Civilizing the Pre-Modern Spanish World through the Gaze of Modernity

The gaze of history when it is penned by Western scholars is often undergirded by a layer of violence through which the historian imposes his own view and perceptions upon another people and their places. During the early modern period (14921800), Europeans sought to describe the peoples and places they had encountered for European audiences, which gave rise to increased interest in the science of describing people (and then to the fields of anthropology and ethnography), and the invention of race. This article meditates on how the gaze imposes race while also structuring non-white people within the Enlightenment concepts of civilization and culture. Using casta paintings as well as literature drawn from the Spanish literary canon, we furthermore demonstrate how race became inscribed as a civilizing tool wielded in the nineteenth century by other Europeans against Spain as a means of othering and de-occidentalizing it from without the so-called civilized world.


Introduction
With no little irony in the context of the Americas and the liberal ideals that ripened into the fruit of civilizing discourses during and after the Enlightenment, Bruce Johansen demonstrates that civil and social liberties protected by the American constitution, which embodies a treatise for civilization, descend from Native American practices and were then adopted by the Western world 1 . His conclusions unsettle the dominance of Western political and social thought and their ideals, and expose the concept of civilization as responsible for elevating these non-Western solutions for Western problems. The Western appropriation of Indigenous thought required a process of re-racialization whereby those ideals emerged instead from the pens of white men during the Enlightenment, which highlights the fluidity of race, particularly in the hands of white people.
Civilizing discourses of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries have shepherded the rest of the world toward a Western semblance that forms the basis of globalization 2 . In tandem, the term civilization stratifies our world by cleaving away those who live within from those who live without it, which implies borders, city limits, and the rule of law. Nested within Western civilization is a neoliberal capitalism fomented in Europe and whose reaches have become global: it proves increasingly difficult to escape the confines of Western civilization, which makes the pre-modern Spanish world such a complex environment within which to understand civilization and racialization as concomitant elements of colonization. The dichotomies of civilization evoke the opposition between the metropole and the country, technology and the lack of mechanization, the refined and the barbaric, Christian and non-Christian, the modern and the ancient, the known and unknown, and white and non-white 3 . Some scholars use the term to signify social organization and the increasing complexity of a culture as it realizes its parabolic existence from nothing, climaxing during its golden age, and disintegrating during its collapse 4 . This tendency also reinforces the eminence of Western civilization, at least for Western scholars, over the last two and a half millennia, and lays bare the potency of the racializing Western gaze 5 .
Thinkers such as Fredrich Nietzsche (1844Nietzsche ( -1900 articulated the superiority of the West along racial lines while acknowledging the violence and privilege that comes with imposing Western civilization upon others. In his 1886 essay On the Genealogy of Morals he wrote: " [A]t the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast [is] prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time. 6 " Nietzsche protects civilizing violence in a way that elevates physical and intellectual brutality for the imperial cause, whose enclosure or cage is civilization. Evidently, he envisioned a German empiricism, not a Spanish one, as the mane of his Arian beast indicates 7 . The metaphor helps us understand how later thinkers racialize the Nietzschean lion, for instance reading its appearance in Spain's national symbolism (for the kingdom of León) as a sign of imperial dominance over the dark-coloured, black-haired common man described elsewhere by Nietzsche 8 . An animal from warmer climates in the nineteenth century and beyond, the lion also symbolized the West's increasing access to the south's resources and the alienation of the global south, typified by darker skin, warmer climates, and a perceived effeminacy, from the global north, characterised by lighter skin, cooler climates, and a perceived masculinity. As Bruce Lincoln has concluded, racialized geographies infect scholarship about European civilizing discourse, and scholars more recently struggle not to view the Nietzschean lion in this way 9 .
