ORCHESTRATING DIFFERENCE AND SIMILARITY: Black Fungibility, and the Spatial Redrawing of Racial Categories in Spanish Colonial Morocco, Sahara and Guinea

In this article I dissect the spatial strategies through which the Spanish attempted to orchestrate both racial difference and similarity in the African colonies of Morocco, Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea during the first half of the twentieth century. With the ‘loss’ of its last American colonies, and increasingly positioned as the internal ‘other’ of Europe, the Spanish sought to build a new Ibero‐African empire and leverage their historical, geographical and racial ties to northwest Africa through the built environment to justify colonial rule and accrue political capital. Yet Spain’s colonial geographical project required Black fungibility both as its raw material—enabling those new colonial landscapes, real or imagined—and as a limit category that could be occupied by any/body. Drawing from both primary archival materials and a host of secondary sources, I show how space—broadly understood as geographic imaginations, architectural styles, urban designs and the uses and policing of public places—became key to orchestrating such similarities and differences, capitalizing on the fluidity of racial categories and securing the supremacy of a struggling Spanish colonizer.