The first paper in the session explores Pardo Bazán’s portrayal of Galician culture in relation to gender and class. In “The Work of the Sea is Hers: Materiality in the Negotiation of Regional Identity,” Rhi Johnson investigates the construction of regional, gendered identities via female piscatory labor in the Pardo Bazán stories “La Camarona” (1896) and “La Guija” (1922). These two stories share a protagonist, a young woman known as Camarona, and detail her assertion of social and economic agency through her relationship with the materiality of the sea. Her establishment of labor practices as definitional to her identity and her refusal of the potential for upward social mobility is justified in the narrative as it is a generationally successful rejection of cosmopolitanism and assertion of autonomy. This talk also brings these stories into dialogue with Pardo Bazán’s fiction more broadly, where female labor can be an emancipatory cultural practice that creates a positive experience of anti-cosmopolitanism within the Galician working class.
The second paper ties Pardo Bazán’s portrayal of Jewish characters to cultural debates about the regeneration of Spain. In “La cuestión judía in Emilia Pardo Bazán,” Jennifer Smith analyzes the short story “El buen judío,” (1910) in relation to both the pro-Sephardic movement in Spain, and the rise of racial antisemitism throughout Europe. The story metaphorically resituates the execution of Jesus (Yesúa) in a judería during the time of the Catholic Kings, and shortly prior to the Jews expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. In doing so the story conflates two prominent narratives (religious and historical) as a symbolic and oblique argument against Ángel Pulido Fernández’s Sephardic repatriation project. Engaging previous studies that have examined the Galician author’s ideas and representations of Jews in other works (Charnon-Deutsch, Dendle, Weitelmann Bauer, Bieder, Versteeg), Smith seeks to interrogate the way the racial stereotype is employed in a story where the absence of female characters obviates a mitigating feminist reading.
In “No Longer Welcome: The Indiano as Problematic (Racial) Figure in the Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazán,” the third paper in this panel, Stacy Davis argues that the slave trade and slavery are alluded to by the frequent appearance of the indiano in her short stories. Four tales in particular – “Barbastro” (1898), “Vampiro” (1901), “El brasileño” (1911), and “Antiguamente” (1913) – stand out for their oblique references to race and slavery in conjunction with the indiano. Operating within discourses of racial Otherness at the intersection of gender, race, and colonialism, the indiano occupies a problematic and, oftentimes, paradoxical position within race, masculinity, and national identity. These stories illustrate how Pardo Bazán ultimately bypasses race to focus on the toxicity of emigration as a parasitic phenomenon on Galicia (region) and Spain (nation). Eliding issues of race and slavery, the author comments on the violence perpetuated upon women as her indianos portray a degenerate form of Peninsular masculinity exacerbated by transatlantic immigration.
In the final paper “Cursed to Extinction: Imperialist Cultural Encounters in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s ‘El brasileño’ (1911),” Wan Tang continues explorations by scholars such as Joyce Tolliver into Pardo Bazán’s ambivalent treatment of Spanish imperialism. Tang focuses in particular on the use of non-realist aesthetics to examine the complex dynamics between Spanish imperialists and exploited populations abroad. Firstly, the open-ended nature of fantastic storytelling—in which supernatural intervention is suggested without confirmation—lends itself to expressions of conflicting sentiments. Additionally, the gothic trope of damnation in the text condemns not only the indigenous peoples deemed expendable by the logic of colonialism, but also the indiano who profits from their exploitation. Ultimately, Tang argues that the story’s central symbol—a diamond that both represents an imperial extractive economy and is the fetishistic cause for the protagonist’s suffering—reflects contradictory and disquieting attitudes surrounding Spain’s imperial past.