A Forgotten Empire: The Spanish North African Borderlands
A Special Issue of the Journal of Spanish Culture

"Broadly, then, this special issue seeks to revisit and expand our knowledge of Iberians’ engagement with North Africa in the early modern period. We seek to recover this region as a space of cultural contact and the imaginary that animated it. Our goal is to understand how people experienced, understood, and imagined the exchanges between Iberians and Maghribis. From their multiple disciplinary perspectives –art history, history, literature, and religious studies. The essays included here examine the nature of cultural contacts, the experiences of individuals who circulated between Spain and North Africa, the types of relations formed, the ideas that emerged, the objects and symbols exchanged, and the historical memory and practices preserved. Together, they bring to the fore the importance of the North African borderlands as part of the Iberian imperial imaginary in the early modern period and beyond." From the editors' introduction.

Barbara Fuchs and Yuen-Gen Liang: A Forgotten Empire: The Spanish-North African Borderlands

Andrew W. Devereux: North Africa in Early Modern Spanish Political Thought

Miguel Martínez: "The Spell of National Identity": War and Soldiering on the North African Frontier (1550-1560)

Jocelyn Hendrickson: Muslim Legal Responses to Portuguese Occupation in Late Fifteenth-Century North Africa 

María Cruz de Carlos Varona: "Imágenes rescatadas" en la Europa moderna: el caso de Jesús de Medinaceli

Javier Irigoyen García: "Poco os falta para moros, pues tanto lo parecéis": Impersonating the Moor in the Spanish Mediterranean