Languages and Literatures

This article argues that the film Pa negre (Villaronga, 2010) questions the recreation of intergenerational transmissions of memory after the Spanish Civil War by means of the “ghosts of history,” the traces left in the present by silenced past events, as theorized by Jo Labanyi. Pa negre revisits the motif of the birds in La plaça del Diamant (Rodoreda, 1962), the hidden and monstrous characters in El espíritu de la colmena (Erice, 1973), and the fairy tale morphology of El laberinto del fauno (del Toro, 2006), to show the tensions between the depiction of the “ghosts of history” and what I call “the other ghosts of postmemory,” a transgenerational transmission of which the affected wants to be set free in order to reaffirm their present self, which I theorize following the concept of the “phantom” developed by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.

Abstract
This study explores the representation of national identities and their relationship to inner exile in the Spanish translation of the Basque novel 100 metro, by Ramón Saizarbitoria, which narrates the last 100 metres an ETA member runs before being shot to death by the police. According to its publishers, 100 metro is the first novel in the Basque language to be translated into Spanish (as Cien metros). The present reading questions the concept of inner exile (exile within the borders of one’s own nation) as it applies to stateless nations within the Spanish state. Paul Ilie’s model considers inner exile a consequence of the split in the national unity caused by territorial exile, which does not work with minority nations within the Spanish state. For the present analysis, inner exile is redefined as a conflict between the individual and the official national discourse and is used to examine national constructions within the Basque Country.

Resumen
Este estudio analiza la representación de identidades nacionales y sus relaciones con el exilio interior en la traducción al castellano de la novela vasca 100 metro, de Ramón Saizarbitoria, que narra los últimos 100 metros recorridos por un miembro de ETA antes de ser tiroteado por la policía. Según sus editores, 100 metro es la primera novela vasca traducida al castellano (como Cien metros). Mi lectura cuestiona el concepto de exilio interior (exilio dentro de las fronteras de la propia nación) aplicado a naciones sin estado dentro del estado español. El modelo de Paul Ilie considera el exilio interior una consecuencia de la brecha en la unidad nacional causada por el exilio territorial, lo que no funciona para naciones periféricas dentro del estado español. Para este análisis, ‘exilio interior’ es redefinido como un conflicto entre el individuo y el discurso nacional oficial y es usado para examinar construcciones nacionales dentro del País Vasco.

This essay argues that the treatment of languages in the novel Paraules d'Opoton el Vell (1968) [Words by Opoton the Elder], written by the Catalan author Avel·lí Artís Gener during his exile in Mexico, opens a third space between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's deterritorialization, and Walter Mignolo's decoloniality, in a way that engages with both these ideas as it distances itself from them. Through the use of multiple languages and registers, the questioning of names, the creation of new words, and translations, Paraules d'Opoton el Vell deterritorializes language. However, by including a multiplicity of languages, it questions Deleuze and Guattari's focus on minor languages as forces that deterritorialize the major language. At the same time, the variety of languages introduced in the novel shows the colonial difference while proposing a pluriversality like the one Mignolo links to the decolonial option. Nevertheless, Paraules d'Opoton el Vell cannot be completely lined up with decolonial criticism because its border thinking pivots around languages more than around epistemological conflicts. The third space portrayed in Paraules evokes the approach proposed by Iberian studies, in between conceptualizations that critique hegemony from both a regional and a pluriversal locus of enunciation that touches on interior and exterior borders.

En este ensayo analizo la película de ciencia ficción Eva (Maíllo, 2011) a través de lo que denomino «iberofuturismo»: la creación y el estudio de productos e iniciativas culturales que, relacionándose con el pasado y el presente del panorama de los estudios ibéricos, atienden también a sus formulaciones de futuro. Usando los presupuestos teóricos de Alison Landsberg y Hannah Arendt para interpretar las significaciones de su estética y su representación de los nuevos comienzos, propongo que Eva presenta un «iberofuturismo herido», que, como la «cultura herida» concebida por Cristina Moreiras (2002), muestra los intersticios de difícil sutura en la relación entre el pasado, presente y futuro, algo que puede considerarse una alegoría de los reinicios ocurridos durante el periodo de la Transición, época que coincide con la parte «retro» de la estética de Eva.

