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Águila Roja: The Demythification of Black Legend and the Will to Overcome

  • Cross-Cultural Studies
  • 2019, 54(), pp.333-370
  • DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2019.54..333
  • Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Literature
  • Received : February 10, 2019
  • Accepted : March 11, 2019
  • Published : March 30, 2019

Juin Lim 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Águila Roja concentrates on Spain’s dark history and societal influences and through this, it reinterprets the reality of Black Legend which were instances and events in their history that they had wanted to hide. In this process, this drama features many incidents: such as the Inquisition and the judge’s injustice, persecution and massacre of Native Americans in Central and South America, conflicts with English pirates, persecution and the deportation of Morisco. Through the main character Gonzalo’s perspective, this drama tries to reinterpret history not in an Ethnocentrism view, but in a relativism view that reviews and interprets the dimension of humanism. The leading characters in this drama are the common people of the time. In a society where the nobility was known as being notably corrupt, the commoners sought to preserve their honor despite their poverty, and formed a stance that was opposed to the nobility. Even though they weren’t of fancy dress or of means and suffered from poverty, their pure love and passion was embodied as Águila Roja. As the drama drew active participation from the public through Twitter, Facebook, and a computer game of Águila Roja, the history was reinterpreted in a broad and modern perspective. The drama, which was broadcast not only in Spain, but also in the Arab world, has a flexible approach to the expulsion of Morisco due to its prominent religious conflicts. Torture because of the Inquisition and the Native South American massacre, which was the main point of Black Legend, was accepted in society, and European’s critical view found that it stood to change and denounced the Catholic’s rigidity and inhumanity. But at the same time, the tolerance of the commoners and the image of humanitarian experiencing a reconciliation at the pagan and the natives review of the theories, establishes a new benchmark for correcting the history which was fabricated by politicians at that time.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.