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Speaker Name: Tania Arabelle Flores, PhD Candidate in ILAC, èצӰ��

Abstract: This work-in-progress articulates the discursive relation between constructions of “Africa” and of gitanidad in the modern Spanish cultural imagination. Thinking alongside scholars of the cultural and political history of Spanish colonialism in Africa, this chapter seeks to understand how specific North African locations function in the context of cante, or flamenco song, produced by the Spanish Roma, namely Juanito Mojama, Rosalía de Triana, Petra García Espinosa “La Niña de Linares”, Antonio Rodríguez Martínez “El Tío de la Tiza”, and Antonia Rodríguez Moreno “La Negra”. I pay special attention to how flamenco cantaores responded to Spain’s decades-long colonial wars in Morocco and to early efforts by the Spanish state to co-opt flamenco in the service of these colonial wars. My chapter juxtaposes the specificity of these references with the Afro-Romani imaginaries in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s 1889 novel Insolación, studying the way this text engages with the aphorism “Africa begins at the Pyrenees”. My reading of Pardo Bazán considers the relevance of Orientalism and of flamenco as trope to her representation of “Africa.

Sponsor: Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone Research Group, Division of Litertature, Cultures, and Languages