This dissertation questions the analytic categories that have been used to study nineteenth century Mexican and Latin American literatures and culture. My dissertation explores the way aural and sonic culture impacts fiction and non-fiction narratives during a period of high economic liberalization and State consolidation. I draw upon the fields of sound studies and literature, to analyze the Mexican fin-de-siècle marked by the emergence of a sonic excess, which I define as the proliferation of sounds (technological and human) that modified arts and politics during a period of nation dependent integration into a global economy.

I work on the concept of aural regimes and performative listening, where I explore the ways in which gender and modernista aesthetics are projected and heard in the noises of modern cities such as Mexico and Paris. I analyze how gender is learned, represented, reinforced, or contested in the aural regime. Here, categories of the feminine (and their intersectionality with race and class) are constituted within spatial sound environments where power, inequality and agency are manifested in the sonic field. Sound becomes a signifier that helps us to understand how power relations, gender, and aesthetics are constructed. I also study a war narrative, Tomochic, an historical novel that gives account of a military campaign to reduce and silence a popular upheaval in northern Mexico as an audionarrative, this is a narrative informed, mainly, through different points of auditions, voices, and war sounds, shifting the naturalist and realist narratological conceptualization of nineteenth century approaches. Additionally, I analyze, for instance, sound representations in a non-fiction travel narrative from the perspective of intellectual Justo Sierra who travels to the United States from Mexico City, noticing that in his geographical displacement there is also an epistemological one that takes him from the lettered city to the audible city, in which the power of writing assimilated by the political order, is affected not only by the hegemonic discourses of elites, but by the noises and sounds of multicultural North American cities.

In this sense, war, material and popular culture, and fiction and non-fiction narratives allow me to reinterpret the turn of the 19th century archive in terms of sound ecologies informed by gender, economics, technologies, and nation building and social movement processes.

Abstract

Writing Spain: Race, Migration, and the Construction of the Pueblo by

Holly Jackson Weiss

Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley

Professor Daylet Domínguez, Co-Chair

Professor Dru Dougherty, Co-Chair

Focusing on literature from the twentieth century, this dissertation analyzes how intellectuals have represented the pueblo of Spain through the lens of personal or intergenerational experiences of migration and diaspora. The dissertation considers work by Southern Spaniards, Catalans, Latin Americans and North Africans on the Peninsula, asserting the centrality of postcolonial and plurinational figures—largely absent from Spanish cultural studies or confined to niche canons—to antifascist critiques of Spain. The dissertation focuses on the junctures that punctuate narratives of twentieth-century Spain: the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, and the Transition to Democracy. Noting the unresolved and discursive quality of these events, the dissertation looks at their representation in the work of Nicolás Guillén, Juan Goytisolo, Najat El Hachmi and others; these writers problematize the imaginaries of race, ethnicity and nation that are latent in official national narratives.

Through analysis of the poetry of Latin American intellectuals, the dissertation shows antifascism in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War to be an anticolonial project, reconceiving the 1930s resurgence of transatlantic solidarity as a decolonial practice of critique. The dissertation then considers the mid-century turn to neoliberalism in Spain through analysis of an exilic memoir, arguing that the economic dispossession of Spain’s southern emigrants and the simultaneous rebranding of the Mediterranean coast as a postcard-ready paradise are the economic and representational legacy of colonial Cuba. From there, the dissertation analyzes two memoirs by Moroccan-born Catalans, arguing that Reconquista-era ethno-racial constructs are central to the discourse of Catalan identity that reemerged in the Transition to Democracy.

Tracing the ways in which the (re)appropriation of the idea of Spain happens in the sign of the pueblo, the dissertation invokes this category as one that is as deconstructive as it is constitutive of Spain, and proposes pueblo as the nation in its erased, unofficial, nonlinear and pluralist histories, on the one hand, and as a hermeneutical category for imagining a community through critique of power relations, on the other. In its reading of transatlantic, transmediterranean and subnational constructions of the pueblo, the dissertation posits an archive that dismantles the homogenizing, centralizing and modernizing discourses of the last century in Spain.