Browsing by Author "Hernández-Adrián, Francisco Javier"

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Open Access
Dena Ongi Dabil! ¡Todo Va Dabuten!: TensiÓN Y Heterogeneidad De La Cultura Radical Vasca En El LÍMite Del Estado DemocrÁTico (1978-...)
(2007-08-15) Saenz de Viguera Erkiaga, Luis
This dissertation examines the ways in which a youth radical culture developed in the Basque Country after the Spanish Transition from Francoism to a democratic state in the late seventies and early eighties. In the midst of a conflict between national hegemonies, Basque Radical Culture emerges as an exodus away from that hegemonic struggle without an abandonment of politics (such as other youth "movidas" proposed in the Spanish State at the time). On the contrary, Basque radical youths, through self-organization and opposition to hegemonic mores, created a space on the edge of the social matrix defined by two competing legitimacies: Basque Nationalism and the celebratory discourse of the Democratic Spanish State. The main questions I address are how to approach a phenomenon that is imbued with the effects and affects of conflicting accounts of the nation; how radical culture subverts the totalizing tendencies of hegemonic narratives; and, finally, how radical culture operates as a limit of society that dispels the triumphant historical accounts of the Spanish Transition, yet also confronts Basque Nationalism and its contradictions. As an edge of the social space, Basque Radical Culture will engage with the ruins of both Spanish Democracy and Basque Nationalism at the time of Globalization. Since Basque Radical Culture has the effect of mobilizing repressive apparatuses of both the State and the Basque Autonomous regional government, the processes that criminalize radical culture will illustrate how political institutions try to eliminate any exception that neutralizes their illusions of hegemony, thus undermining the democratic quality of the political system. I will analyze these problems through a theoretical approach and a variety of music, occupations of public space, stories and histories that, rather than maintaining the political overdetermination of Basque social space, propose a critique of how that determination works in order to maintain the social fantasies of Basque Nationalism and Spanish Statalism. I will study heterogeneous objects such as punk rock music, alternative culture memoirs, and the occupation of public space in order to reconstruct a radical politics outside hegemonic struggles to gain control of institutional politics.
Open Access
Re-membering Identities: Terror, Exile and Rebirth in Hispanic Film and Literature
(2010) Barros, Joanna M.
This dissertation examines fictional representations of Argentine and Spanish authoritarianism from the position of exiled, traumatized and/or marginalized subjects. Though the primary texts and films engage questions of terror, trauma and repression from the 1930s to 80s in Spain and Argentina they stand out from works made within these contexts (that is, works lacking spatial and/or temporal distance) by focusing on how and to what extent individual and collective rebirth can arise from the ashes of terror, exile and oblivion. On the one hand, these works explore the ways in which authoritarian terror and repression maintain and are maintained psychologically, historically and ideologically in these cultures by a series of artificial separations between self and other, fantasy and reality, history and fiction, female and male, desire and responsibility, the spiritual and material, plurality and unity, the past and the future. On the other hand, these works suggest that it is by confronting the repressed authoritarian past through pluralistic, fictional, "exilic" retellings that these binaries may be transcended and that identity, history and reality itself may be radically re-membered.
In effect, the capacity to "re-member", which is revealed to be essentially synonymous with the act of "rebirth", demands a confrontation with the past that is every bit as dependent on "fantastic retellings" of both reality and fiction as it is on history or reality--to the same degree, in fact, that the realization of the self is contingent on an encounter with radical alterity. The various forms of monstrosity, exile and ambiguity that coalesce within these films and texts not only enable this to happen, but they imply that the creation of the primary work depends as much on its audience as it does on its author. Accordingly, the ethical processes these works establish, through narrative layering, ambiguity and other techniques, occur not only within the films and texts but in the outer relationships and responses they elicit from their readers or viewers.
Thus, the processes of exile and rebirth that these works establish can only be fully appreciated in dialogue with their audiences (via a "narrative ethics"), with history and with theories ranging from feminism to mysticism to psychoanalysis (drawing on Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud) to ethical philosophers, in particular, Emmanuel Levinas. In my endeavor to stimulate this dialogue, in which I both build on and depart from these theories, I reveal how and why "exile" fiction has become such a crucial medium for refiguring "identity"--a term which itself becomes inseparable from spirituality. Accordingly, spirituality is not detached from reality or fantasy, but rather buried in the repressed identities and memories that, when exposed through the "monstrous ambiguities" of fiction, reveal an indestructible bond between self and other, desire and responsibility, fantasy and reality, among other dichotomies.
At the same time that these works offer positive models of spirituality, rebirth, and re-membering, they incisively critique the repressive ways in which religion and specifically, Christianity, have been manipulated, in conjunction with authoritarian paradigms, to terrifying, repressive, "sacrificial" ends. More generally, all of these works, notwithstanding their "timeless" and exilic dimensions, represent pivotal moments in Spanish and Argentine history while at the same time revealing innate links or analogies between authoritarianism and religious doctrine. On the other hand, the timeless, placeless, exilic nature of these works helps shed light on the growing and global importance of exile film and literature as well as the correspondingly great and ever-growing need to re-examine the lost, buried and terrifying past that they re-member.