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Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers

Conceiving the Spanish nation-space as a historical and ideological construct, this book sheds light on bordering and othering practices that, from the Middle Ages to the present, have contributed to the shaping of Spain’s ‘imagined community’. We can identify three pivotal moments in the history of ‘Spanish Othering’, and hence also in the history of ‘Spanish Bordering’. The first one coincides with the seminal practices of the exclusion and expulsion of Muslim and Jewish communities during and after the so-called fifteenth-century Catholic ‘reconquista’ of the Iberian Peninsula. The second coincides with the Spanish colonial enterprise on the American continent between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The third occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the reverberations from late Spanish colonial interventions in the Maghreb after the demise of Spain’s transatlantic empire. Spain, today a country of immigration but, in the past, one of emigration, is currently entrenched in a sort of domestic post-colonial encounter with its ‘others’. This is the context in which this edited book questions Spanish frontiers. Spain’s ‘others’ are now inside Spain, and they are contributing to the re-negotiation of a historically constructed us/ them divide. It could be argued that these new ‘domestic others’ are helping to re-calibrate the very idea of Spain by confronting the country with its legacy of exclusion. The 12 chapters of this volume interrogate the border by addressing a variety of issues concerning Spain’s liminalities. This broad range of subjects ranges chronologically from the immediate present to colonial and medieval contexts. Its scope includes disparate geographical scenarios such as Ceuta, the Caribbean, the Basque Country and the Philippines. There is, however, a key commonality lying beneath all of these contributions, embodied by what the editors define as the ‘urgent moral grounds to condemn certain types of national sentiments, and the exaggerated notions of unity and frontier that underlie them, along with the misappropriation of history associated with narcissistic self-celebration’ (p. 3). In the first chapter, Parvati Nair examines issues raised by Ceuta’s positioning at the (EU)ro African border. Between Christianity and Islam, between Spain and Morocco, and also between two very disparate levels of global power, the past and present physical and symbolic reinforcement of the Ceuta border reveals a great deal about the ideological making of Spain and its ‘others’. As Nair remarks, in the eighth century Ceuta acted as a launching pad for the Islamic ‘invasion’ of the Iberian Peninsula; in opposition to this, a still-widespread cultural notion of Spain was forged. Today, after Spain’s accession to the EU, Ceuta is again placed right in the middle of the cultural re-making of Spain. Beyond its functional use as a discriminatory migratory filter, what Nair calls the ‘selfbarricading’ of Ceuta (the militarisation of its perimeter) plays a key role within the current symbolic re-marking of the divide between (EU)ropeanised Spain and its ‘others’. Her analysis identifies a gap between official discourses and social practices, and depicts the border city as a ‘heterotopia’, or ‘a space of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol. 36, No. 1, January 2010, pp. 163 167