary, to and from the colonies. In the first chapter, "The Colonial Politics of Meteorology: The W est African Expedition of the Urquiola Sisters", Benita Sampedro Vizcaya sheds new light on the scientific work and writings of Isabel and Manuela Urquiola. Despite these women's largely overlooked and laudable forays into the masculine domain of science, their work was still a part of the Spanish colonial project. In the second chapter, "Eva Canel and the Gender of Hispanism", Lisa Surwillo studies Canel's travel narrative Lo que vi en Cuba, a través de la isla (1916) as an apologia of political Hispanism -an ideology that viewed Spain as the rightful cultural and economic leader in its former colonies. Surwillo argues that Canel attempts to rewrite Cuban historiography by attributing the barbarity of slavery to the Catalans (not to Spaniards as a whole), and by promoting the idea that Spain should recover its role as moral and cultural leader in Cuba. In the third and last chapter of this section, "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 analyzes connections between sex trafficking and chattel slavery. She asserts that both novels racialize the transatlantic prostitute's deviant sexuality, presenting her as a racial and sexual Other, and consequently as an inferior colonial subject that needs to be controlled by the masculine imperial project (96).

Part II, "Race, Performance, and Colonial Ideologies", includes two essays that explore the performance of race through the use blackface. In chapter four, "A Black Woman Called Blanca la extranjera in Faustina Sáez de Melgar's Los miserables (186263)", Ana Mateos examines the way in which Alejandrina, the novel's mixed-race protagonist who usually passes for white, paints her fair skin black in a plot to recover her inheritance and aristocratic title. Her racial performance makes a feminist and abolitionist statement by equating the status of wives and slaves. Yet, this message is problematized by the fact that Alejandrina also represents the white colonizer and slave master because she is also of European descent, usually passes as white, and is an owner of diamond mine. Mar Soria interrogates the use of blackface in género chico performances in chapter five, "Colonial Imaginings on the Stage: Blackface, Gender, and the Economics of Empire in Spanish and Catalan Popular Theater". Soria persuasively argues that Ferrer i Codina's one-act comedy Las Carolinas (1886) and José Jackson Veyán and Gaspar Espinosa de Montero's one-act zarzuela La perla cubana (1890), both use blackface to uphold racial hierarchies and thereby justify an exploitative economic system based on slavery.

Part III, "Gender and Colonialism in Literary and Political Debates", includes four essays on the intersection of gender and colonial discourses. In chapter six, "Becoming Useless, Masculinity, Able-Bodiedness, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Spain", Julia Chang reads discourses on military masculinity and disability in light of Spain's colonial decline and in relation to Galdós's novel Aita Tetuan (1905). Chang concludes that the very colonial situation that creates masculine norms of virility also creates the circumstances that threaten these constructed ideals. Nuria Godón, in chapter seven, explores Leopoldo Alas's views on Spanish colonialism largely through an allegorical reading of La Regenta. In "From Imperial Boots to Naked Feet: Clarín's Views on Cuban Freedom and Female Independence in La Regenta", Godón equates the male protagonist's desire to dominate his female penitents with the colonial enterprise, and the latter's unsuccessful struggle for emancipation as a justification for imperialism. In chapter eight, "Dalagas and Ilustrados: Gender, Language, and Indigeneity in the Philippine Colonies", Joyce Tolliver takes a critical eye to the rhetoric of two prominent figures of the Philippine nationalist movement, José Rizal and Pedro Paterno, when addressing their message to young Philippine women. Tolliver reveals that both leaders recur to discourses about indigenous women's sexual purity to create "an anticolonial national unity" (248). The ninth and last chapter of the volume is Aurelie Vialette's "The Spanish Carceral Archipelago: Concepción Arenal against Penitentiary Colonization". In this essay Vialette argues that transforming the Philippines and Fernando Poo into penal colonies was part of a neocolonial project that sought to rehabilitate criminals into citizens of the colony, but not of the metropolis. She then examines the way in which the female writer and activist Concepción Arenal condemned this very practice as a form of slavery and an attack on human rights.

Together these well-written and researched essays are innovative, timely, and informative. Each essay stands on its own as an original and incisive piece of scholarship, but they are also coherently tied together by the theme and theoretical approach of volume. With a focus on the interplay of systems of oppression, these scholars avoid facile conclusions or monolithic narratives, and provide nuanced readings on the categories of gender and race within colonial and postcolonial systems. Furthermore, all essays engage with research on both sides of the Atlantic, open new areas of investigation, and provide insightful analyses of the discourses and cultural practices under study. Unsettling Colonialism is required reading for all scholars offin-de-siglo Spain and is sure to set the course for research in the field for decades to come.

JENNIFER SMITH

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D.O.I.: 10.1344/Lectora2020.26.21 Southern Illinois University Carbondale