Mediterranean Memories: Crossings and Migrations in Contemporary Peninsular Culture

Session Coordinator: Tabea Alexa Linhard
Washington University in St. Louis
tlinhard@artsci.wustl.edu

When the Party is Over: Beach Communities, Industrial Modernization, and the Transformation of Narrative Technique in Juan Goytisolo’s Fin de Fiesta

 By the 1960s, industrial development and the fashion for sea bathing reached the South of Spain. In villages traditionally inhabited by fishermen, several concomitant processes marked the arrival of Modernity. While the developing fishing industry started making individual fishermen's business obsolete, the privatization of the shores initiated a separation of the coastal population from the seaside. As soon as the local authorities began allowing the development of the coast in private interests, fishermen's communities had to recede, clearing space for fenced beaches and tourist hotels. In the face of these transformations, it was the visible change of the seaside communities by the developing beach tourism which provided writers with images that could make Modernity representable. This paper examines Juan Goytisolo's little-studied novel Fin de fiesta (1962) as a literary project in which formal experimentation and a beach setting were used as literary devices instrumental for conveying a multi-dimensional image of the belated and contradictory Spanish Modernity. As we shall see, an adecuate understanding of this novel, which can be viewed as a turning point in Goytisolo's writing, allows for a better understanding of his more complex narratives, such as Señas de identidad and Reivindicación del Conde don Julián.

Eugenia Afinoguénova
Marquette University
eugenia.afinoguenova@marquette.edu

Crossing the Mediterranean: Two Cities—Two Documentaries (En construcción and El otro lado)

My presentation will deal with immigration from Africa to Spain in the most recent past by focusing on two documentary films, En construcción by Jose Luis Guerín and El otro lado by Basel Ramsis.

These documentaries reveal certain sociological realities of present-day Spanish culture. These are the realities of “growing pains,” the difficulties and tensions of coming of age in contemporary Spain which arise from historical relations with and proximity to Africa and as well as the (forced) acknowledgement that Spain is definitively no longer “different.”

I will discuss two documentary films not as much as reflections of sociological realities concerning African immigration to Spain—although this is part of the topic--but also as manifestations of changing perceptions and conceptions of the Spanish nation and Spanish identity.

Based on immigrant life in Barcelona (En construcción) and Madrid (En el otro lado), these two documentaries provide conceptual insights about the changing nature not only of urban Spanish culture but of Spanish culture in general. Particularly relevant in my discussion will be the ways in which long-time residents of these two cities negotiate their own identity through their interactions with recent immigrants.

Michael Ugarte
University of Missouri-Columbia
ugartem@missouri.edu

Notes from a Corrupting Sea: Rewriting Sepharad in Contemporary Spain

Recent representations of a nostalgic return to Sepharad always take place against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell conceive of the Mediterranean as a corrupting sea, as the history of the area is marked by constant exchanges and connectivities. Just as Purcell and Horden emphasize a radical diversity within a Mediterranean unity, such novels as Carme Riera’s En el último azul, Lucía Graves La casa de la memoria, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad, and Juana Salabert’s Velódromo de invierno show that the Sephardic diaspora and with it, new representations of a mythical return to lost homeland should be studied with close attention to the diverse localities that appear in such texts. While Graves’s and Riera’s texts are situated in the 15 th and 17 th centuries respectively, Muñoz Molina’s and Salabert’s novels take place in the twentieth century and strongly suggest that a symbolic return to Sepharad needs to be considered in relation to the traumata of the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War. This paper focuses on the latter texts, and proposes that the Mediterranean – and Corrupting – Sea is a valid framework to understand the journeys and the sometimes deadly interruptions that mark any attempt to narrate the presence of Sephardic culture in contemporary Spain.

Tabea Alexa Linhard
Washington University in St. Louis
tlinhard@artsci.wustl.edu