Our approach to the problem of institutional exclusion and/or classification in Spain is novel in its comparative framework; our session examines both the historical period in which the modern State first emerges—the Spanish Golden Age—and also its manifestations during the Transition to Democracy and democratic period, in which Spain’s peripheral nations, namely Catalonia, also exert forms of State power. This approach enables us to trace the evolution not only of literary representations of the Spanish State, but also of its subjects and their tactical engagements and disengagements with State narratives and structures. Taken together, our four papers generate a discussion across historical fields about practices of resistance to the Spanish State’s consolidation of an imperial or national identity that is specifically Catholic and Castilian, illuminating the continuity of certain figures of resistance from early modernity through the contemporary period.
Cory A. Reed’s “Empathy, Dissent, and Social Justice in Early Modern Spanish Theatre” proposes that the corral de comedias was an important component of an early modern culture of dissent, appropriating performance space as a venue for consolidating public opinion and addressing matters of social justice outside official hierarchies. Reed draws on current research in cognitive studies on empathy in theatrical audiences and its relationship to altruism and prosocial action to theorize about how early modern performance might have motivated spectators to think about, and even act on, social issues. The paper focuses on the period of political and economic crisis near the end of the sixteenth century and the concurrent rise of public theatres. Using two plays by Cervantes, El trato de Argel and Numancia, as illustrative examples, Reed shows how early modern theatre casts advocacy in ways that are positive and empowering, contextualizing calls for social action as affirmations of patriotism in order to deflect censorship or official criticism.
Molly Borowitz’s “Habitus and dissidence in Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero” examines Lope’s depiction of the martyrdom of Roman actor St. Genesius, who experiences a true conversion while performing the role of a Christian martyr for the emperor Diocletian, and is executed. Written around the time of the expulsion of the moriscos (1609-1614), the comedia addresses contemporary anxieties about secret apostasy and religious dissidence, foregrounding the ease with which an unbeliever can simulate Christian devotion. On the one hand, Genesius’s enactment of habitus, or the emergence of religious belief through the performance of religious ritual, reassures Lope’s Catholic audience that external postures can change internal attitudes. On the other, Genesius’s unhesitating rejection of Diocletian’s authority in favor of God’s suggests that the believer’s obedience to his spiritual sovereign will always precede obedience to his temporal sovereign—and, by extension, that royal decrees of conversion and expulsion are insufficient to protect Catholic Spain from crypto-Muslims, Judaizers, and Protestants.
Carles Ferrando Valero’s “Passing and Passage in Francoist Barcelona” examines Lluïsa Cunillé’s Barcelona, mapa d’ombres (2004), which explores the fraught relationship between present-day Barcelonans and Francoism through the story of a bourgeois family who belonged to the victorious faction of the Spanish Civil War. Customary concealment of (former) Francoist ties starts to break down when the only remaining members of the family, a couple of old landlords, visit their tenants to ask them to leave their apartment, thus having the rare opportunity to speak truthfully. During these visits, the motif of cross-dressing affords an ambiguous figure for (political) identity based on competing notions of authenticity. Cunillé daringly relates cross-dressing to Francoism, thus posing the question of whether the members of the Catalan bourgeoisie who conformed to the normative authority of the Dictatorship were ‘putting on a costume’ in order to pass as Franco supporters or, on the contrary, expressing their true political and cultural identity. In his cinematic adaptation of Cunillé’s work, filmmaker Ventura Pons suggests that numerous Barcelonans adopted a full-fledged Francoist identity in the aftermath of the War through public national-Catholic rites of passage.
Holly Jackson’s “Performative Statelessness in Catalonia” examines transnational practices of passing in Barcelona in Salah Jamal’s 2004 novel Lluny de l’horitzó perfumat. Overshadowed by national questions, the experiences of transmediterranean immigrants in Spain generally do not appear in the historiographical and literary representations of the late Franco period and Transition to Democracy. Jamal satirizes this representational “passing” in his semi-autobiographical story of Palestinian immigrants who perform various acts of passing—including gender, ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, national and political passing. Holly’s analysis explores ethnic, religious, national and linguistic passing as both a tactics for navigating and an intervention in the rising tide of Catalan nationalism, signaling that the identifying traits that made social distinctions readily legible among autochthonous Spaniards in Catalonia may not have applied to certain immigrant groups that were “illegible” within the emerging nationalist systems of Spain and Catalonia. She problematizes forms of sociality that arise in discourses of statelessness, and argues that the novel simultaneously makes an ethical interpellation of Catalan national politics and reconfigures Catalanitat or Catalan identity.
Our session will initiate a dialogue on the role of literature in accessing, articulating, and constituting subjects from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The session raises questions about what is resistance or resistant in the context of Spain’s multiple nationalisms, how advocacy and solidarity manifest during political and economic crises, and the extent to which interior or subtle acts of dissent undermine, inform, or inhere in institutional Spain.