When we look back at Spanish modern literary historiography it soon becomes evident that Spain’s literary corpus as a whole was often and overly conceptualized as “different” in relation to the Western European canon. Inversely, when reviewing Spain’s current literary critique on Spanish post-modern production – that is, from 1975 onwards – it is also strikingly evident that what is usually expressed is its “normalcy.”
Spain’s formerly assigned non-modern literary “difference” as well as its current post-modern “normalcy” cannot be understood as an isolated cultural phenomenon but, rather, as part of a broader constellation. Although profoundly cultural, the process-formation of “Spanish difference” or “Spanish normalcy,” as conceptual designators for the non-modern and the post-modern respectively, widely surpasseses the literary. It ultimately relates to Spain’s intervention vis à vis the history of capital development – Spain’s initial and increasing estrangement from modernity starting with the shift in imperial economic power in the late seventeenth century from the Spanish via the Netherlands to the English and ultimately, to Anglo-America, and its final plunge into the new contemporary post-modern world economy after 1975.
During modernity, Spanish non-modern literary difference should be understood as akin to a political, cultural and economic configuration deeply and unavoidably linked to the realities of Western economic modernization and to its corollary of hegemonic cultural and political dominance. Through the eighteenth century to the 1960s, Spain experienced massive economic stagnation. Isolated from the centers of economic and political power, the period of modernity in Spain is marked by an uneven modernization and industrialization, steaming with social and political turmoil.
Modernity in Spain was a time of distress, a period when the perceived non-modern Spanish difference became the mold in which to shape a set of essentialist virtues symbolically and nostalgically representative of a heroic Spanish national character long gone. Emerging as an almost desperate response to the unfavorable economic and political reality of Spain during the period of Western modernization, heroic national difference was the discourse par excellence of an agonic and obsolete Spanish imperial state. With almost no interruption, and in order to counter the growing relegation of Spain to the margins of modernization, this was the main cultural discourse developed by the ruling aristocratic and military elites during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a claim so pervasive that the literary production of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, mostly featured in the form of essays and novels, could not easily disregard it and to which that production had to respond either in allegiance or in opposition.
Representations of Spanish essentialist and heroic difference took the Imperial Catholic Spain of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as its model. It is of no surprise therefore that the dictatorial military regime of General Francisco Franco (1939–75), a period mistakenly characterized as profoundly non-modern for its imitative simulacrum of Imperial Spanish iconography, enthusiastically embraced the essentialist rhetoric and aesthetics of the national/imperial discourse based on Spanish heroic difference. Yet for all of the attacks on the Spanish differential as the non-Modern or anti-modern expression of an equally non-modern site, difference is in fact a wholly modernist construct. It is true that Spanish difference was harshly uttered during modernity as, precisely, its counter-expression; however, even though difference was mostly referred to as a collective heroic self, it was intended as a surrogate representation for each national individual self.
The much-mocked anti-modern Spanish difference in fact falls within the logic of modernity. Fredric Jameson has stressed that it is “a particular experience and ideology of the unique self what would be informing the stylistic practices of classical modernism.”1 That “unique self,” in as much as it refers to an ideology or a set of ideologies, is tied to the constellation of singular experiences and practices reflecting a collective hegemonic abstraction termed “the modern Subject.” Spanish difference, therefore, as a cultural construct acting as a surrogate for each individual self, is “organically linked to a unique self and private identity” (The Cultural Turn, p. 6), a structure described by Jameson as intrinsic to modernist aesthetics.
After the hiatus of the Second Republic (1931–6), which was a brief period in contemporary Spanish history indisputably accepted as modern, and following the economic and cultural backlash at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s regime returned to former discourses on “Spanish heroic difference.” However, once again Francoist reappropriation of former representations of a heroic collective subject was, no matter how anti-modern or non-modern it seemed to be, very much a modern geopolitical and cultural process. Although it apparently pushed forward a paradoxical “non-Modern” heroic collective subject, Franco’s populist cultural politics was investing de facto in grand meta-narratives of historical restoration.
