Wacks, David A. Review of Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge: The Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN 9780674980327. 400pp. Comparative Literature, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 460-462

David A. Wacks

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Author’s open-access postprint  Version of academic record: Wacks, David A. Review of Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge: The Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN 9780674980327. 400pp. Comparative Literature, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 460-462.   1 Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge: The Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN 9780674980327. 400pp.  Colonial al-Andalus is an innovative, rigorous, clearly argued, and fascinating study of how Morocco’s colonial entanglement with Spain shaped its modern cultural identity. In the Introduction (1-28), Calderwood clearly lays out his overall argument: “that Morocco’s Andalusi identity is not a medieval legacy, but is, instead, a modern invention that emerged from the colonial encounter between Spain and Morocco in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (8). The chapters form a series of case studies on specific authors, texts, and historical moments that support this conclusion.  In the first chapter, “Tetouan is Granada” (29-73), Calderwood explains how Spanish writers at the time of the Spanish-Moroccan War (1859-1860) located Morocco’s origin story in al-Andalus, thus claiming Spain’s authority over Morocco’s cultural history. In this way, “Spain was not colonizing Morocco, but rather was returning to Morocco, which had always been part of Spain” (Calderwood 35).  Calderwood focuses on the Diary of a Witness of the War in Africa of Pedro Antonio Alarcón, in which the author creates two voices: one Spanish, and one Moroccan, that both affirm Spain’s claim to sovereignty in Morocco. Alarcón is the first of a long series of Andalusian writers who advance different versions of the argument that al-Andalus, and by extension Spain, are the rightful originators and legitimate guardians of Moroccan culture.  In Chapter 2, “Al-Andalus and Moroccan Literary History” (74-115), Calderwood turns his focus on to Moroccan writers’ use of Andalusi tropes in their vision of Moroccan history. He explains that for these Moroccan writers, “al-Andalus [is] an idea that travels across time and performs useful work for writers living in different historical and cultural contexts” (Calderwood 75). At this time Morocco was occupied by two European powers, France and Spain, who used Moroccan culture as a political football as each power vied for control in North Africa. Against this backdrop, al-Andalus took on different valences for Moroccan writers than for their Spanish colonizers. According to Calderwood, al-Andalus more a way of understanding medieval conflict between Islam and Christianity as a prefiguration of modern European colonialism in the region. Calderwood’s reading of the works of Mufaddal Afayal (1824-1887), deploy the idea of al-Andalus in an era of Spanish and French colonial domination of Morocco. Reading Afayal’s lament for Tétouan and his Chronicle, Calderwood argues that Afayal makes use of al-Andalus in making sense of his experience of Spanish colonial occupation. In Calderwood’s words, al-Andalus is both “present and malleable” for Afayal (115). In Chapter 3, “Al-Andalus, Andalucía, and Morocco” (116-141), Calderwood shows how the revival of the Hispano-Andalusi imagination encouraged by the state took on different forms. On the one hand, the state used images of the colonial Andalusi imaginary in promoting state interests and tourism in both Andalucía (especially Granada, Seville, and Cordova) and Spanish Morocco. At the same time, this Andalusi imaginary fueled a nascent (and for Calderwood, “paradox[ical]” (130) Andalusian regionalism calling for increased historical awareness and political sovereignty for Author’s open-access postprint  Version of academic record: Wacks, David A. Review of Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge: The Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN 9780674980327. 400pp. Comparative Literature, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 460-462.   2 Spanish Andalusians. Some expressed this regionalism by converting to Islam in a gesture of “‘return’ to Andalucía’s Muslim origins” (Calderwood 119). Though these Andalusian regionalists continued to write in Castilian (for the autochthonous languages of al-Andalus, Andalusi Arabic and Andalusi Romance, had long become obsolete in Andalusia), some turned their backs on Madrid, rejecting Spanish Nationalism in favor of Andalusian Regionalism. Calderwood explains how Blas Infante used this Andalusismo (Andalusi-ism) for the cause of Andalusian regionalism. Later, Gil Benumeya later transformed this into a fascist ideal through which Morocco is the bearer of the Andalusi legacy whose rightful guardians are the Spanish. In Chapter 4, “Franco’s Hajj” (142-166), Calderwood explores how Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco deployed the Andalusi imaginary to underwrite his fascist colonial project. Franco had staged his coup from his station in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco, accompanied by Moroccan troops loyal to his cause. Moroccan writers such as Al-Rahuni promoted the Francoist idea that Spain would be the savior of Islam and the Arabic language in Morocco, against the bugbear of French linguistic and religious imperialism. Al-Rahuni deploys some of the same tropes of the Andalusi imaginary in his own Francoist version of Spain’s colonial project in Morocco.  Calderwood sums this up neatly: “Franco makes Moroccans Spanish and Islam Francoist. Al-Rahuni, in turn, makes Franco speak in Qur’anic idioms and locates Islam’s holiest site in Cordoba” (Calderwood 163).  