Research Diana Arbaiza

Abstract

In recent years, migration has become one of the defining features and preoccupations of European societies and a prominent literary theme. During the 1970s and 1980s, Spain experienced a wave of Moroccan migration that peaked at the beginning of the 1990s. Representations of Moroccan immigrants in Spanish media and literature have tended to be negative, shaped by a long history of tension between the two countries going back to al-Andalus, the Spanish-Moroccan War and the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. Recent years, however, have seen the emergence of a group of Moroccan immigrant writers who offer a more nuanced portrait of the figure of the immigrant and of the experience of migration. Most of these writers belong to what sociologists call generation 1.5, the generation that experienced the migration process as children accompanying their parents. This project examines how these authors represent generation 1.5 in their works and more specifically how they negotiate their multilingual environment, how they appropriate genres and oral traditions of both countries and how they depict the intergenerational dynamics of migration as well as its impact on subject formation. This interdisciplinary research, moreover, seeks to probe the relevance of the sociological concept of generation 1.5 to the field of literary studies.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Arbaiza Diana

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a spurt in cultural activity in Spain. Women's horizons were expanding, which proved fertile ground for female literary production. It was particularly in the area of popular writing that women writers excelled. Many of these authors were activists, emerging from the camps of the radical left. This project will explore the genre and anarcho-feminist thought of the popular novellas in La Novela Ideal (1925-1938), a collection published by the anarchist magazine La Revista Blanca. Classified as romance fiction, these novellas have been neglected by scholars. However, this project will highlight their relevance for a deeper understanding of the interrelation between anarchist and feminist thinking as well as the malleability of the romance genre. Using advanced machine learning methodology, I will demonstrate how these novellas advanced debates that reappeared much later in the 20th and even the 21st century. This project will also underline their contribution to contemporary feminist thought, thus enriching current-day gender studies.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Arbaiza Diana
• Fellow: De Clerck Emma

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This research introduces a critical approach to "racial passing" and its complicity with image production. In sociology "passing" is a person's ability to be regarded as a member of an identity group different from their own e.g. racial identity, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation. Someone who can pass for white is socially designated as one racial construct but performatively plays out whiteness. My research proposal grows out of a personal experience of racial passing. In my late 20s I learnt that in 1984 my mother was legally reclassified as white in apartheid South Africa She passed as white, or "played-white" (in South African vernacular) all of my childhood. Through this realisation along with a reflection on my image-making practice I embark on an investigation into passing, embodiment, self-presentation, and the aesthetic thresholds of identity. Current public debates on many European country's colonial history, its material and structural legacy, show there is no better moment to problematize this by encouraging a decolonial research approach to visual culture. Through my proposed research, I would like to extend this discussion further to the question of how colonialism is embodied in its subjects and images?

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Arbaiza Diana

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The study of Spanish colonial texts has been traditionally limited to the context of Latin America and conditioned by claims of difference in the Spanish colonial methods and discourses with regard to other European experiences. The distinct character of Spanish imperialism was typically argued to derive from practices of miscegenation and its divergent historical trajectory. The main objective of this study is to provide a theorization of the Spanish colonial discourse about the Philippines during the final years of the Spanish rule, in the last third of the nineteenth century. While other colonial powers were at their zenith in Asia, the Spanish colonial administration underwent significant readjustments at the same time as intellectuals wrote extensively about the nature of Spanish colonialism and its future in Asia. This project will analyse the literary representations of the islands in ten unknown narrative works of eight Spanish authors who travelled and lived in the Philippines. These literary articles and short stories aimed to produce knowledge in Spain about the remote colony, in line with other different political initiatives proposed by the Spanish government. The combination of all these administrative, economic, and social actions pursued a common twofold goal: to strengthen the relations between the metropolis and the colony in order to reinforce the Spanish control of the territory and prevent a possible revolution of the population of the islands – as it had previously occurred in the Latin American colonies-. Thus, in their works, the authors presented their personal experiences and considerations about the islands but offered a convenient image of the territory for the Spanish colonial interests. The research is based on a postcolonial approach, building upon different analysis of European colonial discourses about other colonized territories -mainly English and Spanish discourse about Africa and America-. This study will examine both the representation of the Filipino colonial subjects and the Spanish colonizers and it will be structured in different sections regarding the main topics described in the text: the influence of the environment, traditions and practices, gender issues - representations of masculinity and femininity-, education in the islands, and the role of the Spanish Church. The study of these subjects not only seeks to provide a holistic but detailed picture of the Spanish colonial discourse about the Philippines, but also intends to prove its close connection with the political and economic reforms implemented during this period. Finally, this research also attempts to rescue these unknown writings, which often have gone unnoticed by the critics despite their testimonial, social and literary value. The study of the Spanish colonial discourse about the Philippines in these works will provide a better understanding of the relations between the two nations, in their common colonial past and even during the years to follow.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Arbaiza Diana
• Fellow: Guillén Arnáiz Cristina

