Disorientations

"In this impressive and ambitious project, Susan Martin-Márquez highlights the historical, political, and cultural context in which Spanish identity has engaged with the debate about the precise nature of its ‘African legacy.’"—H. Rosi Song, Bryn Mawr College

-- H. Rosi Song

"This is cultural studies at its best: subtly theorized, impressively historicized, and above all superbly researched and beautifully written. Particularly insightful is the stress on gender and the use of performance theory. A superb exploration of colonial ambivalence, which should be required reading for all scholars and students of Spanish culture."—Jo Labanyi, New York University

-- Jo Labanyi
“Dialoguing with a vast array of sources, this brilliant and thoroughly original study opens up new ways to think about the construction of Spanish national identity.”—Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Stony Brook University
-- Lou Charnon-Deutsch

“Susan Martin-Márquez’s Disorientations is an exceptionally original investigation of Spain's fraught cultural relations with Africa. Ranging over a wide variety of fascinating sources, many of them little known, Martin-Márquez is as meticulous in her close analyses as she is sensitive and judicious in her conclusions.”—Paul Julian Smith, author of Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet

-- Paul Julian Smith

“Throughout much of the modern period, the competing claims that ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’ and ‘Europe ends at the Atlas’ gave a measure of the paradoxical, even ‘disorienting,’ status of Spain as at once orientalized and orientalizing. Drawing on a rich array of literary, visual, and historical materials from the early nineteenth century to the present, Susan Martin-Márquez offers in Disorientations a dazzlingly groundbreaking account of Spanish national identity in relation to colonialist and post-colonialist endeavors in Morocco, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea.”— Brad Epps, Harvard University

-- Brad Epps
"One of the great strengths of Disorientations is that it shows in meticulous detail the attraction and familiarity of Morocco to Spanish advocates of expansion. . . . Disorientations is a rich and important contribution to our knowledge of Spain's late colonial history and its legacies."—Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Journal of World History -- Christopher Schmidt-Nowara * Journal of World Histo