Postcolonial Spain

Coloniality, Violence and Independence

Helena Miguélez-Carballeira

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781837721054
• eBook ISBN: 9781837721078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

At times explosive, at times restrained, the question of independence has been a fundamental force shaping contemporary Spain. However, the discipline of Spanish (Peninsular) studies has been slow to consider the reality of internal anticolonial and self-determination movements in Spain as part of their purview. To redress this, the present study engages postcolonial theory to shed light on the question of Spain's ongoing internal national conflict, arguing that modern manifestations of such conflict are linked to internal demands for national sovereignty, independence and self-determination forged against the backdrop of Spain's post-imperial crisis after 1898.

The collection ranges across topics such as late nineteenth-century penitentiary discourses, the biopolitics of Francoist agrarian reform, dispossession and mass tourism in Mallorca, the judiciary aftermath of the Catalan referendum on independence of 2017, and post-ETA memory politics. Collectively, they illuminate the conflict zones of contemporary Spanish culture, where questions related to (contested) internal colonialities and independence are enmeshed with the processes of political emancipation and state repression.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction The Spanish Postcolonial Continuum: Contested Internal Colonialities in the Long Spanish Twentieth Century
• Chapter 1: Otherness and Corporal Precarity: On the Representation of Torture in Post-Franco Spain
• Chapter 2: The Spanish State of Catalan Exception: Building the Necessity behind Exceptional Rule on Catalan Independence
• Chapter 3: The Persistence of Neocolonial Logic in Fernando León de Aranoa’s Amador
• Chapter 4: Contemporary Majorcan Culture and the Transnational Tourist Gaze: Colonial Dynamics, Cultural Identity and Spatial Dispossession
• Chapter 5: Conflict as a Place of Consensus: The Representation of Political Violence in Harkaitz Cano’s Twist and Ramon Saizarbitoria’s Martutene
• Chapter 6: Pakean Utzi Arte: Art and Resistance in Basque Subaltern Memories
• Chapter 7: Truncated Modernities: Chillida, Tindaya, Fuerteventura
• Chapter 8: The Spanish Rural Subject and the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (1939–71): Coloniality, Biopolitics and Memory
• Chapter 9: Hegemonic Memory Politics and the Basque Nationalist Party: Antifascism and the Question of Violence
• Chapter 10: The Failed Panopticon? Architecture, Social Projects and the Problematic Notion of ‘Model’ in Barcelona’s La Model Prison
• Endnotes