Disoriented Postcolonialities: With Edward Said in (the Labyrinth of) Al-Andalus

Abstract

This essay explores the relation between postcolonial theory and modern Arabic literature from a Spanish perspective. Both postcolonial studies and Arabic and Islamic studies present in Spain rather exceptional histories. Somehow dissociated from its original formulation, postcolonial studies were received in Spain more as a way of dealing with new “English” literatures than as a critical tool. On the other hand, the singularity of Spanish history ended up establishing Al-Andalus as a “domestic Orient”. However, the Spanish case is also unique because of Spanish colonialism in the North of Morocco and the Western Sahara. This other “Orient”, this time colonized, did not match Edward Said’s formulation for imperialism as “a dominant metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory”. Both North Africa and Al-Andalus were too embedded, historically and geographically, within “Spain”. This unique position of Spain, as a place that was orientalizing (and colonizing) at the same time it was orientalized is a complex and ambivalent situation that created (and still creates) many disorientations. On top of that, postcolonial Hispanophone literatures have been absent both from the postcolonial debates that have privileged texts written in English and French, and from the history of Spanish literature.