The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain by José Luis Venegas

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain by José Luis Venegas Paul Michael Johnson Venegas, José Luis. The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain. Northwestern UP, 2018. 228 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8101-3729-5. Since its inception in the late seventies, critics have applied Edward Said's influential theory of orientalism to increasingly wider conceptual and geographical frameworks, leveraging it as a critical tool for reflecting on the logics of regional, national, and intracontinental identity. Said largely passed over Spain, with its unique, conflictive legacy of Moorish and Islamic culture, and José Luis Venegas recognizes in this lacuna a limitation but also an opportunity. The Sublime South begins by tracing the contours of Andalusia's depiction in the popular imaginary, Romantic literary fantasies, and modern political movements. The introduction evokes Susan Martin-Márquez's figurative use of the Möbius strip to highlight the ambivalent relationships that emerge from an historical past that is alternately extolled, exoticized, distorted, and disavowed. Since "Andalusia has occupied a twilight zone in which it is at once the essence of Spanishness and its oriental other" (8), the autonomous community becomes not only a hallmark for (trans)national representations of Spain, but also a singular vector of orientalist dynamics. Kant's sublime serves as the other theoretical pillar for Venegas to underscore how the region has functioned, paradoxically, as both an epitome and abject other of Spain, as both its traditional essence and perennial obstacle to modernization. The remainder of the book offers a finer-grained exploration of these slippages between Andalusia as a center and periphery, organized in roughly chronological fashion. Chapter 1 studies how andalucismo, africanismo, and arabismo all laid claim to a mythical vision of Al-Andalus in the service of diverse and often competing [End Page 182] ends. A close examination of these discourses reveals that, instead of eliding this Afro-Moorish legacy, their proponents appealed to the motif of a domestic orient, as well as its inheritance in popular forms like flamenco, in order to promote the divergent projects of Andalusian nationalism and governmental autonomy, agrarian labor reforms, Spanish colonialism in North Africa, and the recruitment of Muslim soldiers for Franco's army. Chapter 2 explores the tension between public intellectuals like Ortega y Gasset who clamored for the need to jettison the ostensibly backward ideals of Andalusia and those like Jiménez, Falla, and Lorca who vindicated southern culture as, if not the key to modernization, then as at least not incompatible with progress. Though Franco's victory in the Civil War dashed all such aspirations. Chapter 3 demonstrates that Andalusia played a central role throughout the different phases of the dictatorship, from the folkloric musicals and cinema that orientalized the region as a synecdoche of traditional Spanish values and the travel guides that neatly packaged it for the growing influx of foreign tourists, to the progressive magazine Triunfo that contested such glorifications as a distraction from chronic underdevelopment. Finally, Chapter 4 surveys the period from Franco's death to the present day, illustrating how orientalist tropes have continued to thrive well after the transition to democracy. Here the primary objects of analysis signal a spectacle of self-promotion that draws selectively from a mythical Andalusian past, all while overlooking widespread, racialized unease with contemporary Moroccan immigration. An afterword meditates on a recent televised documentary as an allegorical invitation to reject the facile, parochial, and stereotypical mythmaking of Andalusian nationalism without renouncing a sense of collective belonging. "Disavowing identity does not mean that you can be anyone anywhere," Venegas concludes, "which is another way of saying you are no one, nowhere" (171). The assertion reflects an attempt to reconcile the author's own avowed "personal dilemma as someone skeptical about chest-thumping, flag-waving patriotism who yet feels Andalusian" (171), but it also evinces uncertainty about how to resolve the more material question of Andalusian specificity, or how "southern difference" becomes "a structure of feeling and thought that need not cohere in a fixed form of representation" (171). The point is well taken, and proves consistent with the book's overarching interest, and general success, in teasing...