ilm provided a space where colonial nostalgia, anxieties about modernity, and new prospects for empire could be rehearsed. 2 The colonial failure in both the Americas and in North Africa played itself out through popular nostalgia in the mass media of the twenties and thirties, where manufactured notions of biological destiny justified Spain's need to conquer, and black Africa's need to be conquered. Viewed from this framework, the protagonist of Benito Perojo's El negro que tenía el alma blanca [The Black Man With the White Soul], Peter Wald, undoubtedly threatened a Spanish mentality still reeling from the "1898 disaster," and in particular, the Spanish laborer forced to fight against the North African rebels. More importantly, El negro's politics of racial representation, which appeared in its references to skin color and colonial scenarios, and its simultaneous preoccupation with modernity and stardom discourse, created an intercultural arena for contemporary discussions on race and modernity in Spain. The films cultural context is framed by the triangular relationship that developed between Spain, Africa and Cuba. Within this framework the racially saturated text of El negro and its representation of stardom constitutes a foundational fiction of "becoming," embedded as it is within a turbulent Eva Woods Peiró is an Assistant Professor at Vassar College in Hispanic Studies and Media Studies. Currently, she is finishing the book White "Gypsies": Racing for Modernity in Spanish Folkloric Musical Films, 1923-1954. Along with Susan Larson (University of Kentucky) she edited a collection of essays entitled, Visualizing Spanish Modernity. She is also involved in the collaborative book project, Cinema and the Mediation of Everyday Life: An Oral History of Cinema-Going in 1940s and 1950s Spain led by Jo Labanyi (New York University). Her published articles study Spanish cinema before the 1960s. In America, when a Negro is accepted, one often says, in order to separate him from the rest of his race, 'He is a Negro, of course, but his soul is white.' (Bastide 315) 1