Morocco and works on the War of Africa of 1859
Introduction.
Morocco, as with many works on the African War of 1859 since there is no need to find an excuse for the conquest of the Maghreb. Except for the fruitful personal relationship that he had with Moroccan intellectuals and leaders, infant’s Andalusia is exempt from Africanist discourse.
Blas Infante echoes the currents of Arabism of the time and the intense work of translation, interpretation and incorporation of Arab texts in the Spanish cultural background, especially around the work of Arabist Emilio García Gómez that influenced so much with its translationof the Andalusian Arabic poems and with its identification of Al-Andalus with Spain.
This commitment to the freedoms proposed by Infante and the Araboislamic singularity of the Andalusian people as a reason for proud and not shame, is the basis of Andalusian nationalism as a social imaginary and as a political proposal in democratic Spain from the end of the dictatorship in 1975 untilThe present.
Developing.
Infante’s alandalusism would lead us to Panalandalusism of Arabist Rodolfo Gil "Benumeya" who makes Al-Andalus transfer as peninsular uniqueness towards Hispanic America. It is an expansionist alandalusism. During the dictatorship he will be a Francoist convinced that he abandons his Andalusian nationalist discourse to lean towards an aesthetic and ideologically harmless ganivetism.
Benumeya is a very little studied author (apart from specific studies of the Arabist Dolores López Enamorado, his son Rafael Gil Grimau as a compiler and anthropologist J.A. Alcantud several times cited in this study) . The cause of this oblivion works at three levels: as a benumeya Andalusian nationalist is eclipsed by the imposing figure of an infant, as a Africanist writer does not go to posterity, since, although he writes a card of a Spaniard in Morocco (1925) he soon moves away fromThis type of literature, and also, its link to the Franco regime returns a questionable figure during democracy.
His support for the Falange was explicit in his book Morocco Andaluz of 1942 and was co -director of the Africa and the race, which he shared with the dictator Framcisco Francisco. In addition to this, his precursor and still not well understood vision of Andalusian transnationality ("the geopsychic homeland" as he called his Arab Andalucism) has made him a complex figure and impossible to frame for criticism for criticism.
For obvious political needs, Infante focuses on the Andalusian geographical field its nationalist discourse, making an appropriation of the symbolic territory of Al-Andalus with an idea of dignifying Andalusia. Benumeya, on the other hand, proposes an ideological project to expand the physical borders of the Andalusian nation towards the Mediterranean and the Spanish Americas and redefinition of Spanish identity through panalandalusism, based on the thought of infant that puts the cultural homeland beforeto the nation, and the nation to the State.
Benumeya, arguing that her mother’s family descended from the Umayyas will change her second last name to Benumeya, (such as the leader of the Alpujarras rebellion, the Moorish Fernando del Valueand therefore equating with him, although our Benumeya does not share his spirit of rebellion. This change of name and the construction of invented genealogies is related to the identity transvestism that we have analyzed in these pages and responds to the need to legitimize your voice and your approach to the semicolon element giving authenticity to your speech.
Curiously, creating imaginary genealogies will also be used by tired Assens with Judaism. Both benumeya and tired are two renegades that approach Islam and Judaism, as an identity positioning. It is no accident that Benumeya wrote a review in the magazine of African Studies praising the Spanish translation of the Al-Qu´ran de Cansinos, a topic that would be very interesting to explore in future studies: how Spanish avant-garde feed on a Hispanic and academic orientalismAway from the Arabesque exotism of the rest of Europe.
Benumeya will be closely linked to proarabic Africanism and will coin the term "noon" not only as a physical landscape of the south, but as an emotional and cultural place where space and time cross, essential to rebuild European history. This defends it in a series of articles under the epigraph of "noon. Introduction to the study of current Arab Spain ”that writes between 1927 and 1929 and that will be the precedent of his Summit or East or West. The universe seen from Albaizín.
Neither East nor West where debates are established on the concepts of civilization and culture from the essentialism of Ganivet, of which all Andalusians feel debtors and where this concept of noon and Latinity begins to develop around which all their work revolves. His intention is to resituate politics around the Mediterranean sphere.
Spain is located in the center of this new Panarabist and Pan American space, advocating an expansive Andalucism: "Andalusian fact" is not a Nasrid twilight nostalgia space to the use of the orientalist thinkers, but a true homeland where the borders of theemotional geography are restructured .
The ideas of Mediterranean were already present in the 19th between federalists and regionalists European,-especially French-like Gromier and in the magazines Revue du Monde Latin, but this Latinity is nothing but a rejection of everything north-European, especially what IEnglish and German. Others will praise this position, such as Ortega Pichardo and Ignacio Bauer and Landauer.