Transcontinental and transhistorical impacts of racialization such as the ones implied by Nietzsche's lion will be pursued in this article by considering civilizing discourses used on both sides of the Iberian Atlantic in textual and visual sources. This essay first examines the visualization of race in Latin American casta paintings dating from the eighteenth century against earlier portrayals of Native Americans, as a means of demonstrating the increasing importance to Spanish and European 5 Western history being world history is a challenge that scholars must also navigate. See, for example, Paul V. Adams, Lily Hwa, Erick D. Langer, Peter N. Stearns, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Experiencing World History (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Western history as a history of progress and modernity similarly excludes other civilizations and peoples as moderns. See Alexander Woodside, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 114-115. audiences of race as an indicator and demarcation of civilization. We will then turn to the emergence of Hispanic studies as a discipline during a period in which scholars de-civilized Spain from the Western world for its Islamic past as well as its activities in the Americas during the early modern period. Using the example of the Muslim-fighting Spanish hero, the Cid-whose narrative was re-popularized in the nineteenth ,century-this foundation will allow us to reframe Spain's activities domestically and abroad through the lens of post-Enlightenment scholarship's colonizing gaze of that country and its racialized past. We will then meditate on civilizing discourse as, in Bruce Mazlish's view, a colonizing ideology that will allow us to view the Spanish people as simultaneously civilized as well as the civilizers in the modern era 10 .

Racial Typologies and Visual Culture in the Early-Modern Spanish World
Anxiety about race in the eighteenth century characterizes casta paintings, which transcend the verbal ordering of peoples used for centuries in Spanish culture along the lines of blood purity (limpieza de sangre) through which white Catholics remained an ethnographic and cultural ideal, because for the first time race was being displayed as a Western typology for humanity 11 . Enlightenment-era authorities in the Spanish colonies reprised blood purity protocols and re-cultivated them in terms of race in ways that unified the natural and social worlds 12 . Racial typologies had long been part of Christian eschatology, and certainly since the sons of Noah inherited the three continents, thus racializing geographies according to Noah's most and least favoured sons (Japheth, who received Europe, and Ham who received Africa), thus justifying the apparatus of enslaving African peoples for European economic and social benefit 13 . The subject swelled in popularity in the  , who relied upon the bible and biblical commentary, in addition to legal sources, to support their perspectives in favour and against Spanish (and certainly Catholic) culture as ordering principles in the New World. Casta paintings built upon naturalistic portraits of the other displaying his and her differences for European viewers. These portraits grew in popularity in the sixteenth century outside of Spain. During the intense period of European expansion into lands previously unknown to them, the European book trade exploded with illustrated histories and customs books that exhibited these faraway peoples to the European reader. Performing their otherness and demonstrating the use of essentializing objects about which the author provided details, these illustrations almost always absented any ethnographical information, which we argue is a fundamental component of Enlightenment-era civilizing discourse. One of these works, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1589), authored by José de Acosta, situated various peoples of the Americas as new, strange, and different, which exposes the normativity of being European in the context of his work. Typical of most Spanish chronicles, it was not illustrated; rather, it only gained visualization through the workshop of Theodore de Bry (1528-1598) and his collaborators in 1602 ( Figure  1). The title page for this volume, which contains other works, announces the titles of translations prepared for Dutch audiences. The illustrations provided in the book mirror those of its front matter, including the Caucasian racialization of the Indigenous people featured within the Spanish Americas-one of whom was recycled from de Bry's volume on Virginia (the original illustration also featured Caucasian features)-as well as flora and fauna new to Europeans, including penguins and a llama 14 . The interchangeability of North and South Americans demonstrates the artist's disinterest in racializing the visualized subject at the dawn of the seventeenth century and his engagement with these peoples' material and environmental differences through the objects and wildlife displayed to the reader.
Books prepared by Acosta's contemporaries also illustrated Spaniards, portraying them as violent aggressors in their invasion of the Americas as well as Europe during the decades that comprised the Counterreformation 15 . These books circulated in the imperial languages of Europe, moreover, exposing the continent to a narrow construction of Spain and its activities abroad as well as to a particular description of Native American peoples. Because those illustrations likewise do not racialize the victims of Spanish violence, these illustrations portray Spaniards abusing a Caucasian, Europeanized other, which inscribes Spanish brutality known elsewhere in Europe, for example during the Wars of Religion, onto the bodies of both Native Americans and non-Spanish Europeans. With Native Americans and Europeans thus united in their collective subjecthood as victims of Spanish incursions, the perception grows that the Spanish had become degenerated, which we will argue allows them to be re-racialized in important ways after the Enlightenment. 14 The Virginia series featured several illustrations of Indigenous peoples found in the area of present-day Virginia originally prepared for Thomas Hariot by John White. The one that is recycled on the title page of South America is of a Secota (Algonquian) man, and can be found in A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt: Theodore de Bry, 1590), pl. v.
