Unsettling Colonialism

An interdisciplinary analysis of gender, race, empire, and colonialism in fin-de-siècle Spanish literature and culture across the global Hispanic world.

Unsettling Colonialism illuminates the interplay of race and gender in a range of fin-de-siècle Spanish narratives of empire and colonialism, including literary fictions, travel narratives, political treatises, medical discourse, and the visual arts, across the global Hispanic world. By focusing on texts by and about women and foregrounding Spain's pivotal role in the colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, this book not only breaks new ground in Iberian literary and cultural studies but also significantly broadens the scope of recent debates in postcolonial feminist theory to account for the Spanish empire and its (former) colonies. Organized into three sections: colonialism and women's migrations; race, performance, and colonial ideologies; and gender and colonialism in literary and political debates, Unsettling Colonialism brings together the work of nine scholars. Given its interdisciplinary approach and accessible style, the book will appeal to both specialists in nineteenth-century Iberian and Latin American studies and a broader audience of scholars in gender, cultural, transatlantic, transpacific, postcolonial, and empire studies.

N. Michelle Murray is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt University and the author of Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture. Akiko Tsuchiya is Professor of Spanish and Affiliate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the coeditor (with William G. Acree Jr.) of Empire's End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World and the author of Marginal Subjects: Gender and Deviance in Fin-de-Siècle Spain and Images of the Sign: Semiotic Consciousness in the Novels of Benito Pérez Galdós.