For this author the Maghreb element is essential in the new relationship between the South American countries and Spain. The "invasive Hispanity" according to Benumeya occurs in the same way in sixteenth -century America and in Morocco of the 19th. America for Benumeya is the Musta´riba (or neo-Arab lands also called “the new al-Andalus”) and Spain the logical intermediary between overseas and the West. The concept of race and chasticism is redefined by Benumeya in the debate between chasticism and modernization proposed by Unamuno. Spanish Casticism for Benumeya is Mediterranean and goes from Persia and includes America, “that extreme west."
These panalandalusistic speeches will have an impact on contemporary South American authors heirs of the Mahyar and that literary group called "New Al-Andalus" this vision is having an increasingly strong influence on Latin America, especially in a new current of intellectuals and writersthat work the identity from the neorientalism that advocate a "horizontal orientalism" – as defined by the Mexican writer Alberto Ruy – that exceeds the post -colonialist vision of identity to build a new relationship with other communities, beyond his character ofExcolonia.
Beyond historical legitimacy, and in many cases playing with the boundaries between exotism, myth, linguistics or ethnology, and from the freedom of discourse that literature gives, authors such as the aforementioned Alberto Ruy with his quintet of Mogador, or the Chilean poet or Arabist Sergio Macías Brevis, resident in Spain and that open a very interesting field of future exploration around what has come to be called South American Neoárabe poetry and the myth of Al-Andalus as inner exile as inner exile.
Santiago Macías, cataloged by the prestigious Arabista María J. Rubiera as "The Andean poet of Al-Andalus" Sergio Macías is an author and researcher with books such as Arabic influence on the Latin American letters (2009) Tetuán, dreams of an Andean (1989) or the manuscript of dreams, (2008)-publishedIn Chile, Spain and Casablanca in Arab and Spanish-its literary universe collects the poetic reveries of the Mahyar and Benumeya: Al-Andalus did not fall in 1492, but was taken to the Americas to continue overseas negotiating and defining Hispanity.
In that sense of transfer we also find spaces occupied by the myth of Al-Andalus in Latin America and that have been of interest to both Spanish and Latin American academics. Recently, he was edited by Mutis, in his work to promote cultural relations from south to south, a work on the neoArabe architecture in Latin America, entitled Alhambras whose promotion was accompanied by a parallel exhibition in Mexico’s consulates in Spain in Spain.
This study defends that beyond orientalist constructions in the style of the architecture of the Universal Exhibition of Paris, neo -Arab architecture in Latin America is a way of negotiating from a space outside the colonialist symbols the presence of Spain in the new rhetoric of nationsHispanoamericanas, from a new identity and national rhetoric that is increasingly strengthening its relations between these countries and the Maghreb through Andalusian Spain.
We wanted to extend in these new horizons to leave the-Andalus patent in their passage of historical reality to myth escapes traditional studies and also to our expectations of negotiating their own margins of action. The myth of Al-Andalus becomes impossible to foresee and enters all the speeches of Spanish and also Hispano-American society. No traditional discipline can define it and cover it in its entirety and in itself its study requires a crossing of disciplines and a transversality that exceeds the limits of post -colonialism.
Obviously, we cannot deny to what extent the myth of Al-Andalus is politicized, in addition to being subject to an arduous debate in the western world that needs to treat the terrorist threat or the Maghreb immigration with an urgent peremptory, and that seeks in the pastquick responses to the social challenges that are presented to you.
conclusion.
Neorientalism proposes a vision of Islamic otherness from the Spanish identity that does not exclude the imperialist and colonialist past, explores the redefinition of borders to America and the Mediterranean, the contradiction with modernity and with Europe, the symbolic appropriation of the Maghreb territory,Hispanicity through Arabity, aesthetic and modernist exotism and the semicolon as a cultural syncretism between the araboislamic and the Hebrew that as sadly we can observe in the political (and academics) spheres have a confrontation as fierce as antinatural.
These interpretations of the al-Andalus myth around Spanish identity, in an honest attempt to respond to certain socio-political demands, give rise to more or less coherent speeches. The evocative force of the al-Andalus myth is fruitful and will still act under different political and literary rhetoric. The logic of the disagreement between Spain and Al-Andalus in the historiographic plane is resolved with a logic of the meeting in the plane of the myth. Let’s end how we started, with the words of former Spanish president José María Aznar when he said that Al-Andalus is the enemy of Spain since the seventh century. It is certainly the intimate enemy that defines us, an essential myth that articulates our identity.
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