Traveler, There Is No Road: Theatre, the Spanish Civil War, and the Decolonial Imagination in the Americas
252
Traveler, There Is No Road: Theatre, the Spanish Civil War, and the Decolonial Imagination in the Americas
252eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
This book offers a unique perspective on 1930s theatre and performance, encompassing the theatrical work of the Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Spanish diasporas in the United States, as well as the better-known Anglophone communities. Jackson-Schebetta situates well-known figures, such as Langston Hughes and Clifford Odets, alongside lesser-known ones, such as Erasmo Vando, Franca de Armiño, and Manuel Aparicio. The milicianas, female soldiers of the Spanish Republic, stride on stage alongside the male fighters of the Lincoln Brigade. They and many others used the multiple visions of Spain forged during the civil war to foment decolonial practices across the pasts, presents, and futures of the Americas. Traveler conclusively demonstrates that theatre and performance scholars must position US performances within the Americas writ broadly, and in doing so they must recognize the centrality of the hemisphere’s longest-lived colonial power, Spain.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609384913 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2017 |
| Series: | Studies Theatre Hist & Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 252 |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Traveler, There Is No Road
Theatre, the Spanish Civil War, and the Decolonial Imagination in the Americas
By Lisa Jackson-Schebetta
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2017 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-491-3
CHAPTER 1
Spectacles of Gender and Nation
Red Carmens within and without History
When the Spanish army revolted in Morocco and mainland Spain on July 17, 1936, the Nationalist offensive easily won some cities in Spain. Despite resistance from police forces loyal to the Republican government, within hours the Nationalists took possession of Pamplona, Zaragoza, Oviedo, Salamanca, Ávila, Segovia, and Cádiz. Although the Republic retained the loyalty of the navy, its most immediate needs were on land. While the government debated its options, civilians in Málaga, Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid took matters into their own hands. Local political organizations and trade unions called upon civilians to arm themselves. Men and women hoisted hunting rifles onto their shoulders or stormed armories to confiscate weapons. Women helped seize both the Montaña Barracks in Madrid and the Atarazanas Barracks in Barcelona. Men and women constructed barricades of household furniture, sandbags, and lumber to defend their homes and their Republic.
As Spain's civilians created improvised militia companies, Spain's government realized quickly that the army's rebellion would not be put down easily. Scrambling for international aid to reconstitute the army, the Republican government, in coordination with local trade unions and political parties, created makeshift recruitment centers for civilian volunteers. On July 24 the first government-supported volunteer militia, the Durruti Column, headed from Barcelona toward the Aragón front. Named for anarchist hero and legend José Buenaventura Durruti Dumange, the column was enthusiastically supported by and peopled with both men and women, many of whom were active in the thriving anarcho-syndicalist organizations of the city.
In the first few months of the civil war, at least one thousand women served the Republic in combat roles. By 1936 women had participated in wars in multiple ways all over the world: as nurses, cooks, clerics, prostitutes, war trophies, victims, and, occasionally, combatants. The Spanish milicianas were distinct in two ways. First, they constituted a significant mobilization of women solely as combatants. Second, the Republic intentionally recruited female combatants into its nation-state military.
The first months of the Spanish Civil War presented particular political problems for the Republic. In addition to defending itself from its own army, the Republic struggled to contain the murderous civilian chaos spreading throughout the country. International media covered it all, which presented an additional problem. The Republic needed to justify its cause to would-be allies. The Republic needed to show the world that it was indeed a viable democracy and not just another iteration of the same, strange, bloody Spain. The Republic's intentional recruitment of women, I contend, was motivated not only for want of bodies to fight. The Republic constructed itself as a modern European nation-state by using images and bodies of women. The Republic desperately continued its self-fashioning project through female combatants, using enlisted women to argue that its cause was indeed that of Marianne, the national symbol of the French Republic, rather than the hot-blooded, unpredictable Carmen of the Spanish literary imagination (fig. 1).
