Lecture by Arnau Sala Sallent
Chaired by Eugenia Lean

Modernism developed in Spain amid the collapse of its overseas empire at the turn of the century, the rise of peripheral nationalisms within the Peninsula, and a chronic colonial war in Morocco. In this lecture, Sala examines Spanish Modernism as an effect of the mutual implication of colonial warfare and Spain’s internal national fragmentation. In particular, he traces what he calls the transcolonial imagination: the cultural logic through which Catalan, Galician, and Basque writers and artists—many of them conscripted to fight against the Rif Republic in northern Morocco—reimagined the anticolonial struggle of the Riffians as a mirror of their own situations within Spain. At a moment when colonial violence was helping to shape a distinctly Spanish form of fascism, these peripheral nationalists’ sympathies for the Riffians interrogate the limits of metropolitan anticolonialism, the dynamics of internal colonialism in Spain, and the capacities and contradictions of Modernist form in articulating solidarity across uneven imperial positions.

Fall Thursday Lecture Series events are open to Columbia-affiliated faculty, students, and invited guests. All others interested in attending, please email the SOF/Heyman at [email protected].

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