Thousand and One Travelers' Tales: Exile, Immigration and Memory in Contemporary Spanish Culture

3 units

In light of recent migratory flows to Spain, such issues as multiculturalism, racial and ethnic conflict, and religious and linguistic diversity have received renewed attention within the Social Sciences, and have also been the subject of recent films and selected literary text. However, these issues have not been sufficiently discussed in relevance to the debates on the constructions of cultural memory (particularly in regards to the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath), which in many ways have dominated the field of Spanish Cultural Studies. In this course, we will attempt to bridge this gap, while simultaneously studying the main historical developments from the Second Republic in 1932 to the present. We will examine, among other issues, the meanings of the Medieval convivencia of Arabs, Christians and Jews in contemporary Spain, the relationship between the end of this period and the forging of an Imperial culture, which was nostalgically invoked during the Francoist era, the myth that Francisco Franco saved Spanish Jews from a certain death in the Holocaust, the meanings attached to a Mediterranean culture, contemporary tours of Jewish and Arab Spain, and the representation of immigration in contemporary narrative and film. Readings include works by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Ammiel Alcalay, Cathy Caruth, Américo Castro, Jacques Derrida, Federico García Lorca, Paul Gilroy, Juan Goytisolo, Ranjana Khanna, Julia Kristeva, María Rosa Menocal, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Antonio Muñoz Molina, David Nirenberg, Juana Salabert, and Edward Said. We will also watch films by Carlos Saura, Iciar Bollaín and Fernando León de Aranoa.