From Impurity of Thought Toward the Glocalization of Whiteness in Spain

Abstract

Author(s): Persanch, JM | Abstract: This paper is structured in three parts. Firstly, the introduction aims to visualize the trajectory of Spain’s racial rhetoric in relation to whiteness, and its European counterparts’ historical processes of racialization, thus offering an explanation to the acute lack of studies regarding Spanish whiteness. Subsequently, I offer a study that revisits the cultural, symbolical transformation following the Transicion Espanola through Amanece, que no es poco (1988) to examine how Spain disregarded notions of mestizaje in this period, beginning to bound up Spanish whiteness with European multiculturalism, as much as with a long-imagined, Western modernity. The analysis demonstrates how Spain instrumentalized blackness merely as an ideological means to raise awareness of social distance in the Spanish white racial formation, while subsuming the experience of blackness into the cultural practices of whiteneness. To conclude, I link the study to the present day’s racial conceptions, assuming that, in a culturally globalized world, Spain may have decisively integrated into a relatively homogeneous, glocal sensibility of whiteness.