Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

Symptoms Of Spanish Fantasies: Africa As The Sign Of The Other In Angel Ganivet's Idearium Español And La Conquista Del Reino De Maya , Yaw Agawu-Kakraba

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Angel Ganivet's La conquista del reino de Maya (1897, The Conquest of the Realm of Maya) elucidates the aggressive impulse embedded within modern self-consciousness, one that precipitates the need for journeys—linguistic and artistic, as well as authentically colonial—to either the "dark continent" or to the "heart of darkness" to find the irrational Other of the rational modern man. This impulse, however, is not only at the service of individual subjective experience, elevating the ego in relation to a declining awareness of objective or synchronous outside reality. That modernity also precipitated the creation of modern nations, often in conjunction with imperial …