The apparent Spanish “non-modern” heroic collective subject was a spectral, but ultimately very modern, grand narrative, a fact that allowed the Spanish social imaginary of the transitional period effectively and expeditiously to move away from its recent past. In consonance with the emerging global post-modern arena, the Spanish social and symbolic imaginary responded to the new economic geopolitical paradigm with the giving away of the meta-narratives of modernity.
Beyond modernity, local narratives of difference needed to be processed anew and the renarrativization of Spain as a decentralized nation began to take flight in a spectacular way. Historians, writers of fiction, and literary critics quickly moved away from the old discourses on Spanish non-modern differences,2 embracing a global process described by Arif Dirlik as a “repudiation of the metanarratives of modernization.”3 After 1975, Spain became part of a new post-modern arena that renounced the old differentiation between the cultural, the economic, and the political. The novel offered itself as a smooth cultural artifact of mediation: one that could work as an interface between the symbolic and the economic, between the local and the global, between past and present; and, at the end, between the modern and the post-modern.
The new democratic state strove to relocate a significant measure of political power from the center to the periphery.4 In tune with this, writers wanted to break loose from the historical entanglement created by the conflict between an emerging, new construct of Spanish difference and the spectral politics of the imperial state that had been maintained for so long by the Francoist regime. In a present now located beyond modernity Spain’s past had to be re-imagined not as a non-modern burden, but as one of normalcy, beaming with a plethora of potentials that would ultimately lead to its accomplished post-modern reality. It is in that sense that a reconceptualization of nineteenth and twentieth-century Spain as a site of alternate modernity took place. A most important strategy, since, as Jo Labanyi and Helen Graham have noted, it allowed for the uncovering of “the complex interaction of cultural, social, and political alternatives which competed in the past,” revealing “not a ‘single,’ homogeneous ‘modernity’ but many potentials.”5
The conceptualization of Spain as a historical site of uneven, intermittent, or alternate modernities proved to be the epistemological vehicle in which to navigate the rough waters of the modern Spanish experience of isolation and uniqueness. It enabled writers to deal with those historical tensions stemming, on the one hand, from isolation and, on the other, from counteracting peripheral narratives. At the symbolic level the conceptualization of Spain as a former site of uneven modernity reaffirmed a political, cultural, and economic relocation of Spain within an increasingly unionist Europe. Feeding on what could be called neo-memory, it stimulated and nourished a multiplicity of Spanish companion narratives, to be added without conflict to the Western, European literary and historical canon.
Following the general repudiation of the grand meta-narratives of the past that, according to Dirlik, at the global level “allowed greater visibility to local narratives” (“The Global in the Local,” p. 25), in the new Spanish political democratic paradigm novels provided voices that spoke in new ways to the various emergent communities in the Spanish state. As part of the new geocultural and geopolitical system that produced them, novels became active participants in the building of local neohistorical narratives. Novels of the period were cultural artifacts that, functioning in an adaptive mode, were able to negotiate the drastic economic and political changes undergone by Spain at the end of the Francoist regime.
Novels of the democratic state negotiated the rift between the two former, antagonistic constructs of Spanish difference by wiping them out. Emerging as wholly post-modern cultural constructs, they are part and fabric of our present moment, defined by Rob Wilson and Wismal Dissanayake as the period that produces “the dissoluting global and the resisting local.”6 They engaged in the production of neo-historical narratives valid to explain a former “Spanish” history as well as its peripheral counterparts.
