In The Black Legend of Spain & Its Atlantic Empire, my co-editor Cathy Jaffe and I began by asking, “What are the stories that we tell about ourselves and others, and how do those stories contribute to the construction of a collective memory and identity?” The ways in which a nation or group is represented, both for internal and external consumption, the stories that are told about its ambitions and triumphs, its shortcomings and defeats, its character resonate throughout history long beyond the particular moment in which those stories began to take shape.  The Black Legend (Leyenda Negra) refers to the representation of Spaniards and the Spanish Empire as cruel, religiously fanatical and intolerant, and greedy for gold — a picture that emerged from accounts of Spanish abuses during the sixteenth-century conquest of the Americas and which has is based on historical reality. Those accounts of Spanish abuses were — at least initially — an inside job. They were produced by Spanish missionaries who denounced the excessive violence and greed of Spanish conquistadors because it undermined their evangelical project; the most famous (or infamous) of these early modern whistleblowers was Bartolomé de las Casas.  Spaniards defended themselves against such condemnation, of course, and their reaction to the circulation of pejorative images of their country in literature, political discourses, and the arts led to internal debates that swung between grievance and self-defense and self-criticism.  

The essays included in our volume explore how the Black Legend lived on in the eighteenth century, paradoxically persisting during a period when Spanish imperial power was waning, and cultural and political hegemony was shifting from Spain to France and England.  The Black Legend — the idea that Spain is different, not quite European, not quite modern — figures, at times deliberately but often unconsciously, in discussions about colonialism, empire and national identity in Europe and the Americas. For example, narratives about settler colonialism, frontier independence, and manifest destiny might be seen to reflect Anglo-America’s articulation of its empire in implicit opposition to the story of Spanish Empire and the Black Legend.  Anxieties about racial contamination and hybridity that are part of the Spanish experience are reflected in current debates in the US about immigration across our southern border. 

The first section of the book, “Debating and negotiating the Black Legend in the Hispanic world,” sets the stage with several chapters that study the intellectual debates about exceptionalism or victimhood that, grounded in the discourse of the Black Legend, emerged in the eighteenth century. In the second section of the volume, “Translating the Black Legend,” contributors explore the rich history of the translation and circulation of texts related to the Black Legend in the eighteenth century. Section III, “Deploying the Black Legend beyond the Hispanic world,” turns to examples of how the Black Legend resonated in eighteenth-century cultural production in music and theater, in travel literature, and in the plastic arts.