Books by Diana Arbaiza
Madrid-Berlín: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2020
Notre Dame University Press, 2020
In the late nineteenth century, Spanish intellectuals and entrepreneurs became captivated with Hi... more In the late nineteenth century, Spanish intellectuals and entrepreneurs became captivated with Hispanism, a movement of transatlantic rapprochement between Spain and Latin America. Not only was this movement envisioned as a form of cultural empire to symbolically compensate for Spain’s colonial decline but it was also imagined as an opportunity to materially regain the Latin Ameri- can markets. Paradoxically, a central trope of Hispanist discourse was the antimaterialistic character of Hispanic culture, allegedly the legacy of the moral superiority of Spanish colonialism in comparison with the commercial drive of modern colonial projects. This study examines how Spanish authors, economists, and entrepreneurs of various ideological backgrounds strove to reconcile the construction of Hispanic cultural identity with discourses of political economy and commercial interests surrounding the movement. Drawing from an interdisciplinary archive of literary essays, economic treatises, and political discourses, The Spirit of Hispanism revisits Peninsular Hispanism to underscore how the interlacing of cultural and commercial interests fundamentally shaped the Hispanist movement.
Articles by Diana Arbaiza
Africana Studia - Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos, 2021
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 2021
During Francoism, Spanish cultural production on Equatorial Guinea placed missionaries in a centr... more During Francoism, Spanish cultural production on Equatorial Guinea placed missionaries in a central narrative role, exalting their evangelizing labor. This article concentrates on the representation of the colonial mission in works by lay authors who shared an ideological affinity with the regime and received its institutional support: the documentary Una cruz en la selva (1946), the film Misión blanca (1946) and the novel Tierra negra (1957). These works branded a kind of Spanish Catholic colonialism as superior to other European models, but despite their propagandistic intention, they also reveal a series of anxieties and contradictions inherent to the Spanish colonial project.
Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies
Bulletin of Spanish Studies , 2020
Este artículo examina el pensamiento ganivetiano sobre la modernidad y el imperio por medio de la... more Este artículo examina el pensamiento ganivetiano sobre la modernidad y el imperio por medio de la representación de Bélgica y el colonialismo en África. Las aparentes contradicciones en las obras de Ganivet han polarizado a la crítica en sus interpretaciones sobre la posición del escritor respecto al colonialismo. Este trabajo destaca la existencia de una continuidad lógica en su pensamiento mediante el análisis de textos epistolares y periodísticos en los que Ganivet reflexiona sobre Bélgica, su lugar de residencia entre 1892 y 1896 y el país que estimulará su oposición entre el moderno colonialismo comercial y los valores del pasado imperio español. El impacto de su estancia en Amberes no solamente se reduce al contacto con el despliegue del colonialismo belga en el Congo, sino que la conciencia histórica de Ganivet sobre el pasado español en Flandes así como su contacto con la modernidad hegemónica europea contribuirán a su cosmovisión imperial.
Revista Hispánica Moderna , 2019
Studies on Cecilia Böhl von Faber have tended to examine her work in relationship with the nation... more Studies on Cecilia Böhl von Faber have tended to examine her work in relationship with the nationalist project of Spanish conservatives or with the gender politics that constrained her writings. Through an analysis of the letters of Cecilia Böhl von Faber, this article presents a previously neglected influence on her writings: her participation in the developing literary market. At a time in which women entered the public lettered sphere restricted by their gender yet enabled by the authorial possibilities opened up by economic modernization, Böhl von Faber began publishing several works that she had penned years ago. She frequently argued that she was driven to publication by her dire financial situation although her letters reveal that the commodification of her works acted as a liberating force allowing her to justify what she saw as an act of gender transgression. This article also explores how her insertion in the market played a crucial role in shaping her literary trajectory. Not only did she strive to reconcile her gendered identity with her condition as a professional author, but she also felt inhibited by the economy of the literary market and struggled with her self-presentation as an artist and her reality as a cultural producer subject to consumer's demand. Through the case of Böhl von Faber, this article elucidates the pressures of the unfolding cultural industry upon artistic creation and suggests that this exerted a fundamental impact in Böhl von Faber's literary choices.
Siglo Diecinueve (Literatura hispánica) , 2015
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies , 2013
This article examines Emilia Pardo Bazán's novel Un viaje de novios (1881) as a critical reflecti... more This article examines Emilia Pardo Bazán's novel Un viaje de novios (1881) as a critical reflection on the adoption of 'modern' marriage practices and their disruption of the prevailing gendered organization of space in late nineteenth-century Spain. As a foreign custom, the wedding trip emerged in association with 'affective marriage', which conflicted with the frequent intervention of the family and strict control on women's mobility within Spanish society. Furthermore, with its displacement and its erosion of boundaries between private and public, the wedding trip represents a liminal period within the rite of marriage that transgresses the spatial divisions and the conventions of female mobility of Western bourgeois respectability. Un viaje de novios underscores the incongruity between modern rituals like the bridal tours and an obsolete gender normativity, a contradiction paradigmatic of the coexistence of discourses of traditionalism with practices – and desires – of modernization in Pardo Bazán's Spain.
