The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, and: Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-1939 (review)

These two books explore new directions in the study of modern Spanish culture and can be broadly placed within the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, as both of them are marked by the "culturalist turn" in disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The authors and contributors of these two volumes come from two disciplines—history and art history—which, within the field of Spanish studies, have been slow in the incorporation of such "culturalist" trends. The Splintering of Spain stems from the field of history and, as the editors specify in their introductory article, the volume focuses on a "culturalist" approach to the study of the Spanish civil war: "The aim of this book is to depart from these various dual frameworks by directing attention towards the cultural sphere" (2). By "dual frameworks" the editors refer to those well-known and often Manichean definitions of the Spanish war as confrontations between democracy (or communism according to other versions) versus fascism, modernity versus tradition, good versus evil, and/or Spain versus anti-Spain. The relevance of the book is argued precisely in aiming to provide new readings that add layers of complexity to that most traumatic period in twentieth-century Spanish history whose revisitations have been as constant as they have been polemical. By doing so, the book becomes a valuable addition to recent and influential bibliography produced by historians dismantling the idea of Spain as different from the rest of Europe in its participation in processes of modernity. Instead, they have been insisting on more accurate readings that insert the Spain of the last two hundred years within the parameters of modern Europe. Without contradicting the validity of such positions, the contributors in Ealham and Richards's book prove that attention to detail, locality, and culture of the civil war produce the representation of a complex reality made up of modern as well as non-modern elements. The book distances itself from a strictly political definition of the war as a point of departure for the historian; that is, it challenges the idea that political approaches are the exclusive, or, at least, the privileged, framework for interpretations of this major historical event. And that is where the culturalist turn finds its place. More specifically, the editors locate their volume in the context of a new social history seeking to broaden the scope of analysis beyond a narrow understanding of class and of institutional power. This is achieved by way of incorporating the notions of social conflict, consciousness, and collective action as analytical tools (11). These concepts take the entire Spanish population affected by the war—and not only the political elites and that part of the population explicitly politicized and engaged in the war effort—as objects of study and as agents capable of defining important, and hitherto neglected, aspects of the civil confrontation.

In its effort to offer a complex, diverse, and contradictory picture of the war, the volume is also particularly sensitive to local differences and particularities. All articles work in this direction, even though the book is divided into three parts organized around different criteria. Articles in the first part explore concepts of violence, nationalism, and religion, and can be said to be the most centrally devoted to counter traditionally accepted "dual frameworks"; part two applies the cultural models of empowerment, populism, and urbanism to explain the development and configuration of the war at the local level. Finally, part three focuses strategically on the historical processes of identity construction of chosen collectives that made possible their alignment with the Francoist side.

In the exploration of new routes that depart from dual frameworks, some of the authors, perhaps...