Empire, Emotion, and Ethics: Reading the Finde-Siècle Essay on National Identity in Spain

This spring, the students in my graduate seminar and I read Miguel de Unamuno’s En torno al casticismo, and the text elicited a number of emotions in us. At times, that emotion was frustration, caused by the dense language and meandering character of the series of five essays that Unamuno published in 1895. At others, and particularly when attempting to grapple with the baggage of the work’s reception history—that is, appropriations of its central ideas by Fascist and Falangist interpretations of Spanish identity—the emotion was closer to exasperation. Why did this young Basque place Castile at the heart of his analysis, a choice that ultimately (and in some ways paradoxically) reinforced the privileging of this region as incarnating the essence of Spain? As readers, my students and I were forced to contend with a complex mixture of emotions both within the text and in our twenty-first-century response to it.

I cite this anecdote in order to convey the importance of Javier Krauel’s new book, which analyzes key fin-de-siècle essays written during and after the Spanish-Cuban-American war (Unamuno’s En torno…, Angel Ganivet’s Idearium español, Ramiro de Maeztu’s Hacia otra España, and Enric Prat de la Riba’s La nacionalitat catalana) through the lens of emotion. Spanish identity is a topic that excites emotions now, and it bears remembering that emotion also played a key role in how that identity was constructed by writers at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on some of the recent insights provided by affect theory as well as memory studies, Krauel sets out to show how a range of emotional responses to the diminishment of the Spanish empire in the late nineteenth century shapes these texts, and how analysis of those emotions can guide our own ethical relationship to Spain’s imperial past. This is a worthy undertaking, and Krauel is to be praised for venturing to revisit the turn-of-the-century essay on national identity and reveal the great affective diversity that exists within the genre.

In taking up the topic of empire, Krauel duly acknowledges the ways postcolonial studies must frame a contemporary approach to these texts, and also argues that its lessons must distance our world from that of the turn-of-the-century writers he studies. He writes, “I will assume that today we judge [the Eurocentric] presuppositions and prejudices [of the Age of Empire] with a theoretical, political, and emotional distance that precludes any kind of identification whatsoever” (5). Krauel’s point is well taken, though the assumption that contemporary culture finds itself altogether removed from early twentieth-century imperialism, that there are no analogous structures of thought, government, or even feeling in our present society seems optimistic to say the least. Moreover, the suggestion that the emotions felt by the essayists of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain are other than those felt today would seem to undermine the book’s endeavor. Krauel states that one of his goals is “to recover the ambivalent critical force that has been obscured by the subsequent canonization” of these texts (29). Such a recovery requires a delicate balance of critical distance and approximation—one which Krauel, by and large, maintains throughout his study, if perhaps privileging his (our) own historical moment a bit too much.

After explaining his approach and presenting a strong case for the need to revisit these essays in his introduction, Krauel proceeds in the first chapter to study the commemoration of Columbus’ landfall in the Americas in the year of its four-hundredth anniversary, 1892. Though the chapter gets off to a slow start, laying the groundwork for the unsurprising-yet-necessary initial argument that nationalist commemorations largely presented Columbus as a hero and a model of imperial virtues, things pick up when Krauel turns to the alternative views of...