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Although she suggests that a "double movement" of "romancing" and "repulsion" (xiii) has shaped such figures, for most of the book the emphasis is on the latter, as DeGuzmán examines forms of Anglo-American literature and culture that position Spain as a "vanquished imperialist over and around whose abjected body the Anglo-American empire might be erected" (xxv). She begins with the literature of the early US republic and the American Renaissance, then moves to the Spanish-Cuban-American War era, next to expatriate US modernist writers from the 1920s to the 1950s, then to "postmodern" literature, film, and photography, including work by Spaniards and Spanish "transplants" to the United States, and finally, turns to late-twentieth- century work by Latina/o writers that uses representations of Spain to respond to US empire and imagine postcolonial identities. Throughout US history, she writes, figures of Spain have been "central to the dominant fictions of 'American exceptionalism,' revolution, manifest destiny, and birth/ rebirth to Anglo-America's articulation of its empire as anti-empire (the 'good' empire that is not one) and to its fears of racial contamination and hybridity" (xii). Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, especially Freud and Lacan, she argues that figures of Spain functioned as "alter egos in the development of 'American' imperial identity" (xvii).
She further suggests that the construction of an Anglo-American identity has crucially depended on figures of Spain.
This framework, she suggests, has ironically obscured the existence of "a hegemonic ethnic group in the United States": the "Anglo-American" (xii). DeGuzmán begins by arguing that, since the 1980s, a multiculturalist paradigm has dominated American literary and cultural studies. This book is an ambitious survey of US literature and visual culture, from the late eighteenth century through the 1990s, that foregrounds how "figures of Spain" served as foils for an "Anglo-American identity" understood as "transcen dentally or transparently 'American'" (xii). Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire.
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