UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Forgetting the Forgetfulness: (Dis)remembering the Coloniality of the Portuguese and Spanish Dictatorships A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Cindy Pinhal Committee in charge: Professor John Blanco, Chair Professor Fatima El-Tayeb Professor Stephanie Jed Professor Luis Martin-Cabrera Professor Pamela Radcliff 2017 © Cindy Pinhal, 2017 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Cindy Pinhal is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Chair University of California, San Diego 2017 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page…………………………………………………………………………... iii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………... iv Acknowledgements…………………………….………………………………………… v Vita…………………………………………..………………………………………..... vii Abstract of the Dissertation.…………………………………………………………...... ix Introduction…………………………………………………………………….………… 1 Chapter 1. (Dis)remembering the Portuguese Dictatorship; (Dis)remembering Colonialism: Joaquim Furtado’s A Guerra do ultramar de libertação and the Memory of the Politics of Colonialism...………………….………………………………….………35 Chapter 2. (Dis)remembering the Spanish Civil War: Colonial Ghosts...……………… 90 Chapter 3. (Dis)remembering Immigrant Others: Failed Historicization of Coloniality in Post-dictatorship’s Visual Representations……………………………………............. 139 Chapter 4. Ethics of “Transgenerational Transgression” in Driss Deiback’s Los perdedores and Filipa Reis, Nuno Baptista, João Miller Guerra’s Li Ké Terra.............. 179 Conclusion………….…………………………….…………………………………… 213 Works Cited………………………………………………………………….…........... 221 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Completing this project has been a long and windy road and I am deeply grateful for those who inspired it and those who came along the way helping me seeing it to the end. First and foremost, I would like to thank Luis Martin-Cabrera under whose supervision I wrote this dissertation. I met Luis the first year of my PhD program in his class on memory, justice and the dictatorships of Spain and the Southern Cone. This seminar was an eye opener and allowed me to intellectually process what I had always known but never been able to verbalize. For many reasons, Luis was a natural choice for directing this project but it is mostly because of his compassion towards others, his passion for social justice and because I found an intellectual mirror in him. There are not enough words to express how grateful I am for his unwavering support and belief in me throughout the years with all the ups and downs inside and outside the PhD program. Thank you for being a friend. I would also like to thank Jody Blanco whom I also met in my first year in his seminar on race theory.I am very grateful that Jody participated in my project. His input was invaluable and his ability to point out the structure of an argument so that it is articulated in a logical manner has left a great impression on me. I am glad to have found another mentor along the way. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee (Fatima El-Tayeb, Pamela Radcliff and Stephanie Jed) whose intellectual work has been so influential for my own growth as a scholar. And a special thank you to Lisa Yoneyama whose seminar on trauma and history first inspired what came to be part of my title and basis for this project: “forgetting the forgetfulness.” v Also, many thanks to the Hayes-Bautistas who have become my family in America and in particular, to Dr. David Hayes-Bautista of UCLA who spent many evenings listening to and engaging with me fleshing out my theoretical concepts. This was a personal project that originated many years ago and on another continent. Hearing the stories of my father who had to emigrate to France illegaly because he didn’t want to be drafted to the war in Africa and ‘‘go to his death’’ (as he used to say). The summers spent in Portugal with the rest of my family whose conversations always ended up debating if Salazar was worse than Franco, recalling the neighbor’s son who had been taken away by the PIDE never to be seen again, but always interspersed with silences as ‘‘enough was said.’’ Growing up I was fascinated by these snippets of disconnected stories even though (or because) I had no clue who Salazar or Franco were and how big of a role they played into the emigration of my parents and many other Portuguese. Finally, as someone coming from the most socially stigmatized and racially othered part of France, this project speaks to my own experience and that of my friends, my fellow ‘‘ banlieusard(e)s .’’ This is for you, for the 93, never give up the fight in debunking the myth of Europe as white and Chritian, we are citizens of France in our own right. vi VITA Education 2017 Ph. D in Literature University of California, San Diego 2011 C. Phil. in Literature University of California, San Diego 2011 Summer Research Award, Literature Department University of California, San Diego 2010 Summer Research Award, Literature Department University of California, San Diego 2007 M.A in Spanish California State University, San Marcos 2003 Maȋtrise English Literature Université de Marne-la-Vallée, Paris Est 13 (France) 2001 Licence LLCA Université de Marne-la-Vallée, Paris Est 13 (France) Teaching Experience 2015 - present Part-Time Professor of Spanish, MCLL department California State University, Northridge 2007 - 2013 Teaching Assistant in French Literature, Literature Department University of California, San Diego 2007 Part-Time Faculty in French, Department of World Languages Palomar Community College 2004 - 2007 Teaching Associate in French and Spanish, Department of World Languages & Hispanic Literatures California State University, San Marcos vii 2003 - 2004 International Exchange Lecturer in French, Department of World Languages & Hispanic Literatures California State University, San Marcos Research and Teaching Areas Portuguese and Spanish Literature and Culture Iberian dictatorships Iberian immigration studies Politics of memory and knowledge (Post)colonial and decolonial studies Psychoanalysis, race and gender theories Film and documentary genre viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Forgetting the Forgetfulness: (Dis)remembering the Coloniality of the Portuguese and Spanish Dictatorships By Cindy Pinhal Doctor of Philosophy in Literature University of California, San Diego, 2017 Professor John Blanco, Chair Forgetting the Forgetfulness: (Dis)remembering the Coloniality of the Portuguese and Spanish Dictatorships, explores the politics of memory surrounding the Portuguese and Spanish dictatorships as well as their lasting material and discursive effects in contemporary Iberian societies. More specifically, it tends to the silenced colonial past in relation to the production of knowledge around the Salazarist and Francoist regimes. As a ix transhistorical and multiterritorial study, this project articulates a decolonial epistemology on Portuguese and Spanish relations through a critical analysis of several 20 th and 21 st century films and documentaries that provide a space inscribing the modes of (in)visibility and voicing of the Iberian dictatorships’ former colonized and their descendants. From this critical approach, this dissertation posits that the particularity of the Iberian dictatorships rests on their modern colonial projects as vital for their existence and maintenance of power (unlike repressive Latin American regimes or imperial European countries). This project adds to the theory body of academic Iberian comparative studies and addresses the debates around the Portuguese and Spanish “transitology” studies offering a critique of the modes of (dis)remembrance inherent to the transition process as an exclusionary European event. Through an intersectional theoretical reading of the silenced colonial violence of the dictatorships and its effects on the descendants of the colonized, this project contends that the consolidation of race, identity and nation in Spain and Portugal are owed to their colonial subjects in Africa. It responds to the vital need to think of the former colonial subjects under dictatorial rule as forgotten European citizens or nationals in an effort to debunk the myth of Spain and Portugal as white Christian European nations. There are four chapters that comprise this study. However, the organization of these chapters does not follow a teleological framework, but rather an epistemological one. Each chapter is thematically articulated around the ethical and socio-political dimension of the films and documentaries I have selected that address ideas of foreignness, race and colonialism intersecting with social class, sexuality and immigration. x Introduction I have the greatest misgivings about so-called cultural interchange. This has only ever served for the Spanish to heap praise upon Portuguese writers, carrying out through this means a type of peaceful penetration that must not be encouraged … the current crisis, in which we have helped Nationalist Spain to defeat communism, must not make us forget the immutable factors of peninsular politics. António de Oliveira Salazar, “Instruções sobre o intercâmbio cultural com a