Paper short abstract:

Geographically speaking, the Canary Islands are closer to Africa than any other continent. However, its cultural link with Africa raises much more controversy. Local cultural institutions have vindicated a common identity space with Africa that is substantiated in the concept of Tricontinentality.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of tri-continentality presents a cultural specificity of the Canarian archipelago, which links it with the continents of Europe, America and Africa.

The African cultural nexus has been, however, the worst studied. During the 1960s and the 1980s, an urban intellectual elite, constituted by political actors, cultural workers and artists -mostly engaged against Franco's regime- claimed the contemporary culture of the Canary Islands through the aboriginal's artistic expressions of the Canaries aborigines or Guanches, mostly made to disappear during the Spanish Conquest.

This review and its subsequent projection, which does not lack a good degree of romantic voluntarism, has also been key to understand certain cultural ideologies at the service of some current nationalist policies, widespread and strongly institutionalized.

The Canary Islands' Prehispanic artistic legacy experienced a radical change of significance, redefined and adapted to nationalist political issues with more or less historical rigour. In that sense -and unlike the "discovery" of African art by the European avant-garde- the claim for a certain "African being" in the Canaries is going to constitute, some decades after, one of the key issues of the concept of Tricontinentality, which is nowadays highly present as a cultural dogma in local institutions. Despite understanding this relationship as a falsification of History but following Estévez (2004) -who denies the racial foundation of the connection- we will consider a new prospective analysis of the concept of Tricontinentality.

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