Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira

       Introduction

       When did we become sentimental? Colonial stereotype, national discourse and gender in Galicia and Spain

      The historical moment of political action must be thought of as part of the history of the form of its writing.

      Homi Bhabha (1994)

      Limítase a miúdo a cultura galega a umha versom adaptada da difundida por Espanha. (Galician culture has often been reduced to an adaptation of the version disseminated by Spain.)

      Maurício Castro (2000)

      The word ‘nation’ has never been too distant from a reference to sentiments. From Ernest Renan’s definition that ‘A nation is … a great solidarity, constituted by the sentiment of the sacrifices that its citizens have made’ (Renan, 1896a: 81), to Benedict Anderson’s idea that nations are imagined political communities commanding ‘profound emotional legitimacy’ (Anderson, 2006: 4), the link between national identity and the world of affects has been a common constituent of modern thinking in this area. For the particular historical and geographical focus of this book – Galicia, a non-state nation in north-western Spain, from the late nineteenth century to the present day – the conjunction between the national and the sentimental has had particular historical significance. Beyond the definition of nations as communities joined to a great extent by an emotional bond, or of national belonging as a powerful affective experience, the national question in Galicia has been conditioned by a further association between sentiment and the body politic, which has crystallized in the historically recurrent myth of Galician sentimentality. As will become clear in the course of this book, the trope of Galician sentimentality as a marker of national identity has appeared repeatedly in modern representations of the region, its language and its people, forming a continuum that extends throughout the textual and visual corpus on Galician history and culture from the late nineteenth century up until present times. Its manifestations are as varied as they are historically complex and engrained, but they concentrate on the assumption that Galicians are a nostalgic people, living in harmonious communion with their landscape or yearning for its beauty if away from it. Both implicitly and explicitly, these images have evoked a millenary link between Galicians and an innate capacity for poetry and an aloof humour, a way of being in the world that is both impractical and unrealistic, but also astute and reserved. Such imagery appears entwined with discourses on the nation and the multiplicity of ideologies they serve, but also invariably with a gender politics. Thus, the trope of Galician sentimentality has bifurcated into different representations of Galician men and women, giving rise to a network of stereotypes evolving over the extended historical period of Galician national construction, from the first nationally aware movements and writings in the mid-nineteenth century to the diversity of national discourses positioned within and against Galicia’s current status as an Autonomous Historical Community in the Spanish state. Images of Galician masculinity have therefore fluctuated between those of the valiant Celtic warrior and the lachrymose man, whilst traditional representations of Galician women have tended to depict them either as raunchy and immoral or as examples of self-abnegation and grace. Pervasive as they are, these images have seldom been treated as historically grounded in the matrix of national narratives that converge in the Galician context, and even more rarely, if at all, have they been investigated as discursive formations arising from Galicia’s colonial condition. This book intends to be a first step in this line of research.

      As has been the case with much scholarship in contemporary Galician studies, this study is indebted to Xoán González-Millán’s analysis of Galicia’s subaltern position within Spain and its history of cultural resistance. Particularly in his book Resistencia cultural e diferencia histórica: A experiencia da subalternidade (Cultural Resistance and Historical Difference: The Experience of Subalternity) (2000), González-Millán worked towards a theoretical framework for cultural historiography in Galicia that put Galician culture’s subaltern condition centre stage, thus foregrounding resistance as a distinguishing feature of Galician cultural politics and production. Following the work of Sherry B. Ortner, González-Millán’s proposition was groundbreaking for the Galician context, in that it promoted an understanding of cultural resistance not as a protective discourse bent on the preservation of a presupposed original, national quality, but as a reactive and dialectic network of discourses, responding organically to dominant forces often in contradictory ways, both productive and counterproductive. A seldom acknowledged function of resistant cultural forms is, in González-Millán’s own words, that their study can lead us to a ‘diagnóstico do poder’ (a diagnosis of power), rather than to the teleological goal of empowerment and emancipation (2000: 131). Resistance, he concludes, should be analysed not as ‘unha calidade de determinados actos ou políticas, senón como unha loita incesante coas estratexias do poder que están en constante transformación’ (a characteristic of certain acts or politics, but as a tireless struggle against the strategies of power, which are in constant transformation) (2000: 134). This dialectical logic of cultural resistance helps us understand discourses of the nation in Galicia as a semantic body that cannot be studied in isolation from other adjacent national discourses or from the power dynamics informing their interaction. As a consequence, although this relational frame of study has seldom been pursued in Iberian Studies, Galician cultural history and the discourses of the nation underpinning it cannot be adequately investigated without a keen eye for the diversity of often antagonistic discourses of the nation developing in the peninsular context, including Spanish and Portuguese nationalisms, state centralism and its associated anti-Catalan, anti-Basque and anti-Galician discourses. A consideration of the historical power dynamics undergirding such interactions sheds substantial light on the origins, development and persistent currency of some of the metaphors of Galician cultural nationalism. This book centres upon one such metaphor, that of Galician sentimentality, and will argue that its history and contemporary circulation cannot be dissociated from the asymmetrical power dynamics informing the colonial relationship between Galicia and Spain.

      González-Millán’s theory of cultural resistance in Galicia as a historically dynamic interplay of forces helps us bring into the same analytic space national discourses developing in Galicia and Spain. However, it is the theoretical framework provided by postcolonial and Orientalist forms of cultural critique that has assisted me with the question of representation. It is no coincidence, as Edward Said paradigmatically showed in Orientalism (1995), that colonialist discourses have been so extensively reliant on the practice of representation and portrayal. Because of its dual function as both projection and self-reflection, the praxis of representation is also a politics. Moreover, when framed in the colonial context, representations of the colonized serve the two-way purpose of legitimization and control, generating a body of knowledge aimed at perpetuating the unequal power structures that sustain the subjection of certain populations under others, a body of knowledge that is, for this very reason, repetitive and monotonous. This is partly why the concept of ‘colonial stereotype’, already present in the work of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, and influentially elaborated by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), becomes instrumental for any understanding of cultural interactions in contexts of political oppression and domination. I take as a starting point Bhabha’s theorization that the colonial stereotype, itself one of the fundamental rhetorical techniques of colonial discourse, does not simply concern