The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain - Softcover

Jose Luis Venegas (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810137291 ISBN 13: 9780810137295

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2018

Synopsis

The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain is the first systematic study on cultural images of Andalusia as Spain’s “Orient” and the impact they have had on nation-building and modernization since the late nineteenth century. While a wealth of studies have examined how northern Europeans from the Romantic period viewed Spain and Andalusia as Europe’s Orient, little attention has been paid to how contemporary Spanish artists and intellectuals assimilated Romantic legacies to engage in an internal form of orientalism.

José Luis Venegas deftly explores Spain’s shifting engagements with oriental identity and otherness by looking, not just beyond national, ethnic, and racial borders, but at a territory that is institutionally embedded in the nation-state while symbolically placed between inclusion and abjection. The Sublime South shifts the focus and scale of Edward Said’s notion of orientalism by examining how it evolves and manifests transnationally, as the result of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and intra-nationally, in a European yet orientalized country. Finally, Venegas challenges ethnocentric notions of Iberian cultures and fosters an understanding of the encounters between Western and Muslim cultures beyond opposing, and often mutually negating, essentialisms.

About this title

About the Author

Jose Luis Venegas is an associate professor of Spanish and interdisciplinary humanities at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Transatlantic Correspondence: Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898-1992 and Decolonizing Modernism: James Joyce and the Development of Spanish American Fiction.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810137291
• ISBN 13: 9780810137295
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240