As Wilson and Dissanayake observe, within the new world order discourses no longer revolve around “an ‘imagined community’ of coherent modern identity [shaped] through warfare, religion, blood, patriotic symbology, and language” (Global / Local, p. 3). Founded upon this post-modern contract, the new novel turns the formerly confined, local-national binary into local-supranational sites. Accordingly, the novel began to function as a kind of mediating interface between history and memory. Occupied with the revision of the nation’s past, novels and narratives often argue for “the dissolution and disinvention of ‘e pluribus unum narratives’ [‘one from many narratives’] of modernity” (p. 3). Against the former modern, totalizing push that sought to convert the plural into one, they now allow us to witness “the rehabilitation, affirmation and renewal” of “local cultural originality” (ibid.) by offering themselves as the post-national – or supranational – sites of the new world order. It is in that sense that these texts become major producers of neo-memory discourses. Neatly following these symbolic processes, and entangled within the new global market economy, the novel of democratic Spain would soon participate in the boom of the neo-historical novel, with works like Miguel Delibes’s El hereje (‘The Heretic’, 2000) or Carme Riera’s Dins el darer blau (‘Beyond the Last Blue’, 1996) as two among many examples.
Interpreting the cultural logic of post-modernism that emerged during the mid-1970s and early 1980s, according to Jameson, “the end of individualism as such” (The Cultural Turn, p. 6) becomes a new factor. In the post-modern period, then, literature, like other cultural products, became involved in processes of de-subjectivization and de-historicization, processes that would ultimately make possible the abandonment of the “Spanish differential” construct. After the death of General Francisco Franco, Spain moved beyond its own particular ideology of difference and national uniqueness. Thus after 1975, especially during the transitional period (1975–82), the processes of de-historicization and de-subjectivization dominated literary and cultural discourses. What writers and artists enacted and celebrated was not only the reality of the dictator’s death, signaling the end of his regime, but also, in symbolic ways, the death of an iconic representation of the Spanish people as a distinctive subject, one linked to the military dictatorship. As resurgent capitalism accelerated the tendency toward de-subjectivization on the global stage, in Spain the dynamic interplay between de-historization and de-subjectivization may be interpreted as the local performance of a world-wide phenomenon.
Today however, even though the death of individualism – the modern subject, so defined – continues to permeate cultural and literary spheres, the former concept of Spanish difference pervasively and stubbornly bespeaks still an essentialist construct of identity. As Elena Delgado observes in “Prozaic Fissures,” a random compilation of recent writing on contemporary Spain by Spanish intellectuals and scholars from Juan Pablo Fusi to Javier Tusell, from Xavier Rubert de Ventós to Mikel Arzumendi, from Jon Juaristi to Javier Varela, articulates a peculiar dialectic embedded in denial: “[N]ational difference is not invoked [ . . .] except to negate it [ . . .]. [T]he rhetoric used in the titles [ . . .] to describe the ‘Spanish non-problem’ is that same [rhetoric] which, according to [Eduardo] Subirats, has been displaced: labyrinths, tragedies, anguish, struggle.” Further, “it is somewhat incongruent to devote the majority of their pages to analyzing a problem, which has supposedly been resolved, while relegating the discussion of the Europeanized and normalized status of Spain to the last few pages, in the manner of an epilogue.”7
The post-modern novel, like the post-modern essay, is also haunted by what could be termed as a writing-in-denial. At the beginning of the political transition from 1975 to 1982, such denial, however, is not immediately present. Many novels appeared in the mode of ‘lite’ or sub-genre writing, including the enormously successful products delivered by the neo-thriller (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Lourdes Ortiz) and the neo-erotica (María Jaén and, later, Almudena Grandes). Romance, detective fiction, adventure, and erotica all seem to put their emphasis on “normalcy.” Often offering a vast, de-subjectivized, de-nationalized landscape, they apparently aim at erasing any residue of the old “Spanish difference.” The same may be said of many novels published after 1982. Departing from the ‘lite’ sub-genre novels, they could perhaps still be strategically and safely positioned as late “modernist” fiction: especially Miguel Espinosa’s Tribada. Theologiae Tractatus (1982), but also Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Beatus Ille (1986), Soledad Puértolas’s Burdeos (Bordeaux, 1986), Jesús Ferrero’s Belver-Yin (1981), and even Rosa Montero’s Amado amo (‘My Dear Boss’, 1988). Nevertheless, they, too, reflect the new processes of de-historicization, de-nationalization, and de-subjectivization at work at the global level. They are truly post-modern texts, part and parcel of a process of symbolic and economic de-territorialization.
