Spain in the African American Imagination (African American Intellectual History)

Revealing how African American intellectuals reframed race, history, and cultural belonging in the modern era In 1954, Richard Wright rented a car in France and drove south to the Spanish border on the first of two month-long trips that gave rise to the travelogue Pagan Spain, where Wright declared that the Pyrenees, on the France-Spain border, "mark the termination of Europe and the beginning of Africa." While Spain was not actually seen as an African country, such language suggests instead that Spain would be incomplete without African influences.In the wake of the Spanish-American war of 1898, Americans and Northern Europeans attributed Spain's weakened economy and loss of international clout to an inability to modernize, which they described in highly racialized terms.As African American modernists explored the country, they compared modernist notions coming out of the United States pertaining to race, gender, and other categories against Spain's history and contemporary culture. S