User blog:Amedras/How I Do It: Stereotypes Are Always Wrong

Every week or so, I have a moment of realizing just how enormous my workload is. The most recent one was the (re)discovery of the word Españolada - basically, the assumption that all of Spain is Andalusia - and the realization that this is orders of magnitude more wrong in my ATL.

Not only is all of Spain not Andalusia, none of it is - not even Seville, the revived and united al-Andalus. Some visible features (the white towns) are still there; other, less familiar but much more important parts, are missing. (Without a Reconquista, al-Andalus doesn't get partitioned into latifundia staffed by jornaleros, which changes the class dynamics of things considerably.) And from that realization, of course, it's butterflies all the way down. Stuff like this gives me a headache. It gives me an ice cream headache. That's why I love alternate history.
 * The Black Legend is a specifically Spanish phenomenon - but the Spanish were Catholic by then. Per canon, though, the Moors do the New World discovery, in 1484. What does the Black Legend look like when applied to Seville, which doesn't have an Inquisition? How does the fact that Seville's a majority-Muslim country change it? Is the *Black Legend (because sooner or later somebody is going to talk about what the Muslims are doing building the richest empire in the world across the ocean) subsumed into proto-Islamophobia, or stand apart?
 * For that matter, how does Islamophobia evolve? We can meaningfully juxtapose "Western" Christendom and "Eastern" Islamicate, but in Ixbiliada continental Europe winds up sandwiched between Muslim Andalusia and Muslim Anatolia. How does this envelopment change Europe's fear of the Muslim Other? Andalusi trade was already reorienting itself north, away from the rest of the Muslim world, when it basically ended in the 1240s; does this make the Moors European or not? And how does living in the shadow of a trendsetting Muslim power affect the other little Spains, anyways?