This is a commendable piece of scholarship which argues something genuinely new by mixing an impressively broad canvas and a fascinating wealth of detail. It focusses on the ways that the evolving historiographies of Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the late nineteenth century used and reinvented a common past in their separate searches for national identity, either to fit hegemonic views or to contribute to emerging debates. Hence the broad canvas, tracing political and intellectual processes of four separate cultures and, within that, the role played by leading intellectuals and politicians. These processes, which have normally been treated discretely through national histories (notably of cubanidad or of Spanish noventaiochismo), or relatively ignored (the Philippines), are combined here in a picture of simultaneous historical revisionism in all four cultures. They show a surprising degree of commonality, thus departing from the orthodoxy of a variable Spanish rule adapting to specific colonial circumstances. Spain is clearly the main focus here, as Christopher Schmidt-Nowara examines the construction and celebration of its ‘exceptionality’ and the belief that a Spanish national identity necessarily incorporated the colonial experience; however, the other three ‘national’ entities are all subsequently given equal status within the overall view. The result is a welcome, broad-ranging study of the complexity of Spanish and colonial attitudes to the residual Empire, which takes in the leyenda negra, criollismo, and the long slavery versus indigenous cultures dichotomy, and which offers an impressive cast of characters, some well known (Cánovas, Unamuno, Ortiz, Prescott) and others relatively new to us (Rafael María de Labra, Cesáreo Fernández Duro, W. E. Retama).
The format is well crafted, with two chapters essentially examining Spanish debates, and two of the colonies being approached through focal points for the historiographical revision. Chapter One – ‘Spain between Decolonizations’ – is an excellent analysis of finesecular Spanish historical revisionism, seeking (qua the chapter's subtitle) a ‘history against the currents of history’; this was a revisionism realised as much by reactionary and liberal politicians (often turned historian) as by professionals, seeking to legitimise the Empire by emphasising its organic unity. For some this meant horizontal inclusion in Spain's political community (autonomism), but for others it meant a vertical hierarchy of metropolis-colony. Engaging with contemporary debates, Schmidt-Nowara demonstrates well how a view of ‘exceptionalism’ emerged, based on Spain's supposed civilising mission and the ‘Hispanising’ benefits of colonial miscegenation, with contradictions over contentious issues such as slavery or emancipation being elided, not least by presenting the rebellion by the Cuban mulato, Antonio Maceo, as essentially ‘Spanish’. As the chapter argues, Spain's reassessment of its post-colonial identity evidently began before, and not after, 1898.
Chapter Two focuses on the role of Columbus both in these debates in Spain and in emerging colonial debates about their own identity, stimulated by the 1877 ‘discovery’ of his bones in Santo Domingo (and not Cuba), which generated a Spanish colombofilia, eager to adopt him as a symbol of imperial unity. Tracing the evolving monumentalisation in fascinating detail, this chapter analyses the Spanish rescue of Columbus from ‘anti-Spanish’ images (of neglect and waste) and his conversion into a symbol of harmony and Spanish civilisation (debates into which Cánovas entered knowingly). This all related to the arguments about the authenticity and ownership of his bones (until the Havana remains went to Seville in 1899), and to the movement towards the 1881 and 1892 Congresses of Americanists in Madrid and La Rábida.
The book then traces the emerging Cuban and Puerto Rican revisionism of their prehistory, a process of glorification of an imagined past which the author links, as in western Europe, to social change as much as an emerging national consciousness. Hence the underlying fear of the blacks in both places led to the invention of the less threatening and white guajiro and jíbaro, and to arguments about pre-Columbian societies, all coinciding with Ortiz's exaltation of the ‘authentic’ tobacco over the ‘alien’ and enslaving sugar and his ambiguity about Cuba's blackness. Here, the book argues first that the new ethnography and archaeology were instruments of colonial rule, but second that these were appropriated by the colonised to establish legitimising notions of civilised Edens corrupted by Spanish rule.
The book's next chapter (one of the most successful in presenting the complexity of thinking within the Empire in the simultaneous searches for legitimacy) focuses on Las Casas, whose universally acknowledged contribution to our view of the Americas challenged imperialists and nationalists alike, liberals and conservatives seeing him, differently, as an example of both the best and the worst of Spanish colonisation. Schmidt-Nowara links this well to the contemporary perceptions of William Prescott and José Antonio Saco, the former driven by teleological Anglo-Saxon notions of Spanish decline, the latter seeing Las Casas as a model of a desirable critical legitimisation of Empire.
Finally, the book turns to the neglected Philippines, focussing on the debates between nationalists such as Rizal and imperialists such as Retama, debates again about the conquest (Schmidt-Nowara arguing that Rizal's re-publication of the 1609 Morgas account was critical to the Filipino struggle for identity), but also about the Spanish right to be in the islands, with a new civilising mission, continuing the work of the all-important friars.
The conclusion, frustratingly brief and really more of an epilogue, examines the third focal point, the 1909 Puerto Rican celebrations of Ponce de León, the island's discoverer, a study which serves to indicate the shift in attitudes beyond the 1898 watershed. This chapter disappoints, since the arguments throughout the text are so challenging that the whole of an otherwise somewhat fragmented book really needed the findings to be drawn together in a cohesive fashion, with an explanation of the differences between the author's positions and orthodoxy. As a result the book misses a chance to stake a greater claim, to highlight its genuinely new contribution to understanding. Yet this is to carp for the best of reasons, for overall it is an elegant, rich and convincing argument for a need to reappraise a neglected period and occasionally misunderstood processes.
