This special session further develops the topic of a proposed collaborative session between the Catalan Studies Form and the Global Hispanophone Forum. It takes its point of departure from the recognition that Catalonia occupies a paradoxical position in colonial and global history, as both a participant in Spanish imperial projects and a region historically marginalized within the Castilian-centric state. While the wealth of modern Barcelona was deeply entangled with transatlantic slavery and colonial commerce, Catalonia has also been historically framed as peripheral, and Catalan language and culture subjected to political marginalization in Spain. This session will examine these tensions as they play out in Catalonia’s involvement with Spanish colonial projects in the Philippines and Morocco in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Building on recent work on the cultural legacies of slavery in modern Spain (Tsuchiya and Vialette 2025) and Spanish colonialism and its legacies in Morocco and the Philippines (Martin-Márquez 2008, Tsuchiya and Acree 2016, Calderwood 2018, Park 2022), the panel features current research of established and emerging scholars working at the intersection of Catalan Studies, archive studies, and postcolonial studies. Each of the four presenters will be allotted 14 minutes for their presentations, to allow ample time for discussion in a 75-minute session.

In her presentation, Aurélie Vialette will delve into the archives of slave trader Antonio López y López, who founded the Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas and established the headquarters of the company in Barcelona. Her analysis reveals the intricate web of global networks of the slave trade in the nineteenth century and shows how archives can become manipulative tools to conceal and erase the role of the slave trade in sustaining multi-national businesses. Calling attention to the careful curation of data, numbers, and people through what she calls a “cosmetic of the archive,” Vialette will explain why researchers have had trouble finding evidence of the slave trade in the nineteenth-century Philippines in the documents that are available today in archives in the Philippines and Catalonia.

Robert Sanchis-Álvarez will examine Catalan-language periodicals published in the Philippines from the late 19th to early 20th century alongside legal records, photographs, and other textual traces of the Catalan presence in the archipelago to remap our understanding of late Spanish imperialism. Challenging the center-periphery model typical of colonial studies, Sanchis-Álvarez invokes a multipolar framework in which Catalans, though numerically limited and marginal to the colonial administration in the Philippines, made use of their economic influence to structure imperial imaginaries. The Catalan press spoke from the margins of the Spanish state, attempting to assert control over the narrative of colonial modernization. Sanchis-Álvarez argues that the distance this discourse established from the dominant structures of Spanish colonial governance allowed Catalan colonial actors to rhetorically reposition themselves during the transition of the Philippines to U.S. control after 1898.

Carles Ferrando Valero’s presentation will explore the role of Catalan identity within the broader framework of Spanish nationalism during the Hispano-Moroccan War (1859-1860). Examining the work of artists such as Francesc Sans Cabot and poets such as Víctor Balaguer, Antoni Bofarull and Josep Anselm Clavé, Valero will show how they positioned Catalan solidiers as modern-day warriors fulfilling a historic Catalan martial legacy—yet framed their celebration of Catalan identity in accordance with the War’s colonialist and Orientalist rhetoric. The presentation will illuminate the paradoxes of how Catalan intellectuals and artists helped to articulate an alternative Spanish nationalism: one that acknowledged regional diversity and thus countered the Castilianization of Spain but did so within an imperial framework that remained fundamentally exclusionary and hierarchical.

Finally, Sandra Ortiz-València will analyze one of the many literary representations of the Rif War (1921-1926), a military conflict crucial for Spanish colonial pride and geopolitical position after 1898. Josep Maria Prous i Vila’s novel Quatre gotes de sang: Dietari d'un català al Marroc (1936) offers a Catalan perspective on the conflict. Ortiz-València will demonstrate how the novel’s narrative voice displays traits of Said’s Orientalist author in its depiction of Moroccans alongside underlying political motivations that revolve around Catalonia’s situation vis-à-vis the Spanish State. Through his idiosyncratic Orientalism, Prous manages to assert intellectual and material superiority over colonized subjects, yet simultaneously identify with them and their oppression by Spain.

The presenters—two women and two men—bring a range of perspectives as scholars at different points in their careers (one PhD candidate, two assistant professors, and one associate professor) at public and private institutions in the U.S. The panel will be presided by Anna Casas Aguilar, Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada.