“In Andalucía, there are no foreigners”: Andalucismo from transperipheral critique to colonial apology

This article explores the ideological legacy of Blas Infante (1885–1936), hailed today as the “Padre de la Patria Andaluza.” In post-Franco Spain, Infante’s legacy of political andalucismo (Andalusian nationalism) has become inexorably linked with the myth of Andalusi convivencia: the supposedly harmonious coexistence of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Iberia. Yet Infante’s posthumous fame as an avatar of intercultural tolerance masks two understudied aspects of his work and its afterlife: his repudiation of Catalan nationalism and his influence on the discourse of Spanish colonialism in Morocco. In this article, I develop the concept of the “transperipheral” to analyze Andalusian nationalism’s evolving debate with Catalan nationalism — and, more broadly, to propose a new model for the study of Iberian peripheral nationalisms. My notion of the transperipheral aims to revise the center–periphery binary that has dominated the study of Iberian peripheral nationalisms. Blas Infante was assassinated by Rebel troops in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. His writings, nonetheless, exerted significant influence over the discourse of Spanish colonialism in Morocco in the 1940s and 1950s. In the last section of the article, I show how Infante’s andalucista ideology migrated into the work of Rodolfo Gil Benumeya (1901–1975), a leading theoretician of Spanish colonialism under Franco. My article therefore traces the uneven trajectory of Andalusian nationalism from transperipheral critique to colonial apology.