Elvira Roca Barea


María Elvira Roca Barea is a Spanish academic and writer. She studied philology, and specialized in the literature of the middle ages and early modern Europe. Her research work has primarily focused on narrative strategies in different literary periods, but she became famous for her late work on the Spanish Black Legend.

Formative years and career

Born in El Borge in 1966, she earned a licentiate degree in Spanish Philology and later obtained a master's degree in Medieval Literature, and a PhD in Classical Philology at the University of Malaga. She has worked for the Spanish National Research Council, and has taught at Harvard University in the United States. She is the author of several scholarly publications regarding, mainly, rhetoric and the construction of images and discourses through theatre and literature.
She works as highschool teacher at the IES Huerta Alta in Alhaurín de la Torre.

''Empire-phobia and Black Legend'' (2016)

Her most recent publication, the peer-reviewed book "Imperiofobia y leyenda negra: Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y el Imperio español".
The book is an essay, with a preface that declares that the author doesn't plan on being exhaustive but on putting forward the lesser known information about various empires and their ideological rivals. Roca Barea coins the term "empire-phobia" to refer to a characteristic, repetitive process of demonization through distortion and magnification that all multi-cultural empires suffer by neighboring nations, given certain circumstances, and that follows a consistent pattern. She argues that the Spanish Black Legend is not a unique phenomenon, but a particularly persistent case of this broader phenomenon, which also affected other empires like ancient Rome and Ottoman Turkey, and is now affecting the modern United States, especially in the Islamic world.
In her book she offers a definition of both "empire" and "black legend". She then shows the common elements and strategies shared by this discourse across nations and times, by deconstructing and exposing the similarities between the anti-American, anti-Russian, anti-Roman and anti-Spanish propaganda produced by their respective contemporaries, as well as the similarities in how the empires responded—or rather, did not respond.
This book has seen 18 editions in Spanish but has still to be translated to English.

Fracasología

Continuing with the Roca Barea's main idea about the French and English hostility towards the Spanish Empire, her second book, Fracasología, is dedicated to the discredit of the Spanish intellectuals since the moment that, according to Roca Barea, the onset of the Bourbon dynasty and the 18th century allegedly "incrustated among the Spaniards the self-contempt and acritical admiration for the modernity". According to José-Carlos Mainer, Barea argues in the work that self-criticism would be something exclusive of Spaniards and that, somewhat, it would be also a bad trait.

Awards

In 2018 she was awarded the Medal of Andalusia and Medal of Honor of San Telmo awarded by the Andalusian government.
In 2019, Roca-Barea's "Imperiophobia and Leyenda Negra" won the Espasa-Calpe Award for works of literature, journalism and thought, awarded annually since 1984. According to the jury her work was "a magnificent essay, a brave revision which changes the traditional image of the history of Spain and the understanding that we Spaniards have of ourselves."

Praise and Criticism

Peruvian Nobel Prize Winner, Mario Vargas Llosa begins his review of the book with the following statement: '
The historian Fernando García de Cortázar, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Deusto and director of the Vocento Foundation and National History Prize 2008, believes that with Elvira Roca's work '
Manuel Lucena Giraldo, historian and PhD in History of America, CSIC researcher specializing in Comparative Studies of the Caribbean and Atlantic World, highlights that the best aspect of the essay is that Elvira Roca provides alternative data and arguments that allow numerous gaps to be opened to the negative story of history from Spain concluding that the black legend grows as a result of the Spanish complexes and the drive of Catholic self-humiliation.
, Chair of Early Modern History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and author of La leyenda negra: historia y opinión, argues that the Western world currently has a much more positive view of Spain and Spanish history than Roca Barea argues. According to him, it is not possible to currently find any European or American historian with scientific credit buying into the extremes of the so-called Leyenda negra i.e. exaggerated numbers of executed during the inquistion or the catastrophism of the demographic collapse of the Americas. He points out that such exaggerations and distortions have already been de-constructed precisely by European and American hispanists such as Elliott, Parker, Benassar or Vincent.
Historian Miguel Martínez, from the University of Chicago, declares discomfort with her presentation of empires as "victims" instead of aggressors. He has criticized Elvira Roca's Imperiofobia arguing that while it is well documented it also contains key historical omissions and presents ideological bias. Martínez objects that Roca systematically omits relevant data contradicting her vision of the Spanish Empire as lenient and without conflict.
José Luis Villacañas authored Imperiofilia y el populismo nacional-católico, with the purpose of being a refutation of Imperiofobia. According to Villacañas, Imperiofobia lacks intellectual rigour and is alien to the parametres of "historical and academic research", featuring a brand of "reactionary intellectual populism". Villacañas considers the underlying interest in the work of Barea to be the underpinning of an ancient metaphysical struggle between Catholicism and protestantism.
Regarding Fracasología, José-Carlos Mainer considers the Roca Barea's work to be blind to the whole renovation of the literary historiography dealing with the century of Enlightenment that has taken place in the last six decades, as Roca Barea would "not be giving a damn about all that historians and philologists have written about the 18th-century in Spain". When it comes to literary style, Mainer describes the prose in Fracasología as "capricious and impulsive", sprinkled with an "abundant" yet "arbitrary" bibliography with quite an amount of mistakes.

Publications