Melancholic Nation: The Affective Culture of Spanish Nationalism.

Abstract

This work analyzes the reproduction and cultural figurations of modern Spanish Nationalism, from a cultural perspective, in order understand the embedded connections between the concept of the nation, politics and culture that still animate contemporary discussions on Spain’s articulation as a nation. I argue that contemporary Spanish culture still thinks of itself in ways that are seized by the cultural affect of nationalism forged in the wake of Empire (1898). To demonstrate this continuity, I focus on narratives and film ranging from 1876 to 1961. I investigate nationalism as the forging of affect to achieve a better understanding of the pervasiveness and reproduction of nationalist ideology, by revealing its often invisible but transformative effects on the subject. Key to this idea is the concept of melancholia, an affective disorder characterized by the impossibility of localization of a lost object– the nation itself. The first chapter proposes a critical reading of Ortega y Gasset’s España invertebrada (1921). The idea of an inner national crisis allows him to establish an essentialist concept of “Spanishness” through a narrative revolving around metaphors of illness and lack, perpetuating the perception of decadence. The second analyzes Galdós’ Doña Perfecta (1876), Sender’s Imán (1930) and Martín-Santos’ Tiempo de silencio (1961), examining their depiction of the vivid presence of an idealized nation and the contradictions that national identity poses for the individual in terms of an exclusion-inclusion duality, displaying the tension of the notion of belonging. The last chapter focuses on Delibes’ La sombra del ciprés es alargada (1947), Cela’s La colmena (1951), and Bardem’s film Muerte de un ciclista, exploring the mechanisms of affect by examining the protagonists’ national affect in terms of melancholy. I contend that culture and sentiment work together to endlessly preserve the nation haunting the national subject. The theoretical approach includes readings of Anderson, Hobsbawm, Bhabha, Billig, Agamben, Foucault, Negri, Rancière, Chakrabarty, Levinas, Balibar and Benjamin. This study reshapes our understanding of Spanish national phenomena by challenging traditional approaches, which have not accounted for the value of fiction and cultural artifacts as legitimate factors in historicizing and analyzing nationalism and its affective components.