Anglo-Saxon Others in the Spanish imagination

Resumen

This paper aims to contribute to contemporary research on Spanish images of  Englishness and thus on cross-cultural  otherness. More precisely, it seeks to identify  and describe the composite image of Anglo-Saxon Others as portrayed in ten nineteenth  century Spanish history books and to critically discuss the results.   Despite Anglo-Saxon England being a marginal issue for nineteenth century Spanish  scholarship, it has been proved that existing narratives constitute seminal  representations of Anglo-Saxon identity and serve a neatly defined heterogeneous array  of political and collective aims. The present analysis suggests that the portrayal of  Anglo-Saxon Others contributes to reinforce the ideological bases on which the Anglo Saxons themselves are built and reveals the tensions which result from the multiple  functions performed by the narratives selected. More in particular, the narratives  analysed will be shown to differ according to the degree of detail with which the AngloSaxon  Others are described, and to roughly conform to the Roman vs Germanic  traditions recognised among Anglosaxonists. The tradition a given historian belongs to  seems to determine not only the features chosen to represent the Anglo-Saxon Others,  but also the number of groups that should be defined as such.  Most interestingly, a  different concept of race appears to emerge from either ideological platform.  From a more general standpoint, this research enhances our understanding of the  symbolic nature of stereotypes as created in narratives of major social institutions which  maintain a relationship of expert-novice with  their audiences. Last  but not least, this  paper opens up new areas of inquiry for future research.

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