A Companion to Catalan Culture (review)

Dominic Keown’s objective in A Companion to Catalan Culture is both remarkable and praiseworthy. The critic wants to present “a distinctive vision of Catalan national culture,” giving it a centrality that has, up to now, gone completely missing or just “subsumed unhelpfully into the wider category of Spanish” (3). In order to accomplish his goal, Keown compiles ten chapters written by different scholars that deal with various aspects of Catalan culture, from linguistics to history, from cinema to sports. In the introduction, the critic complains about the reductive treatment that Catalan culture has received in scholarly circles. It soon becomes apparent that his ambitious goal, given the long history of Catalan culture, might suffer a similar fate. The paradox surfaces immediately in the introduction when the author candidly remarks how jarring it might be to include a chapter dedicated to medieval culture right after the author’s own chapter on contemporary Catalan culture. It certainly is. By doing so, the critic commits the same oversight that proves fatal for Catalan studies. It is a question of depth versus breadth. And although the cultural studies approach allows for a variety of subjects to be included, a stronger unifying theme (whether chronological or topically focused) among the different components could have yielded a more coherent result. The volume seems unable to decide if it wants to be a “companion” of contemporary Catalan culture or an account of different socio-artistic facets of Catalan culture throughout its long history. Since the public at large, who may be the primary users of this volume, might be mostly interested in the contemporary aspects of Catalonia, Keown’s effort to trace back the history of a conflicted territory is to be commended. His work challenges the reader to move beyond the publicized image of Catalonia and move further into a far-reaching understanding of the region.

The chapters that come off best are those that are allowed to fully explore a subject or a period. In “Medieval Catalan Culture, 801–1492,” Alexander Ibarz successfully condenses a long and rich period that, as Keown remarks, cannot be ignored. “Catalonia: From Industrialization to the Present Day,” by Antoni Segura i Mas and Elisenda Barbé i Pou, jumps to the early nineteenth century and, while covering an extensive period, shows the important and persistent struggle in Catalan modern history of translating its economic power into political gain. Robert Davidson analyzes a similar struggle in geographical terms, as he carefully graphs Barcelona’s many urban transformations throughout its difficult history up to the present branding of the city. Miquel Strubell provides an enlightening and complete account of the Catalan language. He traces its linguistic origins and follows its particular evolution, constantly punctuated by politics, to its complicated present and uncertain future. Jaume Martí-Olivella offers an account of Catalan film-making during the last fifteen years, anchored around four contemporary areas: urban comedy, documentary, literary adaptations, and female/experimental gaze. By establishing strong context/theme reciprocity, the critic concludes that Catalan cinema constantly recreates on the big screen the culture’s own fluctuating state of transnationality. “Festival and the Shaping of Catalan Community,” by Dorothy Noyes, provides a perfect symbiosis between content and theory. Noyes discusses a wide array of Catalan traditions (castellers, Patum, Carnestoltes) and combines them with a socio-historic approach that is not only highly informative, but also points to the questioning that cultural studies ought to accomplish. After analyzing several traditions, Noyes concludes that while these cultural practices “celebrate the bodily participation that seems to evoke deep identity,” festival organizers know what “the general public, in its new prosperity and freedom of movement, is forgetting” (227).

The remaining chapters are slightly problematic, but, at the same time, very interesting. Unfortunately, given the vast period that they cover, the authors are reduced to summarizing extensive areas of knowledge without much commentary, and the final products reads more like annotated bibliographies than full-fledged scholarly articles. For instance, Tess Knighton’s otherwise knowledgeable chapter...