Globalising Iberian Moorishness: Japanese Visitors, Chinese Textiles, and Imperial Cultural Identity

This chapter examines the role of textiles in the globally staged "game of canes, " an equestrian mock battle in which participants, dressed as "Moors, " throw spears at each other. More specifically, the chapter charts the role of textiles in establishing what Bhabha calls ambivalent "identity effects"-once textiles circulated across the Iberian world, and with them notions of imperial identities, the politics of identification themselves got dynamised within specific local settings. The use of textiles for the globalisation of Iberian notions of Moorishness, this chapter argues, produced conflicting "identity effects" on a local level.