Transitions, Restorations, Exiles: Assessing the Legacies of the Expelled Second Republic

• Autores: Mari Paz Balibrea Enríquez
• Localización: The Routledge Hispanic studies companion to twentieth and twenty-first century Spain: ideas, practices, imaginings / coord. por Eduardo Ledesma, Luisa Elena Delgado, 2025, ISBN 978-1-032-96468-3, págs. 155-167
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This chapter is concerned with the place of Republican exile in 20th- and 21st-century cultural and political discourses in Spain. By using representative examples from its cultural corpus, it focuses on ideas of Spain produced by this exile. Moreover, it discusses how exiles imagined the role they could occupy in Spain upon their return and their differing views about the possible or impossible relationship to the nation they left behind. Moreover, the chapter provides a critical account of the ways in which the Spanish state and its agents, in turn, managed the meaning of and knowledge about this exile as Spain’s “other.” Indeed, due to political and ideological reasons, neither the dictatorial nor the democratic Spanish state were willing to grant the reality of Republican exile any prominent visibility. Such attitudes turned the legacies and memories of these exiles’ defeated national projects into unacknowledged dead ends. In the democratic period the relevance of the Republican legacy for the constitution of Spanish modernity and democracy was finally debated and given its due significance, although mostly in cultural terms. Finally, the chapter will postulate the open, unfinished nature of the legacies of the Spanish Republican exile and the conditions for its recuperation. Dealing ethically with the complexities of the Republican exile does not have to be a matter of deciding how much of its legacy can be included within or needs to be excluded from Spanish national boundaries according to self-imposed rules. The key to its recuperation is to accept that other nations and collectives, not only Spain, can make a claim on its legacies and that this shared condition is not only inescapable but also something to be celebrated.