It is not until the Spanish democratic state is consolidated and the political sites of the peripheral nationalities are negotiated in the mid-1980s that we find a new textual tension in the novel that also refers to this writing-in-denial. The peripheral novel will depict “the convergence of predicament and promise introduced by all things local in the postmodern, globalized age.”8 However, the novels of the new post-nationalist sites also voice awareness of a precarious equilibrium vis à vis the global capitalist map. They show both renewed local strength and vulnerability, being very much aware that, as Dirlik says, “from the perspective of global capitalism” the local can become “a site not of liberation but of manipulation” (“The Global in the Local,” p. 10). In this sense, many of the peripheral novels can be thought of as textos de la raya (“borderline texts”), as Cristina Moreiras-Menor suggests in her reading of “Arraianos,” a short story by Xosé Lluis Méndez-Ferrín.9 Bernardo Atxaga’s seminal novel Obabakoak (1988) as well as Manuel Rivas’s short stories, Souso de Toro’s Tic Tac (1993) and Calzados Lola (‘Lola’s Shoe Store’, 1998), Luisa Castro’s El somier (‘Bedsprings’, 1990) or Quim Monzó’s Vuitante-sis contes (‘Twenty-Six or So Stories’, 1999), among many others, are also examples of textos rayados – scarred texts that show how their locality has been, in Dirlik’s words, “worked over by modernity” (p. 35).
Not only the peripheral novel of the period can be conceptualized as textos rayados. Many novels kept arising in the mid-1980s in a “spectacular” mode. Entangled in the post-modern logic that does not differentiate between market and culture, they can also, however, be conceptualized as a marked, scarred corpus. They were the spectacular ‘lites’, massively successful in the new market of mass consumption. Yet an encrypted discourse comes into play in them. Emerging as new post-modern urban narratives, they offer themselves as a tensed, and often violent, spectacle implicated in the negation of difference. In most of the new urban (or, better, post-urban) spectacular “lite” novels of the period, an unexpected spectral negativity is often at stake. In many of the novels published between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s (by Lucía Extebarria, Ray Loriga, and Juan Manuel Mañas, among others), a shadowy struggle violently disrupts the newly constructed post-modern narrative of “normalcy.” Performing in the negative, these novels point to the fissures and ripples appearing in the seemingly harmonious relation between Spain’s new collective image of itself as a cosmopolitan nation, and an image of Europe as a whole, coherent community.10 On the one hand, the strong negation of difference detected in the post-modern Spanish novel signals a developing awareness that Spain, as a nation, is not geopolitically located on the margin; on the contrary, it stands integrated within the European Union, a hegemonic site of the world system. On the other, however, a special tension arises: ‘Lite’ fiction persists in negating the experience of isolation and difference that had marked Spanish culture for centuries; and yet, in so doing, this negation has somehow kept difference alive, albeit in an encrypted form, while at the same time such fiction detaches itself from negativity by embracing the concept of the spectacular. Writing that goes “beyond modernity” – that is, fiction published in the 1970s and 1980s – participates in what the French theorist Guy Débord defines as “the society of the spectacle.”11 Cristina Moreiras-Menor explains how, after 1975, “Spain unreservedly embraces the culture of spectacle, while focusing on a de-historicized present. In an ideological move to eliminate a past that situated Spain in a position of inferiority with respect to the rest of the world, new models of identification – signs of identity – are adopted for the newly established democracy.”12
At the same time, however, in post-modern Spanish fiction significant qualitative differences arise in the various modes of denial that materialize through the development of the spectacular. As we have seen, since 1975 the Spanish essay has continued to struggle – in a still-in-mourning mode – with the experience of “difference.” Although spectacle informs its melancholy, the essay wavers between an empty site or a sense of emptiness of place, bound up with an invocation of normalcy and a recurrent negation of difference. Conversely, we find no mourning, no melancholia in novels of the mid-1980s and 1990s, which engage in the spectacular in an entirely different way.
