Around the turn of 21st Century, Spain welcomed more than six million foreigners, many of them from various parts of the African continent. How African immigrants represent themselves and are represented in contemporary Spanish texts is the subject of this interdisciplinary collection. Analyzing blogs, films, translations, and literary works by contemporary authors including Donato Ndongo (Ecquatorial Guinea), Abderrahman El Fathi (Morocco), Chus Gutiérrez (Spain), Juan Bonilla (Spain), and Bahia Mahmud Awah (Western Sahara), the contributors interrogate how Spanish cultural texts represent, idealize, or sympathize with the plight of immigrants, as well as the ways in which immigrants themselves represent Spain and Spanish culture. At the same time, these works shed light on issues related to Spain’s racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spain’s economic crisis in shaping attitudes towards immigration. Taken together, the essays are a convincing reminder that cultural texts provide a mirror into the perceptions of a society during times of change.

How African immigrants represent themselves and are represented in contemporary Spanish texts is the subject of this interdisciplinary collection. Analyzing novels, poetry, films, online forums, and other genres, the contributors shed light on Spain's racial and sexual boundaries and the appeal of images of Africa in the contemporary marketplace. The collection is a convincing reminder that cultural texts provide a mirror into the perceptions of society during times of change.

The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage demonstrates how theatrical production in Spain since the early 1990s has reflected national anxieties about immigration and race. Jeffrey K. Coleman argues that Spain has developed a “necropolitical theater” that casts the non-European immigrant as fictionalized enemy—one whose nonwhiteness is incompatible with Spanish national identity and therefore poses a threat to the very Europeanness of Spain. The fate of the immigrant in the necropolitical theater is death, either physical or metaphysical, which preserves the status quo and provides catharsis for the spectator faced with the notion of racial diversity. Marginalization, forced assimilation, and physical death are outcomes suffered by Latin American, North African, and sub-Saharan African characters, respectively, and in these differential outcomes determined by skin color Coleman identifies an inherent racial hierarchy informed by the legacies of colonization and religious intolerance. Drawing on theatrical texts, performances, legal documents, interviews, and critical reviews, this book challenges Spanish theater to develop a new theatrical space. Jeffrey K. Coleman proposes a “convivial theater” that portrays immigrants as contributors to the Spanish state and better represents the multicultural reality of the nation today.

This book is an examination of the use of the family album in contemporary Spanish culture. Through the analysis of films, narratives, painting, and a photographic exhibition produced from the end of Franco's dictatorship to the present, Kim interrogates how the family album serves as a critical instrument to reflect on the treatment of the past in contemporary Spain, the recuperation of repressed identities, nostalgia for collective memory symptomatic of the cultural discontent with the erosion of a national boundary due to globalization and the increasing claim of diversity, and ethical concerns for immigration. This study explores a broad range of works by canonical as well as less studied writers and artists, including Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Saura, and Marta Balletbo-Coll. Yeon-Soo Kim is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Rutgers University.

This dissertation analyzes continuity and change in discourses of race and national identity in twentieth and twenty-first century Spain. The study examines colonial interventions in Africa during Francisco Franco's dictatorship, as well as in the context of contemporary immigration. It reevaluates the notion that contemporary Spanish society rejects immigrants wholeheartedly, by integrating the discussion of mixed couples into the broader topic of immigration in Spain. This project demonstrates that dialogue and cultural negotiation are also an integral part of Spanish society's reaction to immigration. Examining mixed couples in film, narrative, and online, provides a way in which to observe these negotiations and compromises. Chapter One considers the concept of raza, or the Spanish race, through Francisco Franco's Raza, as well as the representation of mestizaje and mixed-race desire in Liberata Masoliver's award-winning romance novel Efún (1955), set in Equatorial Guinea. Chapter Two discusses the continuity of these discourses in the late twentieth century, as well as how they have adapted or changed in the contemporary era, analyzing African-Spanish couples in the film Susanna (Antonio Chavarrías, 1996), the novel La cazadora (Encarna Cabello, 1995), the short story "La belleza del ébano," (Marina Mayoral, 1998) and Juan Goytisolo's Makbara (1980). Chapter Three examines the web forum Parejas mixtas. The forum is a textual space that is driven by user-generated content, in which personal narratives create an interactive dialog. These virtual texts allow an engagement and variety of opinions, resulting in a more nuanced articulation of racial and national subjectivity. Parejas mixtas, as a public text, serves as a window into how African immigration has impacted the national conversation about race and national identity in Spain. By juxtaposing colonial and post-colonial texts, as well as fiction with online narratives, this dissertation speaks to the complexity of the national discourse on immigration in Spain today.

Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture examines ideological, emotional, economic, and cultural phenomena brought about by migration through readings of works of literature and film featuring domestic workers. In the past thirty years, Spain has experienced a massive increase in immigration. Since the 1990s, immigrants have been increasingly female, as bilateral trade agreements, migration quotas, and immigration policies between Spain and its former colonies (including the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, and the Philippines) have created jobs for foreign women in the domestic service sector. These migrations reveal that colonial histories continue to be structuring elements of Spanish national culture, even in a democratic era in which its former colonies are now independent. Migration has also transformed the demographic composition of Spain and has created complex new social relations around the axes of gender, race, and nationality. Representations of migrant domestic workers provide critical responses to immigration and its feminization, alongside profound engagements with how the Spanish nation has changed since the end of the Franco era in 1975. Throughout Home Away from Home, readings of works of literature and film show that texts concerning the transnational nature of domestic work uniquely provide a nuanced account of the cultural shifts occurring in late twentieth- through twenty-first-century Spain.