Martin Repinecz
"Shipwrecked in the Ocean of Memories”: Migration and Postcolonialism in
Contemporary Spain"
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Abstract
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Despite its history in the 20th century as a labor-exporting country, Spain has witnessed a dramatic increase in immigration in recent decades. The ever growing presence of North African, Latin American, and sub-Saharan migrants, among others, in Spanish society has made a significant impact on this country’s visual and literary culture. While mass media representations of immigrants often reveal xenophobic fears of “invasion from the South,” other representations, especially in film and literature, have created a discourse that purports to be empathetic to immigrants’ experiences. However, even anti-racist cultural representations of immigration focus predominantly on the question of whether immigrants can be “integrated” or “assimilated” into mainstream Spanish society, and are both produced and consumed primarily by Spaniards. Thus, this cultural discourse, despite its good intentions, frequently excludes immigrants from participating in the very dialogues that are supposed to vindicate their interests. For this reason, my project will introduce the literatures of Spain’s former African colonies, Equatorial Guinean and Western Sahara, into the cultural dialogue about immigration in Spain. Consideration of these literatures, which have been indelibly marked by the effects of migration and displacement, will offer a much needed emphasis on the lived experience of migrant writers in current critical debates about immigration in Spanish culture. Taking these literatures into account will allow us to reconceive immigration to Spain as a phenomenon which is deeply rooted in global coloniality, and will ultimately call into question the very bases upon which the field Hispanists know as “Spanish literature” has been founded.
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