Imperial Emotions

Imperial Emotions LUP, Krauel, Imperial Emotions.indd 1 21/10/2013 12:57:14 Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures Series Editor L. Elena Delgado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Richard Rosa, Duke University Series Editorial Board Jo Labanyi, New York University Chris Perriam, University of Manchester Lisa Shaw, University of Liverpool Paul Julian Smith, CUNY Graduate Center This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary hispanic and lusophone cultures and writing. The volumes published in Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments that have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary hispanic and lusophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture. 1 Jonathan Mayhew, The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Contemporary Spanish Poetry 1980–2000 2 Mary S. Gossy, Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 3 Paul Julian Smith, Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television 4 David Vilaseca, Queer Events: Post-Deconstructive Subjectivities in Spanish Writing and Film, 1960s to 1990s 5 Kirsty Hooper, Writing Galicia into the World: New Cartographies, New Poetics 6 Ann Davies, Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Space and Place in Contemporary Spanish Culture 7 Edgar Illas, Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City 8 Joan Ramon Resina, Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula 9 Bruno Carvalho, Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (from the 1810s Onward) LUP, Krauel, Imperial Emotions.indd 2 21/10/2013 12:57:14 Imperial Emotions Cultural Responses to Myths of Empire in Fin-de-Siècle Spain JAVieR KRAUel LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS LUP, Krauel, Imperial Emotions.indd 3 21/10/2013 12:57:14 First published 2013 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © Javier Krauel 2013 The right of Javier Krauel to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-976-1 cased Typeset in Borges by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY LUP, Krauel, Imperial Emotions.indd 4 21/10/2013 12:57:14 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Emotions, Empire, and the Tradition of the National Essay 1 Redressing the Silencing of Empire 6 Imperialism and Nationalism 12 The Spanish Empire’s Embattled Legacies 19 Imperial Legacies and National Reform 21 Imperial Emotions and the Essay on National Character 27 1 Imperial Myths and the National Imagination 43 Columbus in 1892 43 Nationalist Uses of the Imperial Past 50 Freethinkers and Empire 63 The Failure of the Federalist Critique 68 2 An Incomplete Work of Imperial Mourning: Miguel de Unamuno’s En torno al casticismo 83 Addressing the Post-Imperial Condition 83 Empire and casticismo 86 Mourning Imperial Values 94 3 Fin-de-Siècle Imperial Melancholia: Ángel Ganivet’s Idearium español 103 Theorizing Imperial Ambivalence 103 Independence, Expansion, Modernity 106 The Paradox of Empire and Melancholia 116 4 The Anatomy of Imperial Indignation: Ramiro de Maeztu’s Hacia otra España 124 Anger and Indignation 124 LUP, Krauel, Imperial Emotions.indd 5 21/10/2013 12:57:14 vi Imperial Emotions Nietzsche’s Critical History 135 The Conquest of the meseta as a Second (Imperial) Nature 140 5 The Politics of Imperial Pride and Shame: Enric Prat de la Riba’s La nacionalitat catalana 147 Catalanist Mood circa 1906 147 The Subdued Emotions of Cognition and Controversy 149 Imperialism and the Creation of National Pride 155 Witnessing the Spanish Empire’s Shame 164 Conclusion: Toward an Ethics of Imperial Emotions 175 The Vanishing of Ambivalence 176 The Moral Implications of Imperial Emotions 179 Works Cited 184 Index 200 LUP, Krauel, Imperial Emotions.indd 6 21/10/2013 12:57:14 For Virginia LUP, Krauel, Imperial Emotions.indd 7 21/10/2013 12:57:14 LUP, Krauel, Imperial Emotions.indd 8 21/10/2013 12:57:14 Acknowledgments lthough this book bears little resemblance to my dissertation, it could A not have been written without the intellectual stimulation I was lucky enough to find in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. I would like to thank my adviser, Alberto Moreiras, as well as my teachers there: Meg Greer, Walter Mignolo, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Stephanie Sieburth, and Teresa Vilarós. Barbara Herrnstein Smith deserves special thanks for her continued generosity and for suggesting the title of the book. During the time this book was being written, a number of friends and colleagues provided invaluable support of all kinds. Special thanks to my friends and family in Spain and the United States; to Raúl Antelo, Julio Baena, Anne Becher, Amy S. Carroll, Juan Pablo Dabove, Daniel Gilden, Luis González del Valle, Patrick Greaney, Juan Herrero Senés, Asunción Horno-Delgado, Edgar Illas, Ricardo Landeira, Jorge Marturano, Alejandro Mejías-López, Javier Rivas, José María Rodríguez García, Biel Sansano, José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, Doreen Williams, and my colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado, Boulder; to Rolena Adorno and Peter Elmore for their careful reading of, and critical responses to, significant portions of the manuscript; to Roberta Johnson for inviting me to present parts of the manuscript at UCLA at the Southern California Peninsularistas meeting in 2011, an event that was important for the overall project; to Brigitte Shull for her interest in the project; to Elena Delgado for believing in it; to the readers for Liverpool University Press for their suggestions; to Sue Barnes, my production editor at Carnegie Book Production, for her attentive editorial work; and to Anthony Cond, my editor at Liverpool University Press, for his assistance, patience, and good humor. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge permission to publish earlier versions of two chapters in the present book: Chapter 1 is an expanded version of “Notes on the Conflicting Uses of the Imperial Past: Spain in 1892,” Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, 36.1 (2011), pp. 133–62; Chapter 3 is a LUP, Krauel, Imperial Emotions.indd 9 21/10/2013 12:57:14 x Imperial Emotions slightly different version of “Ángel Ganivet’s Idearium español as Fin-de-Siècle Imperial Melancholia,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, 65.2 (2012), pp. 181–97. The grants I received in 2008 from the Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities allowed me to carry out archival research in Madrid and Barcelona that was crucial to the arguments put forward in Chapter 1. Students in my graduate seminars “Making the Imperial Past Present: Literature and National Memory” (Spring 2010) and “The Poetics of the Essay in Modern Spain” (Spring 2012) helped me refine many of the claims defended in this book and provided intellectual company along the way. The manuscript benefited greatly, more than I will ever be able to repay, from stimulating intellectual conversations with Virginia C. Tuma who, in addition to sharpening the whole manuscript, was kind enough to carefully review it and rigorously edit it. I thank her from the bottom of my heart for this and much else. The book is dedicated to her. LUP, Krauel, Imperial Emotions.indd 10 21/10/2013 12:57:14 Introduction: Emotions, Empire, and the Tradition of the National Essay Introduction n the more than five hundred years of Western expansion, scarcely I another imperial history has stirred up as passionate a dispute as that of the Spanish empire in the Americas. Long-standing and acrimonious, the beginnings of this dispute can be traced back to the beginnings of the Spanish Empire itself, when Bartolomé de Las Casas painfully recounted some of the horrors of colonization in his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552), a book that decisively contributed to the international condemnation of Spanish history known as the “Black Legend.” The Latin American Wars of Independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century were also an occasion to stage bitter criticisms of Spain’s New World empire, as was the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898. In contrast to these passionate critiques of imperial history, nineteenth- century Spanish leaders generally regarded sixteenth-century imperial achievements with pride, which resulted in early twentieth-century intellectuals having to deal with a series of ambivalent, emotionally charged images of the conquest and colonization of the Americas in their attempts to reimagine a post-empire Spain. More recently, on the occasion of the 1992 celebrations of Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, Spain’s cultural and political establishment claimed the glory of those events for itself, transforming them into proof of Spain’s modernity and

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