Identity and Otherness in School Textbooks: A Case Study on the Representation of Al-Andalus

Nationalism, and the social construction of national identity, involves an ideology of the first person plural, where there can be no us without a them. The present paper features a study where we analyze how different forms of otherness —understood as the other side of identity— are articulated through the representation of Al-Andalus in a textbook of Social Sciences used in a secondary school in the Community of Madrid, Spain. Drawing on the concept of schematic narrative templates, we aim to examine the extent to which the teaching of Al-Andalus, in classrooms with students from different national and religious backgrounds, keeps on promoting a narrative deeply rooted in Spain’s collective memory and national identity. The results show that the term “Reconquista” continues to appear, on occasions, as a milestone in the storyline, thus projecting a certain historical continuity between the groups of Christian settlers who fought against the Muslims and the Spaniards today. As for the Muslim past of the Iberian Peninsula, it tends to be framed in terms of alterity, whether in a negative light as the “exotic-threatening-other” or in more positive tone, as the “exotic-admirable-other. The article concludes with some reflections on the teaching of history in increasingly multicultural classrooms.