Courting convivencia: Hispano-Arab identity and Spanish women’s Orientalism in the Franco regime’s years of “unbearable solitude” (1946-1950)

The disturbing duality of the figure of the Moor as ancestral “other” in Spanish culture was refashioned during the first part of the twentieth century as a result of the colonial campaigns in Morocco (1909–1927) and, most memorably, the deployment of North African troops on the Rebel side during the Civil War. Propagandistic efforts to justify their involvement had a significant afterlife via the symbolic privileging of the Moor and exaltation of Hispano-Arab amity during the early Franco regime when it pursued a “courtship” with newly decolonized Arab states in a bid to counteract international ostracism. Locating this courtship within the wider framework of the promotion of hispanidad, this article investigates the reception of overlapping Francoist discourses on raza and Hispano-Arab identity in a selection of contemporaneous Orientalist romance novels by young Spanish women authors whose engagement with such concerns has hitherto been overlooked. It interrogates the strikingly pro-miscegenation stance evident in their reworking of the more conservative popular 1920s British desert-romance genre and considers the possible meanings of their affective espousal of convivencia in the postwar climate of profound social cleavages and violently prescribed gender identities that intersected with aspects of the regime’s “self-Orientalization”.