Reading Culture at the Threshold: Time and Transition in Modern Spain (1800 -1990)

Abstract

This work analyzes historical transitions by reading culture produced at three key moments in Spanish modernity. The first time period addresses the end of the Enlightenment, during Spain’s failure to establish democratic sovereignty after a violent national-popular movement against the Napoleonic invasion. In Francisco de Goya’s etchings (1799-1812), I read the artist’s critique of traditionalism, the Catholic Church, and Spanish crown and furthermore trace, in opposition, the Antiguo Régimen’s turn against French philosophies and the “foreignness” of enlightened thought. Then I explore the time of volatile multitudes in early twentieth-century Spain, concomitant to technological, economic, and sociopolitical transformations that rapidly introduced forms of mass culture into daily life. Reading Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s esperpento plays Luces de bohemia and Martes de carnaval (1920-1930), I analyze the monumental nationalizing rituals endorsed by Primo de Rivera’s authoritarian regime and the role these masses would play in the dictatorial State’s proto-fascist ideology. I turn to the democratic transition in the late twentieth century, which consolidated the existent constitutional monarchy after Franco’s dictatorship and rapidly integrated Spain into a neo-liberal, global economy. Questioning photographic works by Cristina García Rodero, Ferran Freixa, and contemporary photographers from the so-called movida (1975-1980s), as well as Carmen Martín Gaite’s novel El cuarto de atrás, I explore visual and narrative representations of subjectivities that became witness to and ungrounded by sociopolitical change. This project positions a theoretical approach to analyzing historical transitions through the study of culture—by interrogating visual and narrative texts—whereby the traces of these sociopolitical transformations, in practice, may be found marked within cultural production corresponding to each era in question. This work identifies several methodological difficulties within its proposed lines of investigation: what is a historical transition? What criteria of analysis might constitute a threshold from which to question sociopolitical change? Are these “events” defined by epistemic transformations, breaks or continuities with certain practices of knowledge, or by other criteria? The theoretical framework that informs this line of investigation includes works by Benjamin, Foucault, Gramsci, Freud, Lyotard, and Derrida, as well as current debates in cultural studies, among them historiography, literature, and Hispanism.