Casta paintings expose the racial degeneration of Spaniards while idealizing whiteness as a racial construct. This genre of painting becomes popular in the eighteenth century and is a product of the Enlightenment's engagement with the scientific study of humanity 16 . Many of these ethnographic combinations accentuate the dangerous or strange-seeming product of mixed blood relationships, both in the New and Old Worlds. For example, the daughter of a Spanish man (español) and a mixed blood Muslim-Christian woman (morisca) is an albino (albina) (Figure 2). The unexpected product of two comparatively darker-skinned parents disincentives procreation between castes because the child's whiteness will be viewed as aberrant, which in turn encourages blood purity among Spaniards within the context of the civilization of the Spanish world in the eighteenth century. Another example from  Cabrera's series of casta paintings involves a morisco (mixed blood Muslim-Christian man) and a Spanish woman, whose progeny is a chino (literally, a Chinese boy, also a derogatory term for an Indigenous person), and if he procreates with an Indigenous woman (india), their child is a salta atrás (a step backward); when he procreates with a mulata, their child is a lobo (wolf). These last two examples demonstrate the dehumanization of mixed-blood peoples through the caste system, another way through which they were systemically de-civilized from Spanish culture. The effacement of geographical signifiers-with the exception of the Spaniard born in Spain-is another quality of this genre of painting, whereby morisco and india have no explicit or clear geographical referent tied to a particular place, as in the case of the Spaniard to Spain. The displacement of chino and india to Latin America furthermore examples the geographic vagueness underlying re-racialization, as the geographic signifiers expressed by these names also function as racial signifiers pointing to Asian peoples 17 .
The paintings perform the argument of racial degeneration in that they deploy a sliding scale that visualizes the Western ideal of racial purity in a way that maintains the hierarchy of Europeans over indigenous and black peoples. The paintings provide a vocabulary to verbally order and subjugate the person displayed or encountered, ranging from most to least white. Whiteness and Spanishness (that is, descending of two pure-blood Spanish parents born in Spain) together hovered patriarchally above the caste system, as only mixed bloodedness appeared as offspring in the casta paintings, with the exception of the criollo-a man born in the Americas of two pureblood Spaniards born in Spain 18 . Importantly, before this period verbally-expressed racial typologies required investigation and documentation; they were used by Spanish secular and religious authorities to determine perceived spiritual needs and legal entitlements, yet one's appearance was not enough to presume one's place in the order of things 19 . Geography was increasingly comingling with appearance in a way that ordered whiteness, nudging the criollo below Spanish on the scale of racialization despite the common assignment of racial identity to their parents. Criollos thus were denied an essential geographic signifier in their caste category that would have reinforced their otherwise idealized whiteness.
As the Spanish-speaking world grew increasingly mixed blooded, the theme of degenerative whiteness in painting is particularly interesting because many casta painters were criollos and mestizos who directly suffered the impacts of social Civilizing the Pre-Modern Spanish World through the Gaze of Modernity stratification in both geographical and racial ways 20 . The reassertion of works by Las Casas, Acosta, and others in the nineteenth century, moreover, mixes with the established racialization of the Spanish world and makes it difficult to study the early modern period without a civilizing gaze toward the past, particularly in a time in which Western civilization authored the history of all peoples and things with race as a key descriptor 21 . On the one hand, the sixteenth-century motivation to expand into the Americas relied upon the justification of spreading Christianity, which up until the Enlightenment remained an organizing principle of European and Spanish epistemologies. On the other hand, scientific inquiry, anthropology, and the emergence of nation states nuance and eventually displace the Christian worldview.
The study of civilization through culture (kultur) gave birth to the field of anthropology in the nineteenth century, which inscribed the study of culture for the purpose of establishing white knowledge about other peoples in ways that also gave birth to the gaze of civilization within the safe space reserved for the quest for

The Un-Whitening and De-Occidentalization of Spain: the Example of El Cid
Hispanic studies and Oriental studies form while the discourse of civilization is in its adolescence in the late eighteenth century, and they quickly become intertwined as objectified projections of Spanish culture, identity, and history. The expulsion of the moriscos from Spain between 1609-1614 was proceeded by a century-long ban on speaking and writing the Arabic language as well as the burning of books in Arabic. Yet, Spain boasted a significant collection of Arabic-language books due to its mariners' practice of sacking enemy ships, yielding on more than one occasion a library belonging to the enemy, including a catchment of books captured at the Battle of Lepanto in 1570 and the library of Moroccan sultan Mawlay Zidan, captured in 1612 23 . Thousands of books and manuscripts prepared in Arabic resided at El Escorial but nearly nobody in Spain could read them. Arabists such as Ottoman Syrian-born priest Miguel Casiri (1710-1791) and Pascual de Gayangos (1809-1897) became some of the first individuals to study and translate these documents for broader audiences 24 . These activities dovetailed with a widespread interest within Europe about the non-Western world that quickly matured into the field of Oriental studies.
Eighteenth-century interest in national literary corpora also led publishers to capitalize on Spanish readers' thirst for its literary past, for instance in Tomás Antonio Sánchez's Colección de poesías castellanas anteriores al siglo xv (1779), which included the first-published version of the Poema de mio Cid. Likewise discovered in libraries and archives were Spanish-language poems written in Arabic, known as the kharjas, and related forms of poetry and prose that had remained unknown to literary scholars until the nineteenth century. As the kharjas demonstrate, language increasingly opened the door for the reader to access another culture's knowledge 25 . An extensive translation program unfolded throughout Europe whereby the national literature of Spain could be consumed in English, French, and German, in addition to other European languages. As Brett Bowden observes, diplomatic and international relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries relied most on these languages and through them the concept of civilization, unified by whiteness, becomes vocalized 26 .
Using the Cid's poem to demonstrate the extent of this vocalization, following the 1779 edition, English and German bestsellers appeared. Robert Southey (1774-1843), whose translation appeared in 1808 and was subsequently released on both sides of the Atlantic many times over the following two centuries, characterized the poet as a Spanish Homer, linking thusly literary genius with a bygone culture's glory 27 . This linkage was not incidental and reflects a growing perception in nineteenthcentury Europe that Spain and Spanish culture had grown outmoded and decrepit, yet its past glories nonetheless could be romanticized by foreign publishers.

Lauren Beck
Der Cid: Nach Spanischen Romanzen (1813), by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), developed a life of its own throughout the nineteenth century, being rereleased across tens of editions. These and some competing editions became thoroughly adorned with orientalizing illustrations of one of Spain's national heroes in ways that exulted the country's Muslim past and stereotyped the actors of Spanish history using essentializing cultural characteristics that range from ethnographic stereotypes to Arab-inspired architectural abstractions (Figures 3 and  4). During this period, the Cid's character and his surroundings became visibly  and designed to help them acquire the Spanish language 29 . It is in this way that the European objectification of Spanish literature transforms into a colonizing act as Spanish literature becomes German literature read in German and sometimes in Spanish, intended for German audiences, and for which not the poem's author but rather its German translator and commentator become famous.
Such was the popularity of an 1838 edition of Herder's work 30 that one of the only Spanish editions published that century in Spain reproduced the German illustrations in 1842 (reprinted in 1848). Yet, the Barcelona-Madrid editions were intended for Spanish audiences, the latter edition edited by the librarian of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch (1806Hartzenbusch ( -1880 31 . The naturalization in Spain of orientalizing images originally destined for foreign audiences demonstrates the acceptance, on the part of the Spanish book trade, of this othering from without and, on the part of the Spanish people, of the Muslim past of its national identity. This acceptance was not easily accomplished before the Enlightenment when Islam and its referents remained terms of derision that signaled cultural and religious malfeasance and were not considered worthy subjects of literature and art 32 . Notably absent in literature published in Spain before the nineteenth century are celebrations of that Muslim past, which is not a surprise given the conceptual design of casta painting, its idealization of whiteness, and its projection of racial degeneration, whereas works such as the Cid's story began to be read as a form of cultural history that validated at the same time that it assigned national identity 33 . This re-association of Spain with its Muslim past happens not in the hands of Spaniards but of other Europeans, whose objectifying interest in Spanish culture echoed the popular French saying of the day: "Africa begins in 29 These learning materials were also subject to translations and enjoyed an international reach. See, for example, Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi, Historical View   the Pyrenees" 34 . The Spanish embrace of this past even becomes a vehicle for commercial purposes, as one recent exhibition of visual art used to sell products and services between 1870 and 1970 demonstrates, which evinces broad acceptance of that Muslim past domestically 35 .

