3 Gender, Race, and Spain’s Colonial Legacy in the Americas Representations of White Slavery in Eugenio Flores’s Trata de blancas and Eduardo López Bago’s Carne importada AKIKO TSUCHIYA It is only in the last decade that scholars of Iberian studies have begun to interrogate in a sustained fashion the colonialist subtext of many literary works of nineteenth-century Spain, bringing to light the ways in which the Spanish nation was shaped by empire in the economic, political, and cultural arena. 1 According to Alda Blanco, Spanish literary historiography, in an attempt to legitimize Spain as a modern European nation, has generally erased the traces of empire in discussions of nineteenth-century Peninsu- lar literatures and cultures (“El fn” 4). Yet, as Lisa Surwillo has noted, modernity’s roots are in empire and colonialism, and “literature as a space of fantasy provides a locus for imagining what was generally known but ofcially unacknowledged” (6). It is impossible to deny that many Spanish literary and artistic representations of the fn-de-siècle tacitly evoked imperial nostalgia, as the nation coped with the loss of its remaining colonies in the Americas and the Philippines. In fact, Blanco herself, while claiming the erasure of empire from Spanish literary history, has coined the classifcation “literatura del imperio” (literature of empire) to refer to works of the period that implicitly inscribe the history of empire and colonialism within their pages (“El fn”). 81 Unsettling Colonialism : Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World, edited by N. Michelle Murray, and Akiko Tsuchiya, State University of New York Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wustl/detail.action?docID=59046 Created from wustl on 2021-01-22 14:50:57. Copyright © 2019. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.