Performing the Moor: Disorienting Cultural Burlesque in Cartas marruecas and Aita Tettauen

Abstract

Jose Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas (1789) and Benito Perez Galdos’s Aita Tettauen (1905) share a common figure: the ostensibly fake Moor. Through the analytical trope of burlesque performance, I show how the production of Moorish “Otherness” is inextricably entangled with the articulation of Spanish identity in the novels. The epistolary performances of the African Moorish characters alternately spotlight and disguise the making of difference in a process I refer to as “cultural burlesque.” These narrative performances tease the reader with glimpses of purported “authenticity,” cultivating identitary ambiguity in a manner that interrogates and unsettles binary paradigms presumed to be natural or essential (Spanish/Moroccan, European/African, Catholic/Muslim). By calling attention to the performativity of national, cultural, and religious identities, the novels convey critiques of the Spanish societies of both the 18th and 20th centuries; as scholars like Susan Martin-Marquez have noted, politicians and intellectuals in both moments responded to issues of national identity and European modernity through a paradoxical embrace and denial of the Moorish figure—and by extension Spain’s African heritage. The presence of these performances of cultural burlesque in two works separated by more than a century points to a transhistorical Spanish discursive tendency to domesticate and/or colonize the Maghribian Moor in the service of soothing internal and international ills.