Spain Exoticized within Civilizational Discourse
Europe's objectification of Spain as its corner of oriental exotica positioned the country within the realm of the Arab world and thus its sphere of civilization, and lessened the nation's whiteness as appraised by Western eyes. Orientalized thusly from without, Spain had also been weakened due to several bankruptcies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the collapse of the Spanish Habsburg line in 1700, the subsequent installment of the French Bourbon line on its throne, the dispersal of its empire through the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and the eventual independence of its colonies beginning in the late eighteenth century, and the invasion during the same period by Napoleon: not only could Europeans consume Spanish culture in published form, they could also dismantle its empire from within Europe. The architecture of knowledge accessed by the West about Spain became colonized when the most authoritative voices in the discipline of Hispanic studies and for knowledge about Spanish culture originated from outside of the Spanish-speaking world-for example, Southey and Herder, and from influential organizations with extensive publishing programmes, including the American Hispanic Society 36 .
Individuals and entities such as these ones employ their language skills and interest in history or literature in influential ways mirrored by the casta paintings.
Like racialization and the way that white degeneration is manipulated through such works, primary sources can be transformed through translation, infecting them with Western civilizing discourses 37 . A recently-published theorist, for example, quoted  , 2002). While some scholars have concluded that Herder rejected European self-elevation as a superior race as well as universal notions of culture and civilization, in the context of visual culture Herder had little control over how his work became illustrated and thus his edition of the Cid served as a site of parasitic orientalism through which which his work retained an orientalized character due to its visual material. By the mid-nineteenth century, culture as a term and concept began to be used much in the same way as civilization had been in the eighteenth century. On this subject, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 89-90. an English-language translation of Las Casas's In Defense of the Indians (translated by Strafford Poole in 1974), and included parenthetical material within the quotation that commented on Las Casas's description of the encomienda system: "a satanic invention, never before heard of " 38 . The effect, no doubt unintended by the author, positions Las Casas as the one who assesses the evil nature of the encomienda, rather than the theorist, and certainly the phrase is absent from the original text and its subsequent translations. The twentieth-century text contributes nonetheless to the orientalization of Spanish activities in the Americas while de-civilizing Spaniards as, in this case, outside of the Christian order. As the popular refrain "Africa begins in the Pyrenees" confirms, Spain in the European imagination had also been conceptually displaced from Europe to Africa, although the significance of this displacement requires context. When used as an insult, Spain's Africanness undergoes the same resignification experienced by Native Americans, in the latter case as being from India (and thus Indians); when used by Spaniards to reconsolidate collective identity while Spain was losing its colonies, Spain's Africanness reflects a return to a medievalera civilization, which now conceptually existed thanks to the Enlightenment, and which was viewed in the late nineteenth century as harder-working, more educated, and more modern than contemporary Spain 39 .
This example reminds us that Spanish history from a post-Enlightenment perspective is built upon several civilizations that yield alignments between the civilizers and the civilized. When the Romans arrived and later named the land Hispania, the Iberian and Celtiberian peoples adjusted to Roman ways of life, learned Latin and later the vernacular tongue, and provided the labour needed to extract natural resources. Like the popularity of the Cid's poem in the English, French, and German book trades, the extraction of resources or the exploitation of another people and its endowments is a form of exogenous colonization: commerce and industry became key actors in asserting colonial power and authority 40 . According to Roman law, moreover, and despite being from this land, the Iberian peoples could not be Roman, and were distinguished from Romans in juridical and social contexts that objectified their labour but nonetheless viewed them as otherly in their own lands 41 . This form of internal or domestic colonialism structurally segregated the colonized from their colonizers, categorizing one from the other according to place of origin, much in the same way as the casta paintings did using both race and place of origin when both the colonized and the colonizers occupied the same space 42 .
Similarly, when the Visigoths came to the peninsula, they structured the Roman settlers as their unequals in the land where the latter people had lived for centuries in the Visigothic Code. While marriage was not prohibited between Romans and Goths, their access to the land was not equitably divided, with a small population of Goths controlling two thirds of the arable land and a large population of Romans controlling one third of the arable land 43 . As before, their stratification remained geographic in nature. Not long after, a composite group of Muslims arrived and various ways of negotiating the intercultural encounter ensued, from acculturation through the imposition of Arabic language, Islam, and political systems taken from the Muslim world to some imperfect (and today idealized) form of convivencia through which Christians and Muslims lived together under the rule of one or the other's king, usually preventing the equality of Christians, Muslims, and Jews with juridical and social regulations, such as those expressed in the thirteenth-century Siete Partidas 44 . After centuries of living in Al-Andalus, the land slowly fell under Catholic control and Muslims were expected to speak Spanish, worship Catholicism, and eventually were expelled altogether from the land that they had known for centuries. Not unlike Native Americans or Indians, whose namesake embodies the process of severing the colonized from their geographic origins (as they do not descend from Amerigo Vespucci nor come from India), the assertion of alternative places of origin functions similarly to the adscription of race.
