Efún: “White Love” and Modernity in Guinea

Posted in Africa, Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2016-07-04 22:04Z by Steven

Efún: “White Love” and Modernity in Guinea

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
Volume 19, 2015
pages 33-54
DOI: 10.1353/hcs.2016.0026

Kathleen Connolly, Assistant Professor of Spanish
Western Oregon University, Monmouth, Oregon

This paper analyzes the award-winning novel Efún (1955), by Liberata Masoliver. The novel, a romance-adventure set in Equatorial Guinea, stages a cosmopolitan, white identity in the form of the Catalan protagonists Ana Ribera and Carlos Isart. The narrative harnesses racial discourse, as well as the signs of technological advancement and modernity, to portray Spaniards as ideal colonizers in Guinea. Significantly, Efún while in line with much of the ideological values espoused by National Catholicism, contains subtle counter discourses that construct upper-class Catalans as ideal national subjects. The novel’s preoccupation with transgressive sex and miscegenation demonstrates an anxiety regarding the “racial consequences” of the colonial project: the destruction of European, white, identity. Efún’s unease about mixed race, dangerous mestizos, and insinuations of Catalan racial purity all form an integral part of Masoliver’s education of desire.

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