In a dazzlingly ‘lite’ mode, the novel showers the reader with a kaleidoscopic spectrum of de-subjectivization, recording what was lived intensely during and after the years of the transitional period. As narrated, this experience evolves within the mechanism of the “double-take” common to cinema: while texts remain partly haunted by the Francoist ideology of Spanish difference, they also express the current global ideology of de-subjectivization more appropriate to a post-modern, corporate state than to a modern nation-state.13
In retrospect, we see that after Franco’s death the post-modern novel intuitively grasped the spectacle produced by new global powers. In various ways, texts registered the paradigmatic cultural/political/economic de-differentiation that was already taking place in Spanish culture as one of the new sites of the post-modern paradigm. That mode contrasts with the social realist novel of the pre-democratic era (1939–75), texts structured and sustained by a social imaginary based on subject-difference.14 Once this collective perception of difference had been erased, traces of “Spanish national difference” dissolved into the concept of European/global “de-differentiation.” The heavy burden of “national” difference, emblematic of highly politicized social realist novels and lowbrow literature, suddenly mutated into a spectacular mode of writing set in local venues.
After the demise of the social realist novel, the spectacular boom of “lite” fiction during the late 1980s and 1990s came quite unexpectedly, especially as it occurred after the cultural cacophony now widely known as La Movida, a moment when, ironically enough, the novel itself was being mourned as a dead form. Indeed, the novel of democratic Spain experienced a market expansion of tremendous proportions that today continues to generate huge sales. This boom corresponds to the process of de-differentiation that reflected the political, cultural, and economic developments of the new global paradigm, and writers like Almudena Grandes, Lucía Extebarria, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán found an avid national, as well as international, readership.
However, not all novels, not even all novels authored by a particular writer, work in the same way. Caught between the spectral politics of social realist novels and the erasure of politics initiated by the new paradigm, in post-modern fiction certain novels may be seen as trying to fill empty spaces. These are texts that, like Vázquez Montalbán’s early Carvalho series, mask ghostly traces of prior preoccupations still discernible in the wake of the erasure of the historical/political subject. Filling and masking are accomplished through a detached and politically disenchanted point of view. For example, responding to the post-modern paradigm, in Vázquez Montalbán’s Tatuaje (‘Tattoo’, 1974), La soledad del manager (The Angst-ridden Executive, 1977), and Los mares del sur (Southern Seas, 1979), a triad of novels of the early transitional years, the protagonist Carvalho, acting as a private investigator, explores a cold, non-melancholic contemporary scene. Vázquez Montalbán, with his successful adaptation of the thriller genre to the new Spanish concept of the local, communicates what María Paz Balibrea terms “a critical chronicle of the transition” or, more specifically, “what Vázquez Montalbán reconstructs in his early novels is the transformation-capitulation of the left-wing Spanish parliament.”15
The vanishing of the political and its disenchanted aftermath comes up also in other novels as a nihilist, violent “lite” mode, popular in the 1990s and represented by Ray Loriga’s Días extraños (‘Strange Days’, 1994) or by Juan Antonio Mañas’s Historias del Kronen (‘Kronen Stories’, 1971). As Cristina Moreiras points out, such novels confirm “the absence of an explicit motivating desire or object” in our times, an absence that prevents “the subject from ‘speaking,’ or from even producing meaning” (“Spectacle, Trauma and Violence,” p. 140). After 1975 the Spanish novel, whether nostalgic for the lost voice or the lost subject, whether coldly detached or even muted, finds itself at the heart of the social structure of a self-reflexive spectacle. In Débord’s view, always mediated by the virtual eye, it is a virtual eye itself (Society of the Spectacle, p. 10).
The need for re-telling finds, in the post-modern novel, a most appropriate vehicle through which to reimagine and reprocess recent history. The boom of the historical novel exemplifies this trend. Aware of the uncanniness of the Spanish past, novelists of the neohistorical often elect to bypass the gaps and silences caused by Francoist repression, invoking instead a pre-Columbian, pre-national, pre-imperial epoch. From documentary novels to the fiction of pure entertainment, the neohistorical novel aims to establish a historical narrative that would allow for an uninterrupted – invented – positive reading of the Spanish past. This does not mean, as Dirlik has said in another context, that the present “is immune to the burden of the past; only that the burden itself is restructured in the course of the present activity” (“The Global in the Local,” p. 39).
