Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gómez, Trinidad Christian

Titel

A Brown Study of the Black Legend: Impacts of English Propaganda on American Racial Identity

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Black Legend, the idea that the Spanish have always been a cruel and evil people in comparison with the rest of their European colonial counterparts, is a phenomenon whose name originates with twentieth century scholarship. Where this phenomenon originates and who it affects, however, are points of contention among these very same scholars. Historians, anthropologists, and literary critics alike anchor the beginnings of the Black Legend to several different historical points and purposes, using it as a lens to analyze the development of colonialist societies in both the New and Old worlds. These analyses often decenter the idea that the Black Legend is a virulent piece of Anglo-American propaganda designed to spur Western European colonialism into the American territories. This thesis will focus itself on how the Black Legend was spawned out of 16th century English imperial thought and a distinct fear of the racialized, Catholic, Spanish Other. These ideas did not disappear from the American continent after its revolutions, but rather grew in strength alongside the racism and systemic inequality which American expansion has historically relied upon. Anglo-Americans have used “figures of Spain"—or rather, figures of the Hispanic—as a counterpoint to the Anglo-American consciousness, which has relegated all American Latinxs to a category of lesser beings (de Guzmán 13). However, out of the shared struggle the Black Legend has brought to American Latinxs has emerged a panethnic understanding of Latinidad and provided a way forward for our people to grow.