Galicia, A Sentimental Nation. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
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functions rather as:
a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, over-determination, guilt, aggressivity, the masking and splitting of ‘official’ and phantasmic knowledges to construct the possibilities and oppositionalities of racist discourse. (Bhabha, 1994: 117)
The function of the colonial stereotype both as a tool for colonial subjection and as a space for oppositional resistance is thus facilitated by its structural ambivalence as a political trope. In Bhabha’s own terms, if the colonial stereotype can be taken as one of the key mechanisms for the ‘production of knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised’ (101), it is also the object of a certain anxiety of appropriation, internalized by the colonized through a fetishistic investment, in their struggle towards liberation. The trope of Galician sentimentality provides us with an eloquent example of how the idea of the colonial stereotype and its defining ambivalence has also been relevant for the context of Spanish and Galician national politics. As we shall see, the genesis and historical unfolding of the image of Galician sentimentality cannot be extricated from the interrelated processes of the Galician national awakening and Spanish state centralism, with their respective interruptions and crises, but also their mutual permeability. It is for this reason that the rhetorical and metaphorical use of the image of Galician sentimentality can be found in the vast array of cultural and historical artefacts produced by the competing discourses on the nation arising in Galicia and Spain from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, often serving different, yet interconnected, political objectives that cannot be understood simply in terms of an antithetical play of oppression and resistance. As we shall see in the course of the book, we shall come across the image of Galician sentimentality again and again in the competing discourses of Galician apolitical regionalism emerging in the late nineteenth century; in the politically aspiring nationalist movement developing in the 1920s and 1930s; in the discourse of cultural nationalism that developed during Franco’s dictatorship after the legacy of pre-war political nationalism had been estranged from the project of national reconstruction; and, of course, in the overarching discourse of Spanish state centralism taking root in several Galician-based discourses of the nation, particularly in the neo-regionalist discourses upheld by the conservative Popular Party of Galicia (the PPdG). In all these discourses, as we shall see, the trope of Galician sentimentality can be understood as an ambivalent colonial stereotype used by the dominant position seeking to disarticulate an insurgent national culture whilst facilitating a space for its controlled difference. However, it has simultaneously been of use to the oppressed national culture’s programme for self-differentiation and expression, often in ways that collude with the dominant discourses and aims.
The recurrent discursive image of Galician sentimentality is a prime example of the colonial stereotype in yet a further sense, and one that was adumbrated by Frantz Fanon’s stark theorization of national cultures under colonial domination as ‘contested culture[s] whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion’ (Fanon, 2001: 191). While the colonial stereotype’s ambivalent structure allows for a politically versatile combination of ‘desire and derision’ (Bhabha, 1994: 96) which is differently exploited by dominant and insurgent positions, the network of associated values elicited by the stereotype is often aligned with meanings that have been negatively connoted in a hegemonic politics of representation. Hence recurrent explanations of what Fanon called the ‘constitutional depravity’ of the colonized (2001: 32) systematically refer to traits such as their congenital incapacity for logic, their sexual degeneracy and their spiritual insensitivity to transcendence, where such markers are understood as devalued by a Eurocentric logic of bourgeois morality and capitalist imperialism. It is in this framework that the identity marker of sentimentality emerges as a negative trope related to inadequacy and lack. Two bodies of critical work have helped me formulate the link between colonial discourses and gendered politics of representation, which forms the theoretical basis of this book. First, gender critiques of Orientalism such as those by Sara Mills (1991), Regina Lewis (1996) and Meyda Yeğenoğlu (1998) have demonstrated that processes of colonial ‘othering’ have seldom been separated from sexual politics, whether it be through the different uses and gratifications that men and women who invested in – or were subjected to – imperial discourses were able to effect, or in the almost systematically gendered rhetoric informing such discourses, thereby rendering the political stakes of the colonial narratives more multilayered. A central argument underlying this body of work, as well as my own, is that ‘representations of sexual difference cannot be treated as [a] subdomain [of Orientalism]’ but must be regarded as ‘of fundamental importance in the formation of a colonial subject position’ (Yeğenoğlu, 1998: 2). Second, in parallel with this line of research, the conflation of gender studies and cultural historiography has given rise to a solid body of work tracing the gradual semantic deterioration of the notion of sentimentality, which went from functioning as the desired token of civilized refinement and sensibility in eighteenth-century central Europe to being a marker of poor aesthetic value, widely associated with a particular type of narrative genre developing in late nineteenth-century Western literary traditions, directed to a growing market of women readers and focused mainly on female characters. The work of the feminist scholar Suzanne Clark has traced how the trope of sentimentality in cultural production has fulfilled the double function of promoting ‘a stereotyped and normalizing emotional responsiveness that both defined the value of feminine discourse and trapped women within it’ (Clark, 1994: 97), thereby sealing the binary distribution of reason and emotion as two hierarchically gendered spaces. Thus sentimentality is aligned, on the one hand, with images of the undeveloped, uncritical or infantilized mind, and, on the other, with low qualitative value, especially in processes of aesthetic canonization. As the work of Andreas Huyssen has influentially shown, ‘the persistent gendering of that which is devalued’ was a central discursive strategy for turn-of-the-century Western intellectuals, at a time when the anxiety of contamination between high and low, mass and elite forms of culture was becoming a staple of the times (1986: 53). The semantic devaluation of sentimentality as a feminine trope occurring in cultural discourses of this period serves as a prime example of such reactive positions: if coupled with the processes of national awakening and struggle within and against European state apparatuses also emerging at this time – from the British Isles to Spain – we see how the trope of sentimentality emerges as a feminizing colonial stereotype, of particular strategic value against national insurgence movements that were seen as a challenge to still unstable state politics.
I shall add another theoretical viewpoint to this introductory discussion, before I turn to the historical account of how the trope of Galician sentimentality became a double-sided canvas on which both the discourses of Galician national awakening and anti-peripheral Spanish state centralism were inscribed. For, if sentimentality underwent a process of semantic deterioration through feminization that was useful for the preservation of modernist cultural hierarchies, it is no less true that in colonial/national contexts the trope of sentimentality found its political actualization in the image of the sentimental – and therefore feminized – Celt. As postcolonial critics of English imperialism such as Robert C. Young and Janet Sorensen have shown, the feminization of the ‘Celtic’ fringes became a recurrent trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century national discourses in the British Isles. The image of the feminized Celt functioned doubly as a discursive tool with which to estrange the subsumed nations of Wales, Ireland and Scotland from English power centres, but also as a means of debilitating their potential for full-fledged political nationhood. In her study of how linguistic practices and theories in eighteenth-century Britain reveal the range of politically motivated representations of the various conflicting national variants (English, Scottish, ‘British’, etc.), Sorensen did not fail to acknowledge the centrality of gender in imperialist power play (Sorensen, 2000). From the feminization of the Welsh-inflected language of the working-class characters in Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Sorensen, 2000: 106), to representations of ‘a disempowered and feminized’ Scottish Gaelic as connotative of a ‘beautiful but defeated state’ in John Clark’s preface to The Works of the Caledonian Bards (190–1), Sorensen traces how British imperial cultural strategies were awash with references to the ‘Celtic peripheries’ as feminized, in an attempt to prefigure their ‘political quietude’ (Sorensen, 2000: 29). Such were the cultural and political underpinnings of European Romanticism’s interest in Celtic