Decimonónica. Revista de producción cultural hispánica decimonónica , 2014
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2012
At the turn of the nineteenth century, conservative Creoles subscribed to a Hispanist discourse t... more At the turn of the nineteenth century, conservative Creoles subscribed to a Hispanist discourse that promoted the idea of a Hispanic Transatlantic community that shared race, culture and religion. This paper focuses on the work of the Colombian author Soledad Acosta de Samper to examine how this Hispanist discourse did not promote an imitation of subordination to Spanish culture but an instrumentalization of this Hispanic identity for Creole nation-building projects. Acosta de Samper conceived of this identification as a means not only to ‘deindigenize’ Colombia but to counteract the French and British influence that she considered corrupting. However, the reality of Spanish society she faced during her trip to Spain in 1892 would lead her to question her original project. Believing Colombia to be more advanced than Spain, Acosta de Samper depicted the former metropole as unable to reach modernity but rather serving as an archive or museum of Hispanic tradition through which Colombians could create their own concept of modernity. This paper not only furthers the recovery work of the most prominent woman writer in nineteenth century Colombia, but investigates the ambivalent relation of the Spanish American Creoles with their ex colonizer through her writings.
Book Chapters by Diana Arbaiza
CON EL FRANQUISMO EN EL RETROVISOR: las representaciones culturales de la dictadura en la democracia (1975-2018), 2020
Este ensayo se inscribe en la recuperación de la memoria colonial para explorar un aspecto frecue... more Este ensayo se inscribe en la recuperación de la memoria colonial para explorar un aspecto frecuentemente olvidado de la posguerra española: las relaciones entre la metrópolis franquista y sus colonias africanas. El trabajo se concentra en la representación de esta historia colonial en la novela Annobón (2017) de Luis Leante (1963). En esta obra, Leante yuxtapone la Guinea Ecuatorial colonial con el Madrid de posguerra centrándose en la figura histórica de Restituto Castilla, un guardia civil republicano asesinado durante las purgas franquistas, pero que a su vez, ejerció de manera despótica su cargo como delegado del Gobierno en Annobón entre 1931 y 1932. El ensayo examina la representación de ambos espacios como culturas del terror pero a la vez analiza los mecanismos del texto para negociar con el retrato de la violencia en estas reconstrucciones de la memoria franquista y colonial.
Projects by Diana Arbaiza
R+D Spanish Project, 2020
Research team: Ana Lúcia Sá, Jordi Moreras, Jessica Falconi, Jacqueline Pólvora, Elisa Rizo, Dian... more Research team: Ana Lúcia Sá, Jordi Moreras, Jessica Falconi, Jacqueline Pólvora, Elisa Rizo, Diana Arbaiza, Nuria Fernández, Mar García, Eduardo Costa Dias.
ABSTRACT: The aim of this project is the study of Africans and Maghrebis who resided in the Iberian Peninsula between 1850 and 1975. This period marks the beginning of the effective colonization of most of the African territories of Spain and Portugal, and the end of its colonization with the granting of independence to the last possessions. It is based on the premise that the presence of Africans and Maghrebins in Spain and Portugal at this time was framed in Iberian colonialism and its rhetoric, which conditioned their settlement, activities, integration and visibility, also in terms of gender. The interest is to offer an Afro-Iberian history and to complete the shortage of existing studies that has practically reduced the African and Maghrebi presence to its exhibition in human zoos and universal exhibitions, or to their participation in war or sports activities.
Special Issue by Diana Arbaiza
Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies
x by Diana Arbaiza
Este ensayo se inscribe en la recuperación de la memoria colonial para explorar un aspecto frecue... more Este ensayo se inscribe en la recuperación de la memoria colonial para explorar un aspecto frecuentemente olvidado de la posguerra española: las relaciones entre la metrópolis franquista y sus colonias africanas. El trabajo se concentra en la representación de esta historia colonial en la novela Annobón (2017) de Luis Leante (1963). En esta obra, Leante yuxtapone la Guinea Ecuatorial colonial con el Madrid de posguerra centrándose en la figura histórica de Restituto Castilla, un guardia civil republicano asesinado durante las purgas franquistas, pero que a su vez, ejerció de manera despótica su cargo como delegado del Gobierno en Annobón entre 1931 y 1932. El ensayo examina la representación de ambos espacios como culturas del terror pero a la vez analiza los mecanismos del texto para negociar con el retrato de la violencia en estas reconstrucciones de la memoria franquista y colonial.
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Books by Diana Arbaiza
Articles by Diana Arbaiza
Book Chapters by Diana Arbaiza
Projects by Diana Arbaiza
ABSTRACT: The aim of this project is the study of Africans and Maghrebis who resided in the Iberian Peninsula between 1850 and 1975. This period marks the beginning of the effective colonization of most of the African territories of Spain and Portugal, and the end of its colonization with the granting of independence to the last possessions. It is based on the premise that the presence of Africans and Maghrebins in Spain and Portugal at this time was framed in Iberian colonialism and its rhetoric, which conditioned their settlement, activities, integration and visibility, also in terms of gender. The interest is to offer an Afro-Iberian history and to complete the shortage of existing studies that has practically reduced the African and Maghrebi presence to its exhibition in human zoos and universal exhibitions, or to their participation in war or sports activities.
Special Issue by Diana Arbaiza
x by Diana Arbaiza
ABSTRACT: The aim of this project is the study of Africans and Maghrebis who resided in the Iberian Peninsula between 1850 and 1975. This period marks the beginning of the effective colonization of most of the African territories of Spain and Portugal, and the end of its colonization with the granting of independence to the last possessions. It is based on the premise that the presence of Africans and Maghrebins in Spain and Portugal at this time was framed in Iberian colonialism and its rhetoric, which conditioned their settlement, activities, integration and visibility, also in terms of gender. The interest is to offer an Afro-Iberian history and to complete the shortage of existing studies that has practically reduced the African and Maghrebi presence to its exhibition in human zoos and universal exhibitions, or to their participation in war or sports activities.