This development is not unique to the Spanish novel, nor to a particular field or genre or even to a particular national history. Its claim for re-narrativization is part and parcel of the global post-modern repositioning. As Immanuel Wallerstein has observed, “a civilization refers to a contemporary claim about the past in terms of its use in the present to justify heritage, separateness, rights [and therefore such] claims cannot be located in what happened in the past but in what is happening in the present.”16 Novelists seized upon this proposition, construing it as a tool with which to construct a new social imagination. The notion of a past at further removes, which can be reconfigured to mirror obliquely the present, becomes a field in which the enterprise of rewriting history, as one would desire it to have been, is projected, commodified, and disseminated. Impelled by formidable corporate mergers, in which transnational giants took over national publishing houses, the market could now deliver to a voracious reading public the product most desired: the telling anew of past history, stripped of inconvenient historically accurate data. Hence an impressive corpus of ‘lite’ historical, pseudo-historical, and fictional-historical novels occupied the literary scene. In a work-frenzied melee, the post-modern historical novel now forms a tapestry of texts that aims to placate Spain’s desire for hegemony.
It is no coincidence that the boom of the post-modern historical novel began not in the transitional period but after the 1982 elections that ushered in the socialist government of Felipe González. The move toward implementing a solid Spanish European political agenda, accomplished during this regime, incited the development of a pastiche narrative that led to a reformulation of Spanish difference while constructing a new set of de-nationalized virtues. It was then, in politics as well as in the cultural arena at large, that old experiences of difference were recycled and retold in order to create a new (post)national identity, one that could easily become commodified through the existing ideologies of a post-modern global market.
In 1985 Wallerstein pointed to the relations that obtain between national and world identities: “[P]eoples of the modern world have not always been there” and “even less have states always been there” (Geopolitics, p. 141). Thus we may understand how, after the death of the dictator, Spain’s wish to be European represented a kind of “coming out,” articulating a (post) national desire engendered, on the one hand, by Spanish history, and on the other by an exuberance, a kind of desire unlimited, to become a player in global economics and politics. In response to the isolation imposed by the Francoist regime, the transitional period was a time of immense supra-national desire, a tsunami that swept away any obstacles standing between desire and its object.17
While particular in expression, the Spanish transitional period was one among many geopolitical and geocultural reconfigurations in Europe. From the May 1968 student uprising in Paris to the September 1974 Portuguese Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Europe experienced liberation and economic unification. The phenomena of local re-positioning during the 1970s and 80s, either peaceful as in Spain or traumatic as in the Balkans, were responses to a new global paradigm. This period is characterized by changes so broad that Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly J. Silver, and Iftikhar Ahmad refer to “a sea change of major proportions” (Chaos and Governance, p. 1). Eric Hobsbawm designates these years as “decades of universal or global crisis;”18 and a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Immanuel Wallerstein writes: “The 1970s and the 1980s mark the period in which considerable reshuffling – of location of economic activity, of sectoral profitability, of world economic structures – is occurring. The real question, however, is where this reshuffling is going to come out in the 1990’s and beyond” (Geopolitics, p. 55).
The post-modern Spanish novel is a product of such reshuffling, which opened up new correlations between the symbolic and the real, the cultural and the political. Spectacle informs the correlations – of excess or celebration – that characterize La Movida, a youthful phenomenon depicted variously as “lite,” “excessive,” “unaccountable,” and which – precisely in such unaccountability – manifested the destabilizing power of an economic system producing the unexpected surplus that allowed it to flourish in the 1980s. La Movida – that effervescent, engorged, popular youth movement generated by spectacle, surplus, and the idiosyncratic moves of a mixed cultural and political upheaval – also signaled major realignments taking place in Europe at the time. “La Movida de la transición” gestures toward the untranslatable underside of the political and economic reshuffling – movida – of Spain’s transition into the global arena.
