Full Description
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.
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