Such a strategy, anomalous to modernity, was but a stop-gap measure. By November the Spanish Civil War had sorted itself into two sides, with organized militaries along battle lines. Two sides participated in global nation-based politics through the aid of Germany, Italy, and Russia. The miliciana could not stay. In the pattern, practice, and rhetoric of modernity/coloniality, the nation depends on gendered inequities, patriarchal privilege, and centuries-old Western conventions of gendered public and private social spheres. The miliciana therefore had to go. To drive women off the front and back into the domestic sphere, in November the Republic began replacing publicity images of armed women at the front with images of women in housedresses, clutching babies and threatened by violence. The slogan "Men to the front, women to the home front" first appeared the same month. By early 1937 the Republic was depicting its female comrades in arms as untrained and unwanted nuisances, wild girls interested in adventure rather than victory, carriers of venereal disease, or prostitutes.
At the front, women's bodies were neither wholly male nor wholly female. They enacted a spectacle decidedly beyond the bounds of the Republic's desired History. Diana Taylor has written, "Both gender and nation-ness are the product of each other's performance and difficult to imagine separately." Both are also "oppositional and exclusionary — just as one is male as opposed to female, one is Argentinean as opposed to something else." If "woman" does not behave according to the expectations of modernity's states, the category of "man" is dislocated, and the concept of "nation" fragments and erodes. Gendered transgressions in the arena of military action appear uniquely volatile. The military body functions as "the material container of national identity and aspiration. It [claims] the position of the male state, guarding over the female Patria," the symbolically female-bodied national homeland. In the Spanish Republic, women's bodies had to be refeminized, rerelegated, and replaced. US anglophone theatrical representations of Spanish women at arms demonstrated the international pressure exerted on the Republic to reinstate (or rather, re-in-State) the milicianas. Yet the milicianas stayed at the front, on the ground in Spain, and in the theatrical and performative imaginary of Spanish-speaking Cuban, Puerto Rican, and peninsular Spanish diasporas in the United States. The milicianas moved through the bodies that crossed the US-Mexican border, facilitating a rhizomatic perspective of decolonial possibility across the peninsular and hemispheric past and present.
The Second Republic: La niña bonita
After its victory in the 1931 election, the Second Republic confronted and dismantled the gendered culture of Spain. Within months the government granted women over the age of twenty-three the right to vote and to run for office. The Republic legalized a woman's right to sign contracts, own property, act as a witness or guardian, and to keep her job upon marriage. In 1932 the Republic decriminalized divorce, birth control, and homosexuality and legalized civil marriages. The legislative actions of the first Constituent Cortes (parliament) brought Republican Spain up to speed with its European contemporaries while simultaneously provoking significant ire from its opponents. However, many of the advancements of 1931–1932 were repealed upon the 1933 election of the centrist Republican government. The Popular Front government of 1936 would reinstate a measure of equality between men and women, but its victory was short-lived. From July onward, the Nationalists repealed nearly every remaining Republican measure with each territorial victory.
Governmental practice was bound up with the bodies of women for both the Republic and the Nationalists as they waged their interpretative wars. For example, anti-Republican elements in Spain characterized their opponents as godless, and for them the Catholic Virgin Mary served as a model for women and as a symbol of a Spain first won by Ferdinand and Isabella. To mark the Nationalist victory in 1939, Franco ordered full military honors bestowed upon two statues of Mary, one of which had figured prominently in the expulsion of Islam from 711 to 1492, and the other in the victory against the "Turks" in 1571. Franco's enactments demonstrate the deep and gendered historical and ideological cultural memories against which the Republic fought, both within and beyond its borders.
For the Republic's would-be European and American allies, Mary evoked Catholic Spain, a Spain to be wary of for its singular history of fanaticism. Simultaneously, the figure of Carmen traipsed through the international imagination, presenting Spain as irrational, lustful, vengeful, and without moral compass. Prosper Mérimée had published his novella of the Spanish Gypsy girl and her lovers in 1845. Carmen is a cigar worker and a thief. She is quick-tempered, seductive, and savage. Georges Bizet freely adapted the novel into his opera, Carmen, which premiered in Paris in 1875 and in New York in 1885. Bizet set his opera in Seville and centered the story on the violent triangle of Carmen and her two lovers, one a bullfighter and one a soldier. Although the initial reception of the opera was mixed, the piece gained increasing popularity around the world in the coming decades. The figure of Carmen moved through visual art and theatre as well. She persists today as an icon of quintessential Spanishness.