If Spain at the end of the Francoist regime engaged in a spectacular reshuffling and re-sifting at all levels, so did literature – and within it, the novel. As a cultural artifact deeply entangled in a global economic, political and cultural web, during the last quarter of the twentieth century Spanish writing reached back and imagined a new cultural lineage. Effectively erasing the former dichotomy established between the modern and the non-modern, it disposed of its national history as a form of repudiation of grand meta-narratives. At the end of history, whether a pastiche or a tale of violence, haunted or neo-utopian, global or local, wounded or in a ‘lite’ mode, the Spanish novel beyond modernity performed as a spectacular site for such re-imagining. A spectacle itself, the novel cleared the way for the new virtual beginning to follow.
1 F. Jameson, The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 6.
2 In the Spanish literary tradition, the term “modern” or “modernist” applied only to the arts, avoiding broader cultural, economic, and political connotations. For example, critics and scholars endowed the term “modernist” with specifically Spanish and Hispanic attributes.
3 A. Dirlik, “The Global in the Local,” in Global / Local. Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wismal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 25.
4 See Michael Keating’s article “Minority Nations of Spain and European Integration: A New Framework for Autonomy?” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 1.1 (2000), pp. 29–42.
5 Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, Spanish Cultural Studies. An Introduction: The Struggle for Modernity (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 18.
6 Wilson and Dissanayake, Global / Local, pp. 2–3.
7 E. Delgado, “Prozaic Fissures,” paper read at the conference “Brokering Spanish Postnational Culture: Globalization, Critical Regionalism, and the Role of the Intellectual,” Duke University, November 1999. Forthcoming in the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2003.3.
8 G. Arrighi, B. J. Silver, and Iftikhar Ahmad, Chaos and Governance in the Modern Worker System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 1.
9 X. L. Méndez-Ferrín, “Medias azules” (‘Blue Stockings’), in Arraianos, tr. Luisa Castro (Barcelona: Ronsel, 1991); Cristina Moreiras-Menor, “Arraianos: Notas para una arqueología posnacional,” paper read at the conference “Brokering Spanish Postnational Culture.” Forthcoming in the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2003.3.
10 The majority of post-national narratives followed the non-revolutionary, emancipatory mode articulated by Gianni Vattimo a decade later in his introduction to the Spanish edition of his seminal book La sociedad transparente (Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós. ICE de la Universidad de Barcelona, 1990). We have to note, however, after 1978 the unresolved articulation of the Basque Country within the new democratic state. See, for example, Begoña Aretxagas’s article “Playing Terrorist: Ghastly Plots and Ghostly States,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 1.1 (2000), pp. 43–58.
11 G. Débord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995).
12 C. Moreiras-Menor, “Spectacle, Trauma and Violence in Contemporary Spain,” in Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (London: Arnold Publishers, 2000), p. 135.
13 Michael Hardt and Toni Negri have recently defined the sovereignty of a new globalized corporate state as a new Empire, “composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule”: Empire (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xii.
14 From Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte, 1942) to Juan Goytisolo’s Señas de identidad (Marks of Identity, 1966), most novels published during the Franco years belong to social realism. Notable exceptions are the work of the Galician authors Álvaro Cunqueiro and Gonzalo Torrente Ballester.
15 M. P. Balibrea Enríquez, En la tierra baldía: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán y la izquierda española en la postmodernidad (Barcelona: El viejo topo, 1999), pp. 68–9.
16 I. Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World System (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 236.
17 The wave almost crashed on 21 February 1981 in an unsuccessful military coup that sought the restoration of the military dictatorship. Eduardo Mendicutti’s Una mala noche la tiene cualquiera (‘One Hell of a Night’, Barbastro: Unali, 1982) offers a hilarious and acid account of that infamous night.
18 E. Hobsbawm, The Ages of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1 99 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), p. 9.