{"product_id":"colonial-al-andalus-spain-and-the-making-of-modern-moroccan-culture-9780674980327","title":"Colonial Al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture","description":"\u003cp\u003eThrough state-backed Catholicism, monolingualism, militarism, and dictatorship, Spain's fascists earned their reputation for intolerance. It may therefore come as a surprise that 80,000 Moroccans fought at General Franco's side in the 1930s. What brought these strange bedfellows together, Eric Calderwood argues, was a highly effective propaganda weapon: the legacy of medieval Muslim Iberia, known as al-Andalus. This legacy served to justify Spain's colonization of Morocco and also to define the Moroccan national culture that supplanted colonial rule.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWriters of many political stripes have celebrated \u003ci\u003econvivencia\u003c\/i\u003e, the fabled \"coexistence\" of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Iberia. According to this widely-held view, modern Spain and Morocco are joined through their shared Andalusi past. \u003ci\u003eColonial al-Andalus\u003c\/i\u003e traces this supposedly timeless narrative to the mid-1800s, when Spanish politicians and intellectuals first used it to press for Morocco's colonization. Franco later harnessed \u003ci\u003econvivencia\u003c\/i\u003e to the benefit of Spain's colonial program in Morocco. This shift precipitated an eloquent historical irony. As Moroccans embraced the Spanish insistence on Morocco's Andalusi heritage, a Spanish idea about Morocco gradually became a Moroccan idea about Morocco.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing on a rich archive of Spanish, Arabic, French, and Catalan sources--including literature, historiography, journalism, political speeches, schoolbooks, tourist brochures, and visual arts--Calderwood reconstructs the varied political career of \u003ci\u003econvivencia\u003c\/i\u003e and al-Andalus, showing how shared pasts become raw material for divergent contemporary ideologies, including Spanish fascism and Moroccan nationalism. \u003ci\u003eColonial al-Andalus\u003c\/i\u003e exposes the limits of simplistic oppositions between European and Arab, Christian and Muslim, that shape current debates about European colonialism.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eCalderwood, Eric:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - Eric Calderwood is Assistant Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.","brand":"Belknap Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50872744706322,"sku":"9780674980327","price":54.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_8880947d-72e9-44f4-a1cd-b3b3bf4c760c.jpg?v=1737908069","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/colonial-al-andalus-spain-and-the-making-of-modern-moroccan-culture-9780674980327","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}