A Home Divided: A Post-National Approach to Family, Gender and Region in Modern Galician Narrative

Abstract

By focusing on the case of Galicia, A Home Divided represents an attempt to understand the multiple linguistic and gendered subjectivities that are enclosed within and excluded from larger regional/national Iberian identities. Contemporary debates about identity in post-national Iberia are often contingent upon the belief that since the nineteenth century there was a singular, official Spanish national identity that in the last few decades has been superseded by the political recognition of Spain's autonomous communities. I engage with these discussions by taking nineteenth-century Galicia as a starting point for thinking about post-national Iberian identities. Through a close reading of the region's fin- de-siècle literature, we see that rather than offering singular origins for what have become modern day Galician and Spanish identities, this was a period marked by linguistic, political and cultural ambiguity. Literary, feminist and post-colonial studies help analyze the complex images of home and family (the nation and the region) that were represented by Galician authors.Beginning with a critical history of the Rexurdimento (c. 1860-1900), we see that the linguistic plurality of Galicia justifies questioning philologically determined definitions of Spanish and Galician literatures that have limited the ways in which critics have approached them. The second chapter analyzes how from different transnational and gendered positions different writers created narratives of exile and enclosure that offer unhomely visions of home/land. The third chapter examines incest and illegitimacy as tropic expressions of anxiety about the legitimacy of Galician and Spanish nationalisms, particularly in the works of M. Valladares, Pardo Bazán and X. Rodríguez López. In the final chapter I argue that the domestic violence so common in Galician narrative reveals the violence--colonial, cultural, sexual, and economic--implicit in the creation and perpetuation of Galician and Spanish national identities. Revealing the multiplicity of pre-national Iberian identities, these analyses offer historical legitimacy to a variety of linguistic and gendered post-national identities today.