Spain's past is conflicted by these bifurcated identities as a colonized space occupied by both the settler-colonizer-civilizer and the colonized-civilized-settler across time. beginning in the Pyrenees, Nineteenth-century politician Joaquín Costa (1846Costa ( -1911 takes this claim one step further by blending African racial characteristics into the character of Spaniards, "for whom Africa begins in the soles of their feet and ends in the hair upon their heads" 46 . His Africanization of Spain regenerates racial profiles from Muslim Spain within the frame of Costa's modern-day nation state.
Costa's backward glance to Muslim Spain should be viewed in light of the period's civilizational discourse, particularly because Costa's proposed racial heterogeneity, which chafes against the reality that Spain remained quite white, embraces what only a century before was considered degenerative civilization. This ethnogenesis hinges upon civilizing processes expressed by the casta paintings, particularly its portrayal of blood purity, in ways that "painted over" Indigenous and criollo bodies, respectively and to echo Dussel, in order to preserve Spanish settlerism and nativism, respectively. Viewed in this way, the non-Spanish "covering over" of Spanish identity using racial and geographic surrogacies points to the Western colonization of Spain, its culture and history, and Spaniards eventually embrace this exogenous characterization 47 .

Conclusion
Civilization from this socio-political perspective has coloured scholarly assumptions about Spain's history as much as its present 48 . The orientalization of Spanish historiography and the barbarization of Muslims, as opposed to the civilization of Christians, is foregrounded by increasing scholarly activity on Spanish culture and history in the nineteenth century, so that global readerships were exposed to this framing of Spain. Spain in need of civilization became a common theme among early twentieth-century historians, a position not helped by the country's lack of industrialization and the installment of a dictatorship which isolated and alienated it from most of the Western world, as well as its continued adherence to Catholicism, which was also viewed as outmoded. Civilizational projects exampled by the casta paintings, when mixed with these factors, resulted in a transhistorical and transatlantic feedback loop through which modern Spain became exogenously defined. After Franco's death and the regeneration of a republic as well as democratic systems, Spain cleansed itself of its ascribed barbarity and embraced a chance to reignite so-called civility once again as a young democracy, joining the European Union, and demonstrating the country's embrace of the contemporary ideals of civilization summarized at the outset of this essay 49 . And what of the aims of Western civilizational ideology? The modern problem presented by race as a social construct becomes joined by class and the division of labour in the nineteenth century 50 , which has the effect of disappearing Indigenous peoples and elevating the concerns of settlers within the metropole that is Western civilization. Scholars could embrace the view that, like the Romans, Native American values and cultural practices colonized Western thought and society, but such alignments in scholarly thought are rare.
Viewing Indigenous peoples as racialized groups dwindling in numbers, under siege by environmental and capitalist forces, considered (increasingly or decreasingly) white and thus less authentically indigenous, becomes a way of subscribing Native Americans within the Western world as perennially less civilized than others, all without removing them from the land occupied by settlers. The casta paintings document and participate in this complex phenomenon. Like the criollo and mestizo creators of those paintings, Spain likewise reproduces the European othering of itself, particularly in visual and literary culture generated outside of Spain, appropriating it, and completing what Jodi Byrd deems necessary for unsettling settlerism through the appropriation of ideals and methods employed by colonizers 51 . The reassociation of Spain's Muslim and African past within a period of national regeneration underlines the ways that past civilizations, in a post-Enlightenment sense of the term, become grafted upon our sense of national identity while maintaining settler presence on the land.
By establishing these alignments between Spanish civilizational discourse in Latin America and Western civilizational discourse in Spain in both visual and verbal ways, we problematize the civilizational project from within the West by exposing how the gaze of modernity also lays eyes upon the West itself, as opposed to that which typically finds itself isolated from the metropole, and the so-called modern and civilized worlds.