M. Greer u.a. (Hrsg.): Rereading the Black Legend
Greer, Margaret R.; Mignolo, Walter D.; Quilligan, Maureen (Hrsg.): Rereading the Black
Legend. The Discourses of Religious and Racial
Difference in the Renaissance Empires. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 2008. ISBN: 978-0226-30721-3; 448 S.
Rezensiert von: Allison Blakely, Boston University
This collection of fourteen comparative essays, mainly by professors of modern languages and history, challenges the so-called
„Black Legend,“ a term that entered journalistic literature a century ago to describe a negative interpretation of Spain’s conquest of
the Americas in comparison with the conduct of the other major European imperial
powers in their respective exploits. The volume seeks to do this through reexamination of
Spain’s conquests both in Iberia and the Americas; and for a global comparative perspective offers accounts of practices in the Ottoman, Mughal, and Chinese empires in Asia;
and the later Dutch and British global empires. The book’s four parts are titled „Two
Empires of the East,“ „Spain: Conquista and
Reconquista,“ „Dutch Designs,“ and „Belated
England.“ Their constitutive essays highlight
pertinent themes such as religion and evolution of the concepts of caste, class, and race.
While focused on the Renaissance and early
modern periods, the volume also intends to
inform the discourse on the interaction between world regions and cultures all the way
to the present. The editors contribute an Introduction and Afterword that succeed to some
extent in providing coherence to the volume’s
vast thematic, chronological and geographical
range.
The essays collectively deny that Spain’s
conquest in the Americas was exceptional in
its brutality, nor that Spain led in establishing
color-based racism, a related aspect of the Legend. They admit that Spanish Christians did
contribute to the evolution of the modern concept of race by beginning to apply to humans
terminology earlier used to classify horses, relating these at first to Moors and Jews, and implying hierarchy among human groups. Some
of the authors also acknowledge that this polemic about Spanish character did echo an in-
ternal debate within Spain about racial purity, stemming from the Spanish awareness of
a Moorish influence on their society. The authors assert however that the Black Legend per
se was a contrivance of Spain’s colonial rivals, especially England, to divert attention
from the character of British imperialism that
would eventually be cloaked under such concepts as the free market and free trade. In this
view, the English began to denigrate the Spaniards just as the latter had Moors, Jews, Indians and Blacks. Consequently the demonizing of the Moors in Europe and stigmatization of blackness in Western societies tarnished the historical image of Spain. The authors
point to Immanuel Kant’s influential national
and racial classifications in his essay „On the
Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime“ as
another important contributor to the Black Legend. Kant asserted there that Spaniards were partly non-European, at the very time the
emerging European imperialist powers began
to distinguish themselves from the Moslems
in North Africa and the Turks to the East,
thus rendering Spain a racial and religious
„other.“ The authors also cite the equally renowned German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel for a clearer articulation of this geopolitical and racial formulation of the imperial
discourse, in the Introduction to his Philosophy of History. There he posits central Europe (principally Germany, France, and England) as the heart of Europe, defined as such
by their having no direct contact with Africa
or Asia.
The main question Walter Mignolo, one of
the editors, takes up in his Afterword is the
relevance of the Black Legend to concepts of
race. He notes that only the Europeans among
the empires considered in the volume tied race to skin color, and concludes that ultimately the ascendancy of this concept owes most
to capitalism and new forms of economic organization involving massive appropriation
of land and exploitation of labor. Concluding
that the racial discourse arose to justify this,
he adds that this outlook is also manifest today in „keeping Iranian and Chinese expansion at bay and criminalizing immigration in
the United States and Europe.“ (p. 314) In his
view the European Union continues to reflect
this vision. While all of the essays in this vol-
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ume are quite scholarly and well written, and
an economic interpretation is consistent with
naming England as the chief author of the
Black Legend, some of the sweeping generalizations in the Afterword, encompassing centuries of complex history and issues not treated in this volume, seem to undervalue the
importance of historical context. Surely the
competition for land and political domination in the expansion of the United States have
had more bearing on the predominant attitudes toward „Latins“ there than the centuries
old Black Legend based on a close proximity to Africa and annihilation of indigenous
peoples in America. After all the United States
bears a burden of shame of its own on the latter score, in addition to being the only modern
Western society to practice full blown slavery
at home.
This volume’s focus on debunking the socalled Black Legend is at the same time a
quest to affirm Spain’s identity as European
and distance its historical image from the traditional negative ones Western societies have
held of Africa. An unintended possible consequence of this is that while these essays succeed in pointing out fallacies in The Black
Legend, some readers looking at these matters from the perspective of the non-Western
cultures implicated in Spain’s Black Legend
may therefore be left with an impression that
the denial of the Black Legend rests on uncritical acceptance of its assumption that African and Asian peoples and cultures are inferior to those in Europe. Such assumptions
could actually weaken the arguments against
the Black Legend since African population in
Iberia was not limited to the Moorish period: some 150,000 laborers were brought in
during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries. The seeming concentration on affirming Spain’s character as truly European
is offset by some content in the essays that
attempts to correct common misconceptions
about the Spanish conquests. An example is
the essay by Silver Moon and Michael Ennis, „The View of the Empire from the Altepetl: Nahua Historical and global Imagination“ (pp. 150-66), that asserts that the conventional view that the Spaniards totally annihilated the indigenous peoples is an exaggeration, despite the very real atrocities commit-
ted. Is there not more evidence that could salvage Spain’s reputation without impugning
those of other cultures? In this regard, there
is surprisingly no mention in the book of the
Frank Tannenbaum thesis that occupied a generation of scholars in the mid-twentieth century, and is still contested in recent work. [1]
This argued essentially that the Iberian model
of Latin American slavery was more humane than Anglo-American slavery. More of this
type of discussion might have mitigated the
appearance of emphasis on distancing Spain
from Africa, which may easily be exaggerated
given the fact that in terms of cultural exchange even the Mediterranean Sea has historically served more as a connection between all of
Europe and Africa than as a boundary.
Notes
1. See, for example, Daniel Littlefield’s 2001
review of: Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, Chicago 1999, in: William and
Mary Quarterly, Volume LVIII (2001) 1, pp.
272-75.
Allison Blakely über Greer, Margaret R.;
Mignolo, Walter D.; Quilligan, Maureen
(Hrsg.): Rereading the Black Legend. The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the
Renaissance Empires. Chicago 2008, in: H-SozKult 25.09.2009.
© H-Net, Clio-online, and the author, all rights reserved.