Immigration is one of the most pressing issues of our time. In the case of Spain, immigration has increased notably during the past three decades. There is no doubt that immigration has changed Spanish society, but what is the role of cultural representations regarding the migrant experience? In recent years, immigration has captured the attention of a diverse group of artists in Spain—non-immigrant and immigrant Spaniards alike. Male and female writers, filmmakers, and visual artists often challenge the biased image of migration portrayed by the media. However, these representations are also not free of prejudice. Many of these works, although conceived with good intentions, insist on the exhibition of suffering, while reinforcing sensationalist ideas of racialization, helplessness, and tragedy. Beyond these images of victimization and despair, I am interested in the counter-representations that challenge the conventional notions about immigration that prevail in Spanish media. In my dissertation I study counter-representations of immigration to contemporary Spain in the works of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Spanish authors. What I found is that – while immigration has received critical and creative attention as a tragic phenomenon –humor, parody, and ironic subversion reshape our comprehension of migration, complicate the unilateral image presented by the media and other forms of mainstream representation, and criticize the spectacularization of the suffering migrant. I argue that the works of Spanish non-migrant authors such as Eduardo Mendicutti, Juan Bonilla and Hernán Migoya, and Spanish migrant artists such as Quan Zhou Wu and Yellow Power among others, use humor as a rhetorical strategy that contests stereotypes about immigration. Focusing on forms of cultural representation such as urban art, graphic novels, science fiction novels, and animated short films, this interdisciplinary project bridges literature, film, and popular culture produced by canonical and non-canonical authors, opening new lines of research on these untapped discourses on immigration. The works that I study distance themselves from a paternalistic model and propose different versions of the immigrant. I study these works as cultural manifestations that parody certain negative attitudes of Spanish society against immigration. I pay attention to how these attitudes are articulated through humor, and simultaneously exercise a satirical self-criticism of Spanish identity.

The year 1992 marked a turning point for Spain. The Barcelona Olympics, the Seville World Exposition, and the Quincentennial of Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas kickstarted a renaissance for the Iberian country, as it entered into a globalized economy. Though the 1992 celebrations were criticized by many for their problematic glorification of Spain’s colonial history, this particular year also gave birth to a newfound interest in Cuba, one of Spain’s most precious colonies, lost in 1898. Literary texts, films, documentaries, photographs, and art focused on the Caribbean island began circulating in Spain in an unprecedented manner, as artists and the public alike showed a growing enthusiasm towards Cuba, its history, and its culture.

By analyzing novels, theater, a tourist guidebook, a film, and two photographic series, this interdisciplinary and transatlantic dissertation studies the image of Cuba promoted through the work of Spanish women writers (Carme Riera, Magrarita Aritzeta, Mar�a Teresa �lvarez, �ngel Aymar i Ragolta, Isabel Segura) and photographers (Cristina Garc�a Rodero, and Isabel Mu�oz) between 1992 and 2015. I maintain that though conceived with good intentions, the literary and cultural productions discussed herein offer a simplistic, stereotypical, and at times fetishizing image of Cuba. Most works fail at openly criticizing Spain’s dark colonial history and choose, instead, to grant Spanish women a voice, an agency, and a subjectivity, wishing to rescue them from historical oblivion. While significant, this “gendered choice” is nevertheless paradoxical, for it obscures the role that Western women, alongside men, played in the colonization process and in the oppression of others.

The westernized images of Cuba offered by the writers and photographers in this project, as well as the omission of Spain’s colonial actions, support what scholars call imperialist nostalgia—the longing for a past whose brutality has been concealed and forgotten. The works that I study are the offspring of this particular form of nostalgia, which finds its truest expression in the problematic clich�s and images used, during the last thirty years, in Spanish literature and photographs focused on Cuba, as well as in Spain’s new forms of economic colonialism on the island.