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

My research project addresses artists' books and the politics of publishing, creating forms to uncover forgotten histories in this field, through a critical design approach which includes feminist tools. I will work on a series of hybrid publications (paper, digital, spatial, oral) to re·activate objects and histories and re·circulate them. The goal of the research project is to make untold narratives visible and activate the relation with historical, present and initiatives and narratives. How to tell these stories: through individual figures, groups of people, through objects? How to fill in the blanks — address the things that disappeared and integrate them? How to archive and transmit these stories? How to shift the traditional focus on monographic objects to collective ones, from books to "ephemeras"? The artistic context of this research is that of artists' books and artistic publishing. The theoretical context is art history, and more specifically the history of artists' books, as well as gender and postcolonial studies. The political context is that of activists working to shape the way we deal with knowledge and history (depatriarchising and de-colonialising). The research methodology is built on critical, research-based design methods. Throughout, intersectional feminist (design) tools will be used, notably an attention to who speaks for whom, in order to find a balance between speaking about/for and letting the primary source speak.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Arbaiza Diana

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This dissertation project will investigate the representations of race and gender in a selected corpus of Spanish literary works about the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea. These works were written during the early Francoism (1939-1959), a period in which Equatorial Guinea was still a Spanish territory while the Philippines, not a Spanish colony any longer, was the object of imperial nostalgia in Spain. Recent studies have examined the existence of a colonial consciousness in Spanish modern literature although imperialistic dreams became especially pervasive during the Francoist period. At that time, the idea of the former Empire became an organizing symbol of Spanish nationalism and agglutinated several groups with expansionist aspirations. The doctoral student would undertake this project in the context of larger research conducted by the promotor and co-promotor around Peninsular literary works about the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea written between the late 19th century and the independence of Equatorial Guinea in 1968. Studies about the intersections between Spanish (post)colonial identity and its cultural production have mostly concentrated on the portrait of Latin America, while Spanish literary works concerning former and current territories in Asia and Africa have been far less explored. Comparative approaches between the Spanish treatment of the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea are also scarce despite presenting significant parallels as peripheral colonies. Among other parallels, this dissertation will focus on the representations of race and gender, which in these two territories did not respond to the phenomenon of mestizaje developed in Latin America. As part of its analysis on racial representation, this dissertation will investigate how the discourse of La Hispanidad appeared in these literary works. A reactionary ideology deployed by Francoism, La Hispanidad was presented as an egalitarian spiritual community composed of the past and current Spanish colonial territories. This dissertation will explore how these literary texts racialized the colonial other and employed the rhetoric of La Hispanidad. It will examine the tensions, contradictions or rhetorical strategies derived of these discursive coexistence. For its theoretical framework, this dissertation will drew upon numerous scholarly works on gender, race and nationalism in colonial discourse (Burbank and Cooper 2010, Gilroy 1993, McClintock 1995, Stoler and Cooper 1997; Wilder 2007) as well as in recent scholarship (Fischer Tiné) that has remarked the relevance of undertaking colonial discursive analysis from the perspective of affect and emotion theories (Ahmed). The approach will combine a close and distant examination of representation in texts. The distant reading will be done with digital tools and the corpus will be digitized. As a first step, the student will perform a topic modelling of the corpus and then the student will proceed to do a close reading analysis to explain the results of the key topics obtained during the first step.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Arbaiza Diana
• Co-promoter: Ortuño Casanova María del Rocío
• Fellow: Vivó Capdevila Emilio

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

From the late 1940s, cities in Spain began to grow rapidly. The mass migration of rural inhabitants resulted in the emergence of slums and shantytowns in the outskirts of the cities. The Franco regime, initially hostile to urban areas, which it saw as antithetical to its vision of society, sought to combat this phenomenon and developed a series of urban plans in an attempt to regulate—and segregate—the city. The urban discourses of the period were complex, however, and the government also encouraged, and facilitated, the construction of massive and uniform apartment complexes, which changed the face of the city. Unsurprisingly, cultural production in this period does not ignore these radical transformations. Throughout the Franco dictatorship, novelists and filmmakers interrogated aspects of the new city, often using novel forms and narrative techniques to do so, such as neorealism, science fiction, etc. The goal of this project is to analyse in what ways these narratives engaged with the Francoist city. It will argue that literature and film did not merely reflect the changing city. Rather, novelists and filmmakers actively participated in the creation of the imaginary around the city, by adopting, subverting and challenging urban discourses of the time. By looking at both Madrid and Barcelona, the project will seek to provide a full picture of the cultural reactions to Spain's large-scale urbanization during the Franco period.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Arbaiza Diana
• Fellow: Yoeli-Rimmer Nettah

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This project focuses on a literary network active in Madrid in the decades following the Spanish War. Known as Ágora (1955-1973), the group ran a publishing house, a literary journal and a poetry prize and hosted a weekly soirée that attracted some of the most notable dissident writers and intellectuals in post-war Spain. Remarkably, the group was run by a woman, Concha Lagos, in a period when women were generally excluded from public life and relegated to domestic roles. After the Civil War, Franco implemented a policy of autarchy and isolationism. Scholars have often regarded the culture of this period as cut off from both Europe and the rest of the Spanishspeaking world. This project attempts to revise this inward-looking vision of post-war literature by showing how the Ágora circle managed to create a network of writers that extended not only throughout Spain but also beyond its borders, including Latin American, American, European and exiled Spanish authors. The goal of the project is to recuperate the exchanges among these writers and to trace the role of Ágora in creating a space for dissident literature and thought in post-war Spain. More specifically, it will examine how the circle promoted writers excluded from official literary circles (women, dissidents, etc.) and created contacts with foreign writers who helped to disseminate Ágora authors abroad and whose works were in turn translated and published by Ágora in Spain.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Arbaiza Diana
• Fellow: Navarrete Navarrete Maria Teresa

Research team(s)

• Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC)

Project type(s)

• Research Project