Mary and Carmen stood as powerful opposite examples of female identity in Nationalist Spain. The Republic countered by marshaling women's bodies in its interpretative battle, using women to fashion a history of native-born republicanism that was legitimately and viably parallel to that of Europe. The Republic's strategy supported its claims to modernity and its exodus from the orientalized coloniality of monarchical Spain. In the 1920s Spanish artists and intellectuals mined their own pasts for women who could counter Mary and Carmen. Public dissemination of the resulting representations ignited aesthetic and political fears and desires.
For example, Federico García Lorca spent years trying to secure a director or producer for his play Mariana Pineda. Whether the play was turned down because of personal tastes or the political climate is still debated. Undeniably, its subject matter, the life of Mariana Pineda, steeped in the revolutionary fervor of the antiabsolutist, French Revolution–inspired 1830s, was a volatile story to present in 1924 in Spain. The country was three years into the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, mired in unsuccessful colonial wars in North Africa, convulsed with domestic dissent, and harboring rapidly developing Republican voices. Actively antimonarchist for most of her life, Pineda was sentenced to death when authorities found a flag of purple, yellow, and red in her home. The colors of the flag signified an alliance with Spanish liberalist factions of the 1800s, the first democratic movement in Spain after the French invasion of 1808. Pineda's flag, embroidered with the words "Liberty and Fraternity," evoked anti-Napoleonism. More dangerous, it broadly connoted anti-imperialism and antimonarchism for Spain.
Accused of treachery and treason, Pineda died by firing squad in 1831. Margarita Xirgu, a risk-taking Catalan-born actor and producer on the rise to celebrity, ultimately agreed to produce and star in Lorca's dramatic rendering of Pineda's life. The production of Mariana Pineda was among the first explicit theatrical attacks on the Spanish state and one of the first visions for what would become the Republic. It also demonstrated the way in which (emerging) Republicans used images of women to construct their ideals of nationhood (fig. 2).
After its 1931 victory, the Republican government also developed images of women to position Spain as legitimately located within the ideological continuum of the European Enlightenment and European Republicanism. The Republic iconographically figured its new nation, its "niña bonita" (lovely young girl) in the tradition of the French Marianne. Although Marianne positioned the Second Republic as being in line with European Republicanism, she also functioned to construct a continuity of Spanish Republicanism. Marianne-esque imagery had represented Spain's First Republic of 1873–1874. The Second Republic resurrected the first as if the first were an origin point and the intervening years had been a period of Republican development rather than a period fettered by political infighting, profound class inequality, and totalitarian rule. The moniker "la niña bonita" performed a similar task. The term had referred to the First Republic as well, but it probably reached even farther back, having been used by Spanish liberals and the circles of none other than Mariana Pineda in the post-Napoleonic 1800s, a historical moment on which anti-monarchist artists and intellectuals drew fervently in the 1920s and early 1930s and returned to in 1936, continuing into and through the chaotic violence.
When the military revolted in 1936, the people of Spain took up arms, motivated by political idealism and conviction but also by vengeance, terror, and personal grievance. Barricades bifurcated city streets, and apartment windows became sniper posts, coercing civilians to battle one another. The first months did not appear to be a legible war, either within Spain or to its outside observers. Both the military and the government struggled to maintain order among civilians. The international press showed images of razed churches, the contents of tombs emptied onto the street amid heaps of dead clergymen, and it laid the blame on the pro-Republican factions. Horror stories of mass murder, systematic rape, and mutilation by rebel (anti-Republican, Nationalist) troops and rebel-supporting civilians circulated throughout the country. Simultaneously, Spaniards also used the war as an excuse to commit personally motivated violence against their neighbors.