Chapter 5, “The Invention of Hispano-Arab Culture” (167-207), describes how the Spanish colonial government in Morocco generated legitimacy by supporting Muslim religion and Arabic language education and literary production. Spain thus fashioned itself as the lesser of two colonial evils vis-à-vis France, whose linguistic and missionary policies were far more stringent. Colonial Governor Juan Luis Beigbeder projected the political rift of the Spanish Civil War onto the colonial imaginary, saying that Republican Spaniards denigrated Arab culture, while Franco’s colonial government promoted it. This line of discourse echoed in the work of Lebanese-American writer and seminal Arab nationalist Amin al-Rihani, who wrote a book in Arabic about Morocco written for Eastern intellectuals. Al-Rihani’s book echoed the Spanish colonial discourse, and argued that the “Spanish [were], quite literally, rebuilding al-Andalus in twentieth-century Morocco” (193). He also supported the idea that because of their pro-Arabic policies, the Spanish colonial administration was favorable to the French. Chapter 6, “Moroccan Alhambras” (208-250), tells the fascinating story of how the Spanish colonial government promoted a very specific idea of Moroccan culture that supported the Andalusi-centric thesis of the Spanish colonial project. Spanish officials, through cultural agencies such as the School of Traditional Moroccan crafts in Tetouan and musical organizations, promoted and taught those Moroccan cultural practices that supported the narrative underwriting Spain’s occupation of Morocco. Calderwood argues that al-Andalus is key in the formation of a modern Moroccan Calderwood focuses on Francoist state discourse and especially on the Spanish colonial administration’s efforts to promote traditional crafts that reflect design features from Andalusi architecture and art. The protagonist of this effort was Mariano Bertuchi, who directed the “colonial agent to a father of Moroccan” (214). Through his own art, the Author’s open-access postprint  Version of academic record: Wacks, David A. Review of Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge: The Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN 9780674980327. 400pp. Comparative Literature, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 460-462.   3 propaganda of the colonial administration, and the education of a generation of Moroccan traditional craft artisans, Bertuchi disseminated a vision of Morocco whose cultural origins lay in Spain. He promulgated this vision through exhibitions in both Morocco and Spain, most famously in the Moroccan pavilion at the Iberian Exposition in Seville in 1929. Chapter 7, “The Daughter of Granada and Fez” (251-285), centers on the work of Lebanese writer Shakib Arslan, a pan-Arabist and pan-Islamic intellectual whose Arabic translation of Chateaubriand’s The Adventures of the Last Abencerage and his own massive work on al-Andalus, Brocaded Garments about the News and Monuments of al-Andalus (1936-39) diffused ideas of a Moroccan Arab and Muslim identify forged in al-Andalus throughout the Arab world.  Calderwood ends his book with an Epilogue (286-300) dealing with the afterlife of the Andalusi colonial imaginary in modern, independent Morocco, and how the tropes and images promoted by the Spanish Protectorate and some Arab intellectuals have been transformed in the propaganda and visual culture of the ‘Alawi dynasty, who have ruled Morocco from the 17th-century through the current day, interrupted only with the exception of the French and Spanish Protectorates.  There is quite a lot to like about this book. While other scholars written on Spain’s colonial project in North Africa. In recent years Susan Martin-Márquez’s 2008 study Disoriented is the most important contribution to this discussion. Calderwood’s main contribution is that he includes Moroccan and other Arabic sources in his study and is therefore able to demonstrate the ways in which Spanish colonial discourses shaped Moroccan and Pan-Arabist thought, sometimes in surprising and counter-intuitive ways. Like Martin-Márquez, he also includes a variety of sources ranging from writing to government document, graphic arts, and cultural history (such as his compelling account of Mariano Bertuchi’s direction of the School of Traditional Moroccan crafts). Calderwood’s prose is lucid and while he demonstrates a theoretical grounding, his writing is quite accessible to non-specialists (this reviewer, for example, is a medievalist). Despite the book’s length, it is an engaging read with clearly drawn arguments and innovative analyses of well-selected and often fascinating material, a good deal of it appearing for the first time in English-language scholarship. While it is clearly an essential read for anyone interested in Spanish Colonialism in North Africa, Colonial al-Andalus will also be of interest to a variety of scholars working in fields such as Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Spanish, Arabic, History, and Art History.   David A. Wacks University of Oregon  Works Cited  Martin-Márquez, Susan. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. Yale University Press, 2008.   Author’s open-access postprint  Version of academic record: Wacks, David A. Review of Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge: The Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN 9780674980327. 400pp. Comparative Literature, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 460-462.   4  

Review of Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture

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Review of Calderwood, Eric. Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture

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