"Nuestro destino en África": Autoridad y representación en la escritura española sobre Marruecos (1859–1936)

This dissertation examines Spanish textual and visual production on Morocco from the War of Africa (1859–1860) to the eve of the Spanish Civil War. It argues that, amid the long erosion of Spain’s Atlantic empire and the consolidation of European colonial expansion, Morocco was conceived as a privileged field in which Spain sought to redefine its imperial authority. Drawing on a corpus that includes war chronicles, travel narratives, geographical materials, and historical fiction, the study analyzes the procedures through which Spain sought to make Morocco legible as an object of knowledge and intervention. These procedures also claimed privileged access to the neighboring country through different forms of presence, geographical observation, cartographic ordering, and intimacy. Such authority, however, remains precarious, since the works can only sustain their claims to knowledge through mediations that they repeatedly attempt to contain.

The dissertation is organized into four chapters. Chapter one examines Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de África (1860) and the collective work Crónica de la Guerra de África (1860) to show how the War of Africa created a contested field in which different forms of writing claimed authority to represent the campaign and define its place in Spain’s national and imperial imagination. Chapter two focuses on the itineraries, maps, and expeditionary accounts of Joaquim Gatell and Julio Cervera Baviera, where the authority of exploration depends on the conversion of travel into scientific and military knowledge. Chapter three analyzes Aita Tettauen (1905) within the fourth series of Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios nacionales, arguing that the novel revisits the War of Africa after 1898 to test the limits of the colonial archive. Through the figure of the false renegade and the mediated presence of different voices, Galdós shows how fiction reorganizes the materials of the African campaign while exposing the instability of the Spanish narratives that seek to contain them. Chapter four considers Carmen de Burgos’s chronicles of the Melilla campaign and the novella En la guerra (1909), alongside Aurora Bertrana’s El Marroc sensual i fanàtic (1936), to examine how women’s writing relocates colonial authority in scenes of intimacy and frustrated knowledge.

By tracing these shifts across the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the dissertation demonstrates that Spanish imperial writing on Morocco was sustained by a persistent need to authorize itself. Morocco offered Spain a space from which to imagine historical destiny and respond to imperial decline. However, the materials analyzed show that this authority depends on forms of mediation whose limitations remain evident. The dissertation thus reconsiders Spanish Orientalism as a practice of epistemic authorization, organized around claims to access whose fragility becomes visible in the very procedures that sustain them.