UC Berkeley

Abstract

Writing Spain: Race, Migration, and the Construction of the Pueblo by

Holly Jackson Weiss

Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley

Professor Daylet Domínguez, Co-Chair

Professor Dru Dougherty, Co-Chair

Focusing on literature from the twentieth century, this dissertation analyzes how intellectuals have represented the pueblo of Spain through the lens of personal or intergenerational experiences of migration and diaspora. The dissertation considers work by Southern Spaniards, Catalans, Latin Americans and North Africans on the Peninsula, asserting the centrality of postcolonial and plurinational figures—largely absent from Spanish cultural studies or confined to niche canons—to antifascist critiques of Spain. The dissertation focuses on the junctures that punctuate narratives of twentieth-century Spain: the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, and the Transition to Democracy. Noting the unresolved and discursive quality of these events, the dissertation looks at their representation in the work of Nicolás Guillén, Juan Goytisolo, Najat El Hachmi and others; these writers problematize the imaginaries of race, ethnicity and nation that are latent in official national narratives.

Through analysis of the poetry of Latin American intellectuals, the dissertation shows antifascism in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War to be an anticolonial project, reconceiving the 1930s resurgence of transatlantic solidarity as a decolonial practice of critique. The dissertation then considers the mid-century turn to neoliberalism in Spain through analysis of an exilic memoir, arguing that the economic dispossession of Spain’s southern emigrants and the simultaneous rebranding of the Mediterranean coast as a postcard-ready paradise are the economic and representational legacy of colonial Cuba. From there, the dissertation analyzes two memoirs by Moroccan-born Catalans, arguing that Reconquista-era ethno-racial constructs are central to the discourse of Catalan identity that reemerged in the Transition to Democracy.

Tracing the ways in which the (re)appropriation of the idea of Spain happens in the sign of the pueblo, the dissertation invokes this category as one that is as deconstructive as it is constitutive of Spain, and proposes pueblo as the nation in its erased, unofficial, nonlinear and pluralist histories, on the one hand, and as a hermeneutical category for imagining a community through critique of power relations, on the other. In its reading of transatlantic, transmediterranean and subnational constructions of the pueblo, the dissertation posits an archive that dismantles the homogenizing, centralizing and modernizing discourses of the last century in Spain.