Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America ed. by Cristián H. Ricci (review)

Reviewed by: Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America ed. by Cristián H. Ricci Hugo A. López Chavolla Ricci, Cristián H., ed. Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Routledge, 2023. 254 pp. ISBN: 978-1-032-42429-3. Both timely and innovative, this volume of essays provides a variety of interdisciplinary studies on the underexplored Arab and African diasporas in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, and expands the understanding of their sociocultural and literary contributions in the 21st century. Divided into three parts —Spain, Portugal, and Latin America—, and while providing political and statistical analysis, this volume's 15 chapters concentrate on the cultural productions of authors and works representative of Arab and African diasporas from or that refer to 18 different countries across four continents. These essays, as the editor Cristián H. Ricci states in the introduction, "trace the transcultural and heterogenous genealogies of diasporic literary and artistic representations, their development in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, efforts to consolidate transnational literature and art, and the eventual attainment of a place in the global literary and artistic map" (18). The first section of this volume focuses on representations of Arabic and African diasporas in Spain and opens with an analysis of education discourses and classroom interactions in Spanish schools and the experiences of Moroccan immigrant children's identity and social integration. This essay is followed by an examination of porteadoras' transborder economic significance in the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa. The third essay engages with the poetic voices of Saharaui women writers in Spain and their resistance against Spanish imperial aspirations in Western Sahara. Chapter 4 redirects the attention to the emerging literary productions of Equatoguinean authors and their works' defiance of Western heteronormative sexual mores while exploring constructions of identity and sexuality. The last chapter in this section provides an analysis of Afro-Spanish writers —specifically Agnès Agboton's denunciation of Spain's xenophobia and intolerance against West African immigrants in her autobiographical essay, Más allá del mar de arena— while questioning the boundaries of belonging and the dynamics of race as a political concept. Part two offers five chapters focused on Portugal. This second cluster of essays explores Portugal's colonial history and its implications in the twenty first century in relation to Arabic and African diasporas by providing different studies pertinent to African migration, questions of citizenship, racialization, and representations of Blackness in post-imperial Portugal. Through the analysis of fiction and music, Chapter 6 interrogates Lusotropicalism in the context of national identity. Along these lines, End Page 223 Chapter 7 investigates the intersections of Portuguese postcolonial race relations and the Lusotropicalist narrative in the context of Portuguese representations of Blackness in mural art and its political entanglements. Similarly, Chapter 8 proposes an analysis of the representations of the Angolan diaspora in Portugal through the examination of the literary works by Kalaf Epalanga, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, and Yara Monteiro. On the other hand, Chapters 9 and 10 concentrate on the Iberic Peninsula's Arab heritage through the discussion of the concept Luso-Arabic poetry as an example of Counter-Orientalism as well as the presence of Muslim diaspora communities from former Portuguese colonies, Portugal's relationship with Islam (including its Islamic past, heritage, and identity), and its current intersections of race, gender, and Islamophobia. The last part of this volume concentrates on the Arab diasporas and the southern majhar in Latin America, specifically in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Chapter 11 begins with an analysis of early Palestinian-Chilean immigrants' engagement with journalism and Chilestinians subsequent contributions to print media. In turn, the following chapter refocuses the attention to the Argentine mahjar and the recovery of the homeland through the examination of family histories and Spanish-language short stories engaging with Middle Eastern immigrants' customs and traditions, most notably from Lebanon and Syria. Moving north toward Colombia, Chapter 13 brings attention to the present gaps in the study of the Arab diaspora in Colombia and engages with canonical and non-canonical novelists to analyze their role as...