España Negra: The Consumption and Rejection of Blackness in Contemporary Spain

This book explores the ways in which Blackness has been appropriated in Spanish popular culture, literature, politics, and society. Using a cultural studies approach, España Negra delves into a vast archive of texts, performances, and cultural practices in order to not only understand how Blackness is lived and conceptualized in Spain’s changing demographic landscape, but also to serve as a way to conjecture the ways that Blackness is understood in other southern European contexts (e.g. Italy, Greece) that are undergoing similar transformations. Over the last 30 years, mass immigration has shifted the national image of who can be Spanish as there are now second and third generation non-white Spaniards, who are constantly read as foreign due to their race, despite having been born and raised in Spain. These citizens are now pushing back against the racist and colonialist tropes under which they were raised with the hopes of making Spain a more pluricultural and multiracial nation.

The central argument of the book is that Blackness operates through simultaneous consumption and rejection, which has enabled Spain to articulate a conceptualization of race/racism that facilitated the nation’s shift from a colonial power under dictatorial rule to a fledgling European power. Through the analysis of food, politics, cultural traditions, literature, and performance, we can see that (anti-)Blackness is embedded in Spanish culture at a time in which the Black community in Spain is now growing as a sizable portion of its citizenry. This manuscript is situated in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on 1985 to the present. Spain’s Europeanization in the late 1980s not only changed how the nation was racialized by Northern Europe, but also how Spain began to racialize others as it increased in racial diversity. The five main chapters of the book will thus explore different facets of the consumption and rejection.