This dissertation examines the aesthetic of the grotesque in contemporary Spanish cultural production (1975-present). I maintain that in the aftermath of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), film directors and writers resort to the grotesque to unveil the contradictions of the political narratives of the Transition to Democracy in order to destabilize them. For these authors, the grotesque is the key instrument used to challenge the perception of Spain as a paradigm of democratic transformation: they contest the celebratory democratizing discourse of the Transition, undermine the reconstruction of national and political identity in Catalonia, and question and denounce the negative social and political effects of the Pact of Forgetting in twenty-first century Spain.

In the first chapter, I study how Luis García Berlanga's film Patrimonio nacional (1981) and Pedro Almodvóar's film ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (1984) criticize the presumed modernization and democratization of the period. Against the grain, their authors present the survival and continuity of traditional Spain and Francoism as grotesque. In the second chapter, I explicate how Juan Marsé's novel El amante bilingüe (1990), Bigas Luna's film La teta y la luna (1994), and Albert Boadella's theater play Ubú president o Los últimos días de Pompeya (2001) subverted the vision of Catalan national identity propagated after Franco's death by Catalan President Jordi Pujol via grotesque satires of cultural normalization initiatives, Europeanist ambitions, and the political persona of Pujol himself. In the third chapter, I examine how Laila Ripoll's theater play Santa Perpetua (2010), Álex de la Iglesia's film Balada triste de trompeta (2010), and Hernán Migoya's novel Una, grande y zombi (2011) address the deliberate suppression of historical memory that defined the Transition. In these three works, the grotesque is the fundamental element employed to challenge the silencing of the traumatic legacies of the Civil War and the Franco regime.

Cinematic Loss investigates the late Weimar Republic’s film legacy, which survives today in fragmentary form, and raises questions about how film historiography addresses absence. Taking a closer look at the final democratic years before the rise of Nazi rule, this study explores the works of German-speaking Jewish filmmakers in Germany from 1929 to 1933 and proposes systematic searches for their lost films in archives and private collections. The focus of film studies has traditionally been on narrative structure, cinematography, editing techniques, and mise-en-scene. Between 1980 and 1990, the archival turn in film studies redirected attention to broader historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. As a result of this shift and technological advancements, scholars can access archival resources more easily, making it easier to analyze missing films. By drawing on preservation debates, this project explores the challenges posed by ontological realism and proposes alternative approaches that consider the uncanniness and gaps inherent in historical discourse. Studying the dynamics between lost and found films highlights the extent of material decay and the potential for restoration. Examining ephemera, this project emphasizes their aesthetic value and broader perspectives beyond the films themselves. Cinematic Loss challenges the idea that ephemera should be considered a last resort in film analysis and emphasizes the importance of engaging with the medium of film in all its forms. Through a comprehensive research effort, this project contributed to the rediscovery of numerous lost films. An extensive search of international archives and private collections led to the discovery of a substantial number of missing films. Considering paper collections, sound elements, and images, among other crucial components, greatly facilitated the systematic search. A researcher’s ability to recognize and include cinematic absence as an object of study within their own work is essential to finding and recovering long-lost cinematic artifacts. One can only find something when one understands what one is looking for. Therefore, the inclusion of missing films into cultural histories facilitates their rediscovery, preservation and restoration by breaking the silence surrounding their existence. In addition to recovering films from the period, this work contextualizes them within their cultural milieu. Among the topics explored are the transition from silent to sound films, the notions of nationality and belonging, and the emergence of a transnational form of cinema in the early 1930s. Taking a closer look at these topics sheds light on the broader significance and implications of the recovered films. Moreover, the study discusses the efforts made by film archives, German government funding for preservation, and the importance of collaboration between archives and private collectors. Cinematic Loss discusses the challenges and methodologies involved in restoring lost films. It emphasizes the need to preserve ephemera and contextual information for future use by archivists and researchers alike. As a final component, this work contains a digital companion piece, the Weimar Talkies Project, which provides summaries and reviews of feature-length sound films from the Weimar Republic, which serve as a valuable research and educational resource. Through archival searches and critical research efforts, this work contributes to the revitalization of the Weimar Republic’s film legacy by engaging with the absence of historiography in film. Cinematic Loss sheds light on a crucial period in German cinema history and enriches our understanding of cultural artifacts from the past.