Resumen de Ficción televisiva e identidad nacional
The programming strategies of regional television are often based on the contrast between homogenization and local identity. Thus, they tend to conceal an essentialist notion of local identity, understood as a “natural” or stable entity which does not depend on social processes. This academic metadiscourse disregards the fact that “territory” is also a cultural construction, focussing on the “effects,” (i.e., aggression) of the media on those unchanging entities. Therefore, in view of policies, linguistic normalization, promotion, and the star system, the popular serials produced in Catalonia can be analyzed as constructions. A consideration of the audiovisual genres reveals that there is no such thing as Catalan fiction. The “difference” lies in the process of constructing the other, most of which is not contained in the fiction itself, but in calculated programming strategies, where territory becomes a dramatic and iconographic element. The core issue is not really “difference” itself, but the effort made by certain social groups to present a (legitimate) political action as natural and, thus, to mask the processes of confrontation and the mechanisms which that political action itself generates by promoting and defending such abstract “difference.”
