The long goodbye of Marca España: affect, politics and modernity in Marta Sanz’s crime novels
-
-
[1] Department of Hispanic Studies, UC Riverside (Riverside)
-
- Localización: Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, ISSN 1463-6204, ISSN-e 1469-9818, Vol. 21, Nº. 2, 2020, págs. 255-273
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
Halfway between a paean to Spain’s accelerated modernization and prosperity and an overcompensating denial of its economic implosion in 2008, Marca España is the state-sponsored initiative to promote a positive image of Spain as an international brand. Marta Sanz’s noir writing locates the instances of the violence that lay the foundation for that triumphant representation. Her work is both a tribute to Raymond Chandler’s noir model and its dismantling within a peripheral modernity. This essay asks whether the deployment of noir tropes allows for the critical examination of social attitudes toward the socially vulnerable, or if, on the contrary, it betrays a desire to belong to an imaginary global middle class. Where natural and man-made spaces, both traditional and modern, bear the inscription of a nondemocratic global market, how does crime fiction hierarchize, negotiate and/or articulate affect, economy and politics? I claim that within the conventions of noir, Sanz speaks to the economic nonviolent crime upon which Marca España is founded.
