The Other Catalans
Representations of Immigration in Catalan Literature
Editor(s) Josep-Anton Fernàndez
Language: English
Genre(s): Literary Criticism
Series: Iberian and Latin American Studies
- October 2024 · 304 pages ·216x138mm
- · Hardback - 9781837721566
- · eBook - pdf - 9781837721573
- · eBook - epub - 9781837721580
About The Book
Catalonia has for centuries been a destination for immigrants: first from neighbouring regions, then from all over Spain, and in the last twenty-five years from the whole world. Currently 16% of the Catalan population was born outside Spain, and well over 75% of Catalans have a migrant origin. Yet the Catalans see themselves as a distinct society, and a majority of them are making a claim for political self-determination. The Other Catalans is the first book to explore how Catalan literature has depicted the social and cultural consequences of immigration, from the 1930s to the present. It examines a rich body of texts in order to ask how immigration has shaped discourses of identity and otherness in Catalan culture, and how it has brought into question the claims to the authority to represent Catalan society; how the work of mourning is effected in migrant literature; how issues of language and space articulate with social and political conflict in these texts; and in what ways all these issues are inflected by gender and sexuality.
Endorsements
‘It is startling that the Països Catalans (Catalan-speaking territories) have such a colourful and complex history of migration, and yet, as Josep-Anton Fernàndez points out, only a meagre presence in literature. This volume of nine essays by established and emerging scholars, together with Fernàndez’s own illuminating introduction, breaks new ground exploring the intersections of migration with Catalan (and Spanish) history, and (Catalan) national identity. It is sure to become an essential point of reference for Catalanists and Iberian scholars alike.’
P. Louise Johnson, Reader in Catalan and Spanish, University of Sheffield
‘The Other Catalans is an essential collection of essays to understand the full extent of the presence of immigration in Catalan literature – and the experience of migration in Catalan-speaking territories – since the early twentieth century to the present. Rather than a history of migrant literature or the representation of migration in literature, what the diverse and rich contributions to the volume explore is the extent to which the cultural production associated with the phenomenon of migration as a collectively shared experience has been and continues to be at the core of Catalan literature.’
Mario Santana, Associate Professor and Academic Director of the Catalan Studies Program, University of Chicago
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Josep-Anton Fernàndez
Part I: Otherness and Representational Authority
1. On Masks and Cracks: Positions of Authority in the Portrayal of the Migrant Phenomenon in Catalan Literature
Mercè Picornell Belenguer
2. Egalitarian Aesthetics and the Literary Representation of Immigration: The Work of Julià de Jòdar
Àlex Matas Pons
3. The Representation of the forasters by the Majorcan Literary Generation of the 1970s
Guillem Colom-Montero
Part II: Spaces, Borders and Memory
4. To Speak the Unspeakable: Francesc Candel and the Trespass of Borders
Olga Sendra Ferrer
5. Barcelona and Valencian Immigration: Julià Guillamon’s El barri de la Plata
Teresa Iribarren
6. ‘Catalunya termina aquí. Aquí comença Vietnam’: Urbanism, Migration and Spatial Immunity in Jordi Puntí’s Els castellans
William Viestenz
Part III: Disidentification, Dislocation and Mourning
7. ‘Te deix, mare, un fill com a penyora’: Disidentificatory Intertextuality in Najat El Hachmi’s La filla estrangera
Natasha Tanna
8. Limits and Borders in No, by Saïd El Kadaoui
Roger Canadell Rusiñol
9. Mourning, Trauma and Ambivalence in the Catalan Literature of the Argentine Diaspora: Silvana Vogt’s La mecànica de l’aigua
Josep-Anton Fernàndez