International media, of course, were not immune to propaganda, half-truths, or the politically or economically motivated inflation of narrative and interpretation. Nevertheless, the first months of war in Spain, scholars agree, was little more than a riot of violence. Jay Allen's report from Badajoz, first published in the Chicago Tribune, captured the climate. Badajoz fell to the Nationalists on August 14. Allen arrived a week later to find large puddles black with blood and rotting corpses. The victors continued to round up resisters. Allen witnessed Nationalist troops stop a man in the street and yank his shirt open to search for the telltale sign of Republican sympathies: a bruise on the shoulder, acquired from firing a rifle over and over. Nationalists took their arrested offenders to the bullring to face machine guns. Allen recounted that "eighteen hundred men — there were women, too — were mowed down there in some twelve hours." The terror of the summer of 1936 targeted all Spaniards with assassination, sexual violation, or imprisonment.
In 1936 the Republic faced three key problems. First, it needed a militia. Second, it needed order. Third, it needed its prospective allies, including the United States, France, and Britain, to aid it. The Republic resorted again to women's bodies — those of past female combatants — to appeal to its potential allies. Past warrior women firmly circumscribed within modernity were not anathema to the identity-making projects and processes of the Spanish Republic. Augustina de Aragón fought Napoleon in Zaragoza in 1808. Aida Lafuente died in combat in Asturias in October 1934. The Republic used both women to promote its foundational values: freedom, antiabsolutism, and the patriarchal hegemony of the modern nation.
Xosé-Manuel Núñez-Seixas describes how Republicans hearkened back to "the most well-known resistance myths in Spanish history" to support their cause. Spanish resistance to Napoleon from 1808 to 1813 featured prominently. In 1808 Napoleon Bonaparte sought to place his brother on the Spanish throne. Napoleon (not unlike the rebels in 1936) planned a rapid victory. Spain was a poor nation, and its army should have been no match for the French. Yet the Spanish managed to resist. What had been envisioned as a regional battle became a six-year civil war. Both the Nationalist and the Republican factions in the 1930s claimed the Spanish resistance to Napoleon as their antecedent defense against foreign invaders.
The Republic focused on the siege of Zaragoza. The legend of the actions of Augustina de Aragón provided ready fodder for its Marianne nation, now in arms. In Zaragoza, the story went, the French had massacred all the soldiers who were defending the Portillo battery. As French troops stormed the battery, Aragón rushed into the breach. She took a match from a dead Spaniard's hand and lit the Portillo's cannon to fire upon and defeat the French advance. She was given a medal and a commission; artists and poets from within and without Spain (most notably Lord Byron) celebrated her. The painter Francisco Goya immortalized her in plate number 7 of Disasters of War, titled "What Courage!"
John Lawrence Tone describes how early 1800s Spain used the image of women in battle to "demonstrate that all Spaniards, even women, were resisting Napoleon." He further points out that because "all of Spain was a battlefield" under Napoleon's occupation, women "became belligerents" but took up arms only in "certain exceptional situations." The 1936 Republic used similar rhetoric. Aragón could thus be understood, both in her time and in 1936, as acting in extreme circumstances; there was no other choice for her — all the men around her were dead, and absolutism was advancing. She was immortalized through her exceptional action.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Traveler, There Is No Road by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta. Copyright © 2017 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Decolonial Spain 1. Spectacles of Gender and Nation: Red Carmens within and without History 2. The Making of a Transatlantic Sister Republic: Good Neighbors and Air Raids in Spain 3. “Everyone Has His Lorca”: Andalusi Pasts and US and Caribbean Resistance 4. Moros a la costa: Blackness and the Spanish Civil War 5. Dramaturgies of No-Where: Exile and Repression in Spain and the Americas Conclusion: Worlds Otherwise Notes IndexWhat People are Saying About This
“With considerable imaginative verve and intellectual breadth, Traveler, There Is No Road investigates several unheralded dimensions of both Spain and of the Spanish Civil War.”
“This compelling text uses the frame of the Spanish Civil War as a concrete site to generate productive intersections between the discourse of the ‘circum-Atlantic’ and the hemispheric. Traveler, There Is No Road demonstrates the complexities of Spain’s position in Europe and its crucial, lingering influence in a political and cultural understanding of the Americas. Spain becomes a central site for a shifting understandings of the legacies of European colonialism.”