FLESLER, Daniela. The Return of Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2008. viii + 246 pp.With The Return of Daniela Flesler has written foundational text of contemporary Spanish immigration studies, particularly regarding how Spaniards negotiate past and present representations of Moroccan immigrants. This is thoroughly researched, convincingly argued, groundbreaking scholarship that dialogues comfortably with current trends in Hispanism and those in colonial, postcolonial, and early modern and contemporary race studies. In this remarkable book, Flesler argues that there is a relation between how contemporary Spaniards imagine and relate to waves of North African migrations from 711 to seventeenth century and how they deal with their current relation to economic immigrants from Morocco. Having conflated all Muslim and North African migrants conveniently flattened category of menacing, invading Moor, Spaniards justify their rejection of contemporary and Muslim immigrants by appealing to an imaginary construction of their perceived radical, irreconcilable cultural differences from Spain fully integrated European Union and functioning as guardian of infelicitously called fortressEurope. These supposed differences must be emphasized because, of all groups of contemporary immigrants looking for work and a better life in Peninsula, one group most directly implicated in question of Spanish identity in relationship to Africa (3). Spaniards see not as guests that must be welcomed, but as former medieval hosts that were driven from their land and have come to reclaim what was theirs (3). Looked at from this perspective and taking consideration many phenotypical similarities between North Africans and Spaniards, Moroccans turn a 'problem' . . . not because of their cultural differences, . . . but because . . . they are not different enough (3; Flesler's emphasis).The book is divided five chapters, with an extensive introduction and a short but very helpful conclusion. Chaper 1, Difference Within and Without: Negotiating European, National, and Regional Identities in argues that, in joining European Economic Community in 1986, Spain gained economic, political, and psychological advantages. Spain could stop thinking of itself as one of Europe's others to become, instead, an equal partner in European modernization project. In this sense, immigration from Morocco reaffirms how Spain belongs to Europe at same time that it highlights internal contradictions, tensions, and ruptures of Spanish racial formation (11). The most compelling aspect of this chapter is its second part, where Flesler analyzes the intersection of immigration debates and politics of national and regional identities, in context of 'Europe of Regions' (11). She teases out complex anxieties that Catalonia, for example, experiences when negotiating presence of new immigrants who must choose whether to learn Catalan or Spanish, thus emphasizing Catalonia's own difficulties in shaping its cultural identity vis-a-vis Spanish State.Chapter 2, Ghostly Returns: The 'Loss' of Spain, Invading 'Moor,' and Contemporary Moroccan Immigrant, traces transformation of contemporary Moroccan immigrant into threatening figure of medieval (male) Moorish invader (12). Effectively dialoguing with current hauntology studies about Spain's repressed historical memories (Jo Labanyi, Joan Ramon Resina) influenced by Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, Flesler demonstrates how the figure of 'Moor' continues to haunt Spanish imaginary, producing slippages between past and present and textually constructing as Moorish ghosts (12). Flesler's best contribution in this chapter is how, through painstaking literary and historical research, she separates myth from textual fact in mapping many rewritings of foundational stories of Don Rodrigo, Count Julian and his daughter La Cava Florinda, and of Don Pelayo as initiator of Reconquest of Spain from Moors. …
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Apr 23, 2024
Brian Copenhaver 
Open Access