Re-reading the conquest and reconquest: The return of the Moors in contemporary Spain
Description
In this Dissertation I examine a group of novels by Juan Goytisolo, Magdalena Lasala, Angeles de Irisarri and Lourdes Ortiz which re-interpret the Moorish presence in the Spanish past. Informed by New Historicism and Post-colonial theory, my Dissertation examines the long history of intertexts that narrate the Conquest of Spain by the Moors in the form of the 'Loss of Spain' legend and the uses recent novels make of the Reconquest as a negotiation between Arab and Christian identity. The symbolic return of the repressed self in the form of a massive wave of immigrant Moroccan workers becomes the framework for a recent boom in narratives that reconstruct Spanish national identity as multiple and heterogeneous The first chapter analyzes the legend of the 'Loss of Spain,' one of the most provocative metaphors that were produced to explain Spain's relationship with its 'others.' The different versions of this legend, which expand throughout Spanish literary history, continuously re-interpret the meaning of this foundational myth. In the second chapter I read Goytisolo's Don Julian as an extremely subversive, although intensely problematic, reinterpretation of the legend. Goytisolo, following Americo Castro, emphasizes the importance of Spain's Arab past, embracing it through an intensive use of language, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. Don Julian also defies the hegemonic centers of Spanish culture, performing a Derridean trespassing of discursive and geographical frontiers Chapters Three and Four analyze contemporary readings of the Reconquest in the form of novels that problematize, as does Hayden White, the notions of history and fiction as they narrate the lives of Medieval Spanish Women. The Trip of the Queen of Irisarri and Moorish and Christian Women of Irisarri and Lasala show the ambivalence that characterizes discourses of cultural difference, following the notion of stereotype of Homi Bhabha. Ortiz's Urraca and Irisarri's Queen Urraca , in the Fourth Chapter, establish the difficulties of narrating the life of a woman who is mother, wife, and Queen. These novels question Spain's official history of the Reconquest, as well as Franquist discourse on national unity, revealing Spain to be a hybrid and heterogeneous nation