Ausencias y presencias de la nación: Una reconstrucción cultural de las identidades ibéricas

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the defeat of the Second Republic in the Civil War (1939) and the subsequent dictatorship (1939–1975) disrupted a nation-building process in Spain due to the hegemonic power of National Catholicism, but the repressed identities —centralists and peripherals— subsisted politically in the field of cultural production beyond the limits of geography. In Ernest Gellner’s words, “Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such” (6). That perception is what drives the need to compensate for the absence through what I refer to as textual prosthesis, which are cultural products that foster the fantasy of acquiring a national identity that is not sponsored by the state. This project focuses on the reconstruction of those identities through the texts of Manuel Azaña, Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao, and Agustín de Foxá, as well as the films of José Luis Sáenz de Heredia and others.First, I examine President Manuel Azaña’s writings, especially his speeches and diaries, demonstrating how historians, literary critics, and government institutions use the incomplete Republican project to rebuild and redefine their version of the Spanish national identity. Similarly, I analyze Galicia as a national project through the works of Castelao, whose literary writings —particularly those written during exile— present a foundational archive that occupied the place of institutions by legitimizing a political entity. Finally, the last chapters address two conservative political movements, Falangism and Carlism, strategically unified and appropriated by Francoism since the beginning of the Civil War. My interdisciplinary research explores how certain cultural products dealing with national identity are interpreted as authoritative and foundational documents in order to acquire institutional legitimacy, recover historical memory, or perpetuate a political discourse, thereby keeping those identities politically influential.