Abstract
What does it mean to write in Catalan? What does ‘Catalan culture ’ mean? And what does it mean to build a literary oeuvre? The life trajectories of the authors analysed in this volume enable us to explore these questions from the inside. Catalan culture and language originated in the early Middle Ages. This introductory chapter takes a modern stance and analyses the development of linguistic, literary and social identity in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
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- 1.
We quote the toponims according to their Catalan original spelling.
- 2.
‘Invented tradition’ intends to mean “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacit accepted rules and a ritual of symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, when possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983: 1).
- 3.
This expression came from P. Cheah, a former Anderson’s student, and he elegantly endorsed it. See the criticisms gathered by J. Culler and P. Cheah in the collective volume devoted to this notion from a literary and anthropological perspective (2003).
- 4.
Cfr. El compromis literari en la modernitat. Del període d’entreguerres al postfranquisme (1920–1980). Publicacions de la Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, 2016.
- 5.
Cfr. Salvador (2017) on Fuster’s sociopolitical commitment through his literary practice.
- 6.
“Nation-state” policies stand for a political-institutional approach that tries to make the political boundaries of the state and the presumed cultural boundaries of the nation match” (…) By contrast, “state-nation” policies stand for a political-institutional approach that respects and protects multiple but complementary sociocultural identities” (Stepan et al. 2010: 52–53).
- 7.
This notion refers to the construction of a “dual” (Moreno and Arriba 1996) or “composite” identity indicator to predict, among other things, the electoral behavior. In principle, the Linz-Moreno question consists of a self-defining scale of identity to measure social mobilization in questions of political autonomy (only Catalan and not Spanish, more Catalan than Spanish, more Spanish than Catalan, only Spanish and not Catalan). It has been recently verified that although it captures preferences when one prevails over the other, it does not record the intensity of the identity, and it is not reliable in the case of hybrid or mixed identities (Guinjoan and Rodón 2015). On the other hand, the cultural frame of reference has proved important as a cognitive filter to explain behaviors such as e.g. abstention (Fernández-i-Marín and López 2010).
- 8.
“The main nucleus of civil society is composed, today, essentially, by those institutions dedicated to the solidarity intervention in the social life.” I.e. altruistic civic associations cooperatives, alliances for the aid to the poor, civic movements for the peaceful pursuit of humanitarian interests, etc.
- 9.
The recent discovery of the Llibre dels Vuit Senyals [The book of Eight Signals] (15th century), which summarises mediaeval Catalan political principles, supports this statement. Cfr. Chap. 2 of this volume.
- 10.
The publication of España en su historia (1948) [Spain in its history], followed by La realidad histórica de España (1954) [The historical reality of Spain] (1954) [The historical reality of Spain] by Américo Castro was challenged by Sánchez Albornoz response, España, un enigma histórico (1956) [Spain, a historical enigma]. It is the vision of a historian of literature vs. a historian of the institutions. Sánchez’s vision rests on a more unitary vision, centered on institutions; Castro’s one does not. He sets Spain as the meeting point [convivencia] or the dialogue (and rupture) between three cultures, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. But even so, and already since his participation in the Board of Trustees of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1933 and his discussions with archeologist Pere Bosch Gimpera (1891–1974), Castro maintained his opposition to the “dismembering” vision of the global vision of Spain.
- 11.
“From a normative perspective, I argue that all nations—with and without states—should be encouraged to set up the conditions favoring the emergence of cosmopolitanism as an attitude compelling individuals to add a further dimension to their care and concern for fellow nationals by raising awareness about the respect, dignity, freedom and equality that should be granted to all human beings” (Guibernau 2013: 32).
- 12.
See Gerrand (2006) on the history of the Catalan campaign to win the ‘.cat’ domain. It was the first top–level Internet domain to be dedicated to a particular human language and culture by ICANN in September 2005.
- 13.
“A most striking fact is that, as of July 2013, 30 of 450 crowdfunding platforms were currently based in Catalonia. With a population of 7.5 million, this ratio makes Catalonia a special case in point calling for further examination” (Poblet 2014: 179). Verkami’s campaigns represented 40% of the total in the national territory.
- 14.
“From 1990 onwards, without immigration the inhabitants of Catalonia would never have declined, but the current population would be ceteris paribus of some 2,370,000 inhabitants. Without immigration from 1887 we would be little more than 2,200,000” (Cabré 1999: 26).
- 15.
See the studies about family, work, labour, neighborhoods and culture contained in the volume directed by Giner (1998) to understand the complex fabric of Catalan society .
- 16.
Cfr. Llobera (1998) for a discussion of the “places of memory” in Catalonia, just just as Nora (1997) proposed for the study of French nationalism (“les lieux de la mémoire”). See Resina (2000) for a reflection on the articulation and disarticulation of memory, especially political oblivion or “short of memory” in late Francoism .
- 17.
Costumbrism stands for costumbrismo, a Spanish literary genre which emerged in the 1830s and concentrated on a depiction of social and regional customs, often contrasting them with the changes brought by industrial development.
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Acknowledgements
This essay is part of the research carried out by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili’s research group Identitat Nacional i de Gènere en la Literatura Catalana and the Grup de Recerca Identitats en la Literatura Catalana (GRILC) (2017 SGR 599); the research carried out by some membres of the project “La construcción discursiva del conflicto” (FFI2017-85227- R); the research conducted at IDT-UAB on (i) “Meta-Rule of Law” (DER2016-78108-P) and (ii) “Models of Law and Catalan Political Philosophy”, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, IEC18-S05-CAS; and the research on legal governance and compliance accomplished by the La Trobe Law School LawTech research group at the CRC Data To Decisions program (DC25008, “Compliance by Design (CbD) and Compliance through Design (CtD)”.
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Casanovas, P., Corretger, M., Salvador, V. (2019). Catalan Identities: Literature, Social Commitment, and Political Engagement in the 20th Century. In: Casanovas, P., Corretger, M., Salvador, V. (eds) The Rise of Catalan Identity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18144-4_1
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