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The Other Catalans

Representations of Immigration in Catalan Literature

The first book to explore how Catalan literature has depicted the social and cultural consequences of immigration in the twentieth century.

Catalonia has for centuries been a destination for immigrants: first from neighboring regions, then from all over Spain, and in the last twenty-five years from the whole world. Currently, sixteen percent of the Catalan population was born outside Spain, and well over seventy-five percent of Catalans have a migrant origin. Yet the Catalans see themselves as a distinct society, and many of them are claiming political self-determination. 

Surveying the 1930s to the present, The Other Catalans provides a comprehensive examination of Catalan literature on immigration or by authors of migrant origin. It combines detailed readings of major texts with an awareness of the historical developments regarding immigration, providing readers with vital contextualization of migration and its literary representations. Covering both Catalan responses to immigration and literary accounts of the migrant experience, the book examines how immigration has shaped discourses of identity and otherness in Catalan culture; how the work of mourning is affected in migrant literature; how issues of language and space articulate with social and political conflict in these texts; and in what ways these issues are inflected by gender and sexuality.

304 pages | 12.52 x 8.5 | © 2024

Iberian and Latin American Studies

History: European History

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

Political Science: Political Behavior and Public Opinion


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Reviews

"It is startling that the Països Catalans (Catalan-speaking territories) have such a colourful and complex history of migration, and yet, as Josep-Anton Fernàndez points out, only a meagre presence in literature. This volume of nine essays by established and emerging scholars, together with Fernàndez’s own illuminating introduction, breaks new ground exploring the intersections of migration with Catalan (and Spanish) history, and (Catalan) national identity. It is sure to become an essential point of reference for Catalanists and Iberian scholars alike."

P. Louise Johnson, Reader in Catalan and Spanish, University of Sheffield

"The Other Catalans is an essential collection of essays to understand the full extent of the presence of immigration in Catalan literature – and the experience of migration in Catalan-speaking territories – since the early twentieth century to the present. Rather than a history of migrant literature or the representation of migration in literature, what the diverse and rich contributions to the volume explore is the extent to which the cultural production associated with the phenomenon of migration as a collectively shared experience has been and continues to be at the core of Catalan literature."

Mario Santana, Associate Professor and Academic Director of the Catalan Studies Program, University of Chicago

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction
Josep-Anton Fernàndez

Part I: Otherness and Representational Authority

1. On Masks and Cracks: Positions of Authority in the Portrayal of the Migrant Phenomenon in Catalan Literature
Mercè Picornell Belenguer

2. Egalitarian Aesthetics and the Literary Representation of Immigration: The Work of Julià de Jòdar
Àlex Matas Pons

3. The Representation of the forasters by the Majorcan Literary Generation of the 1970s
Guillem Colom-Montero

Part II: Spaces, Borders and Memory

4. To Speak the Unspeakable: Francesc Candel and the Trespass of Borders
Olga Sendra Ferrer

5. Barcelona and Valencian Immigration: Julià Guillamon’s El barri de la Plata
Teresa Iribarren

6. ‘Catalunya termina aquí. Aquí comença Vietnam’: Urbanism, Migration and Spatial Immunity in Jordi Puntí’s Els castellans
William Viestenz

Part III: Disidentification, Dislocation and Mourning

7. ‘Te deix, mare, un fill com a penyora’: Disidentificatory Intertextuality in Najat El Hachmi’s La filla estrangera
Natasha Tanna

8. Limits and Borders in No, by Saïd El Kadaoui
Roger Canadell Rusiñol

9. Mourning, Trauma and Ambivalence in the Catalan Literature of the Argentine Diaspora: Silvana Vogt’s La mecànica de l’aigua
Josep-Anton Fernàndez

Bibliography

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