Mar Martínez Góngora. Los espacios coloniales en las crónicas de Berbería Los espacios coloniales en las crónicas de Berbería by Mar Martínez Góngora Review by: Daniel Hershenzon Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Fall 2015), pp. 1076-1078 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/683927 . Accessed: 03/09/2015 11:10 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
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Los espacios coloniales en las cr onicas de Berberıa. Mar Martınez Gongora. Tiempo Emulado: Historia de Ame rica y Espa~ na 28. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2013. 272 pp. €29.80. In 1492, the Catholic kings conquered Granada, the last political bastion of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. Following the conquest, Spain forcefully converted its new Muslim subjects and turned its attention to North Africa, seeking to conquer, colonize, and Christianize it. Spain gave up on its Maghribi colonial agenda in 1577 and expelled the Moriscos (the forcefully converted Muslims) in 1609–14. In Los espacios coloniales en las cr onicas de Berberıa (The colonial spaces of the chronicles of Barbary), Mar Martınez Gongora argues that Spain’s Maghribi colonial interests generated a thematically coherent but generically heterogeneous literary corpus that tried to justify, on an ideological level, the conquest and annexation of Mediterranean Muslim territories, especially the Maghrib. This corpus not only legitimated colonization, the author compellingly argues, but also offered a way for Spaniards to come to terms with the Muslim traces scattered throughout Spain, which challenged the formation of a unified Spanish subject. Martınez Gongora features the accounts of captives, soldiers, missionaries, and redeemers who wrote about North Africa — the Moroccan sultanate and Ottoman Algiers and Tunis — and the Ottoman imperial metropole. Martınez Gongora argues that these authors constructed representations of North Africa’s history, natural environment, and people that supported expansionist politics and the struggle against Islam. In three parts and eight chapters organized around these themes, Martınez Gongora thoughtfully demonstrates how, in order to justify Spain’s right over the Maghrib, the authors of Barbary chronicles stressed the Christian and Greco-Roman origins of North Africa (chapter 1) and the contiguity of landscape (chapter 2) and urban environment (chapter 3) from Al-Andalus through Andalusia to North Africa. These authors also portrayed North Africa as a land rich in economic resources, which varied from bulk goods (chapter 4) to luxurious objects (chapter 5), of which Spain’s economy could benefit. The last three chapters focus on the Spanish Moriscos (chapter 6) and on the
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Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire (chapters 7 and 8). In these chapters, Martınez Gongora argues that the Barbary chroniclers discussed the home of the Moriscos, which during the sixteenth century became an object of inquisitorial control, as a space central to the construction of Muslim colonized masculinity. When these authors turned their focus to the heart of the Ottoman Empire, Muslim spaces (houses, gardens, and galleys), and the masculinity these spaces shaped, served to balance an idealized image of the Ottoman Empire. By creating a corpus based on texts produced over a long stretch of time (1529–1612), the author convincingly demonstrates the continuous and paradoxical significance of Islam and Muslims to sixteenth-century Spanish authors. Especially fascinating are the first three chapters that reconstruct the symbolic, nearly religious place of North Africa in the early modern Spanish imagination. In focusing on how Spanish authors rediscovered their Christian and classical roots in the Maghrib, the author engages in a fruitful dialogue with recent historical research on seventeenth-century Spanish orientalism and interest in Arabic and Islam, expanding the textual corpus to which such research ought to be applied. While shedding new important light on a hitherto nearly invisible textual phenomenon, the decision to reconstruct the function of such a chronologically disparate group of texts on the basis of their analysis alone raises questions. Does thematic affinity mean the texts published early in the sixteenth century had the same function as texts published nearly a century later? And where exactly is the function located? In the authors’ hopes, the texts, or their reception? Do we not risk flattening significant differences by limiting the analysis to authorial or textual function, leaving aside their publication histories, interpretation, and uses? The publication histories of three texts at the center of Martınez Gongora’s book hint at the importance of these questions. Diego de Torres’s Relation of the Origin and Succession of the Sharifs and the State of the Kingdoms of Morocco: Fez and Taroudant (1586), Marmol Carvajal’s General Description of Africa (1573, 1599), and Antonio de Sosa’s Topography and History of Algiers (1612) were written in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, before Spain gave up on its African colonial agenda. The authors, influenced by Spain’s expansionism, probably hoped (among other hopes) to contribute to the colonial enterprise. However, de Torres’s and de Sosa’s works were published only posthumously, and Marmol Carvajal faced immense difficulties republishing the first volume of his work together with the second. By the time they were published, Spain had already turned its attention north- and westward — publishers and audiences either did not identify the texts’ alleged function or did not identify with it. Only Marmol Carvajal’s first volume was reprinted, and while the three were partly translated to other languages, they were all poorly received in Spain. The most successful, de Sosa, was mostly read by Trinitarian and Mercedarian friars, who used him to justify goals very different from colonial expansion. Despite these minor concerns about reception history, Martınez Gongora’s book is an important contribution to the fields of Spanish literary history, early modern Spanish history, and Islam in the West, not to mention the emerging field of Mediterranean
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studies. Los espacios coloniales en las cr onicas de Berberıa offers an original and elucidating analysis of a set of often-neglected but important texts. DANIEL HERSHENZON, University of Connecticut
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