Introduction: Theorizing the Performance of Spanish Identity

Martín-Márquez, Susan

doi:10.12987/yale/9780300125207.003.0001

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“…Such realities set the tone of the education that Jules Verreaux received prior to his own efforts to smuggle a cadaver from southern Africa to France, later to be taxidermied and displayed for commercial gain. The remains of the southern African man were stuffed and displayed in Paris alongside taxidermied animals that were prepared by the Verreaux brothers (Martin‐Márquez, 2014, p. 64), first in the show rooms of Baron Benjamin Delessert where he was placed under the name “Le Betjouana” and then later sold to Spaniard in 1888 to be placed at the Barcelona World Exhibition (Harries, 2014, p. 175; Molina, 2002, 34; Parsons, 2002, p. 19). The man's remains were purchased in 1880 by Frencesc Darder (who acquired the body after the Verreaux brothers' deaths in an estate sale) and displayed to the public in 1888 at the Universal Exhibition in Barcelona, later being placed in the Francesc Darder Museum of Natural History in Banyoles, Spain (Parsons, 2002, p. 19).…”

Section: The Verreaux Brothers and Postmortem Bodily Rights Injusticesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lions Attacking a Dromedary: The Verreaux brothers, imperial taxidermy, and postmortem bodily rights

Niittynen

2023

Curator The Museum Journal

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Lions Attacking a Dromedary created at Maison Verreaux brings up a larger discussion about representations of racialized bodies (real and synthetic) in the history of museum display. Looking to the history of racialized bodies on display, I outline how taxidermied animals and racialized mannequins oscillate to reinforce continual colonial projects of the present. I show my reader how the construction of a ‘specimen’ is used in the dehumanizing processes that shapes who and what is human: a recognizable being that is (borrowing from Judith Butler) grievable upon death. Since the discovery of real human remains inside the racialized mannequin, the group is now redisplayed at the Carnegie Museum alongside educational insights that seek to ethically interrupt the colonial violence that the display narrates. In order to push this discussion further, I seek direction from decolonial artists and scholars on the best approaches to take in response to postmortem human rights abuses (past and present) and to show the ways that art can be both a destructive and reparative exchange.

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Section: The Verreaux Brothers and Postmortem Bodily Rights Injusticesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lions Attacking a Dromedary: The Verreaux brothers, imperial taxidermy, and postmortem bodily rights

Niittynen

2023

Curator The Museum Journal

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“…The othering of the African in this period differed between the colonies, as Susan Martin-Márquez (2008) and Aixelà-Cabré (2017 carefully describe. Instead, in Equatorial Guinea, conversion into Catholicism and the values of the dictatorship were at the forefront of the colonial rule, but with discouragements of miscegenation.…”

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Recovering memory, reasserting Europeanness

Suarez¹

2021

The Routledge Companion to European Cinema

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Coloniser's daughter?", asks Iniko, "Farmworker. It is not the same." 1 , replies Clarence in her father's defence. The exchange takes place between the Equatorial Guinean and Spanish co-protagonists in Palmeras en la nieve/ Palm Trees in the Snow (Fernando González Molina, 2015), the box-office hit based on the novel of the same name. As the dialogue encapsulates, Spain's revision of its African colonial past is yet to acknowledge the abuses and inequalities of the period, grounding itself instead in notions of collaboration, exchange, and conviviality. Whereas Spanish colonialism in the Americas has been approached onscreen with revisionist tones, Spanish incursions in Africa have been given much less attention and even less critical awareness. Nevertheless, it is worth noting a recent increase of Spanish films around themes of (post)colonialism in the African colonies; in post-Franco's Spain this debate was conspicuously absent.Twenty-first century Spain is interrogating the past and collective memory. At the turn of the millennium and the foundation of the ARMH (Spain's Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory) in 2000, numerous literary works, testimonies, and films were produced around the themes of the Civil War and its aftermath (Labanyi, 2007, p. 95). The debates that 2007's Ley de Memoria Histórica (Law of Historical Memory) reignited have encouraged the examination not only of the war and the dictatorship that followed, but also, as Triana-Toribio (2016, p.16) identifies, of the transition, its political agents, and the decisions taken.The reinstatement of a collective memory around Spain's colonial incursions in Africa must 1 (INIKO) Hija de colonial? (CLARENCE) Empleado de finca. No es lo mismo.

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Introduction: Theorizing the Performance of Spanish Identity

Cited by 2 publications

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Lions Attacking a Dromedary: The Verreaux brothers, imperial taxidermy, and postmortem bodily rights

Lions Attacking a Dromedary: The Verreaux brothers, imperial taxidermy, and postmortem bodily rights

Recovering memory, reasserting Europeanness

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