In this essay I analyze the critically-acclaimed animated movie, Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero, 2015) through the lens of environmental humanities. Birdboy takes place on an island populated by anthropomorphic animals, most of them young, who live in a time after an industrial accident destroyed the livelihood of its inhabitants. Drawing on various theoretical approaches, such as Hannah Arendt’s notion of new beginnings and Timothy Morton’s sustained project of ecological critique, I study the ways Birdboy represents time and suggests an ethics of the future. Birdboy portrays a post-apocalyptic universe that is not detached from the past, even after a catastrophe, but always already marked by emotional, material and temporal accumulation. The movie also questions the necessity and the possibility of new beginnings if we do not engage with the complexity of nature. It ultimately focuses on the consequences that all of this has for the future: the accumulation affects the younger generation that lives in a world whose development has been exhausted but where the remains of the past have not disappeared.

This essay studies Memoria de la melancolía (Buenos Aires, 1970), the autobiography that Spanish author and intellectual María Teresa León (1903-1988) wrote towards the end of her exile. In addition to being an account of the most relevant events of her life, I argue that her memoire can be considered a modern “Laus Hispaniae,” that is, a “praise of Spain,” as this genre was used by medieval authors such as Saint Isidore, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and King Alfonso X of Castile. Like her medieval counterparts, León laments the loss of her native land and incorporates history in her geographical descriptions of several regions in Spain. She also relates exile culture and herself to the Spanish territory and history, and thus reasserts exiles’ cultural hegemony (a concept coined by Sebastiaan Faber) by proposing an alternative history of the country she had to abandon.

In this chapter I examine the representation of Latin American geography in Memoria de la melancolía (Buenos Aires, 1970), the autobiography of Spanish exile writer María Teresa León (1903-1988). I have argued elsewhere (Alvarez-Sancho, 2021) that its description of Spanish geography that ties space with history follows a technique borrowed from the “Laus Hispaniae,” a medieval genre with which León was very familiar and which ultimately serves to link exile culture to Spanish territory. The description of the land of her exile, however, contains a more problematic praise. In some instances, León describes American geography with presentist and futuristic notes, without acknowledging its past. In some others, León describes the Argentinian landscape through its historiography and inscribes her own body in it, like she does with Spain, a way of reclaiming exiles’ sense of belonging also in the land that received them.

This paper analyzes the recovering of tradition as well as the new forms of activism and community engagement in music in Asturias following the 2008 financial crisis. Specifically, I study Rodrigo Cuevas, arguably the most recognized new musician inside and outside Asturias; Ún de Grao, the musical project of Xosé Martínez Álvarez, a member of the so-called «post-folk» generation whose main aim is to revitalize the tonada; and the Coru Al Altu la Lleva, which, born in the environment of the association of musicians Caja de músicos, continues the tradition of choral music and explicitly engages in activism, both with noted Asturian musician Nacho Vegas and as an independent ensemble.
Recent Asturian music signals new trends in its relationship to space and also to time. Musicians hope to participate globally, not by blending into any pattern, but through their local difference and through activism. Some of the issues Asturian musicians relate to are the role of the many languages and cultures that coexist in a territory, the revival of a lived past while questioning certain ideas of the previous generation, the awareness of sexual diversity, the new-rural tendency after the economic recession and the pandemic, and the rise in community activism after the Indignados movement following the 2008 global financial crisis. Through music, Asturias and the Asturian language both participate and respond to local, national and international trends which, drawing upon tradition, create unique ways of resignifying the past and of influencing the present and the future.