Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire

England and the Netherlands, Spain's imperial rivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, imagined Spain as a land of cruel and degenerate barbarians of *la leyenda negra* (the Black Legend), in league with the powers of "blackest darkness" and driven by "dark motives." In *Spain's Long Shadow,* MarÍa DeGuzmÁn explores how this convenient demonization made its way into American culture-and proved essential to the construction of whiteness. DeGuzmÁn's work reaches from the late eighteenth century-in the wake of the American Revolution-to the present. Surveying a broad range of texts and images, from Poe's "William Wilson" and John Singer Sargent's *El Jaleo* to Richard Wright's *Pagan Spain* and Kathy Acker's *Don Quixote*, *Spain's Long Shadow* shows how the creation of Anglo-American ethnicity as specifically American has depended on the casting of Spain as a colonial alter ego. The symbolic power of Spain in the American imagination, DeGuzmÁn argues, is not just a legacy of that nation's colonial presence in the Americas; it lives on as well in the "blackness" of Spain and Spaniards-in the assigning of people of Spanish origin to an "off-white" racial category that reserves the designation of white for Anglo-Americans. By demonstrating how the Anglo-American imagination needs Spain and Spaniards as figures of attraction and repulsion, DeGuzmÁn makes a compelling and illuminating case for treating Spain as the imperial alter ego of the United States. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, ambitious in its chronological sweep, and elegant in its interpretation of literary and visual works, DeGuzmÁn's book leads us to a powerful new understanding of the nature-and history-of American ethnicity.