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  • Modernismo's Inverted Conquest and the Ruins of Imperial Nostalgia:Rethinking Transatlantic Relations in Contemporary Critical Discourse
  • Alejandro Mejías-López (bio)

For over a century, there has not been a single generation of Spanish intellectuals that has not been haunted by the specter of Latin America.

ÁNGEL LOUREIRO "Spanish Nationalism and the Ghost of Empire" (2003)

Bueno es decirlo porque muchos afectan desconocerlo, cómo se dio el caso de una especie de inversa conquista en que las nuevas carabelas, partiendo de las antiguas colonias, aproaron las costas de España. De los libros recién llegados por entonces de América, la crítica militante peninsular decía que estaban, aunque asaz bien pergeñados, enfermos de la manía modernista.

MANUEL DÍAZ RODRÍGUEZCamino de perfección (1908)

In his article on the figure of the indiano in Clarín and, more generally, nineteenth-century Spanish literature, James Fernández called attention to the central place that Spanish America must have in discussions about Spanish national identity1 : "The elaboration of a national identity is […] one of the principal tasks modern Spanish writers and intellectuals have set for themselves, and any such elaboration must inevitably come to terms with Spain's relationship to the New World" (32). Writing in 1996, Fernández noted, [End Page 7] however, that scholarship on this topic was scarce. Almost a decade later, Ángel Loureiro could still speak of the almost complete lack of scholarship on this subject. According to Loureiro, all sorts of factors have been addressed in contemporary discussions of Spanish national identity with the exception of the role played by its American ex-colonies in the Spanish national imaginary:

Without diminishing the relevance of [other] factors in the processes of national construction, one would have to add the part played by the mournful memory of the lost empire, since for over a century, there has not been a single generation of Spanish intellectuals that has not been haunted by the specter of Latin America.

(68)

This critical vacuum is being slowly filled, particularly (and perhaps only) in Anglo American academic circles. In addition to Fernández and Loureiro, María Escudero, Robin Fiddian, and Joseba Gabilondo, among others, have made important contributions to the issue of Spanish national identity and the role of Spanish America in Spain's post-imperial imaginary. Escudero showed early on how Spanish official discourse about America and the question of Hispanidad has changed remarkably little between the Franco Regime and the subsequent democratic governments. Fiddian and Loureiro have offered insightful readings of the way in which Spanish intellectual discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was marked by the loss of empire. In a move similar to Escudero's, both scholars address the continuities between this earlier period and the later institutionalization of Hispanidad by the Franco regime. Following Loureiro's lead and corroborating Escudero's findings in official discourse, Gabilondo (2003) centered his analysis mainly on Spanish historiography in order to further show the extent to which Spanish America has become a sort of Derridean "ghost" in Spanish nationalist discourse. In addition to their specific contributions, these studies have to be credited for opening and beginning to explore this largely ignored line of inquiry. However, despite their unquestionable importance, there is a significant absence in these critical texts: Spanish America itself. Indeed, most scholars have tended to examine Spanish America exclusively as a Spanish construct without apparently ever contemplating the possibility of any real Spanish American agency that may have prompted, influenced, or otherwise mediated Spanish national imaginaries.2

In this essay I will show how any discussion about Spanish national identity that does not acknowledge the active role that Spanish American writers and intellectuals themselves have had in shaping literary, cultural, and political debates in the Peninsula is bound to remain partial. I will argue that interpretations that silence Spanish America by reducing it to a mere projection of the Spanish imagination run the risk of reproducing the very same imperial gesture under critique. My study focuses on a watershed moment in transatlantic relations when, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Spanish American...

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