Uneven Souths: The Mediterranean Dimension of Spain's Southern Regionalism

Abstract

Abstract This article traces the continuities between the Mediterranean and the Global South while noting the asymmetries between and within these concepts as revealed by the development of Spain's southern regionalism or andalucismo in the 1920s and 1930s and during the post–Franco period (1975–present). Prefiguring post–Cold War South–South relations, early andalucismo promoted a wider Mediterranean community extending from Cordoba to Damascus, but opposed Spain's colonial presence in Morocco. Despite its anticolonial dimension, this modern revival of medieval al-Andalus was not envisioned as a network of comparable material and ethnic locations that could encourage lateral movements of people, capital, and ideas. In contrast to the anticolonial celebrations of Andalusian conviviality found in the work of Arabic and Muslim writers and activists in the 1930s, including Shakib Arslan and Sir Muhammad Iqbal, the andalucista archive—cultural magazines, regionalist manifestos, and literary texts—simultaneously included and excluded the Maghreb and the wider Islamic Mediterranean from articulations of Spanish and Andalusian identity. This ambivalence, which persists in contemporary immigration and cultural policies and European economic and political integration, demands a form of comparative analysis that does not reduce the interaction among the world's “Souths” to unproblematic relations of analogy, mutual recognition, and solidarity.