Towards a Postcolonial Spain: History, Political Cultures and Material Realities

‘Postcolonial Spain’ aims to be the first academic event to map postcolonial/decolonial theories onto Hispanic peninsular studies, aiming to diversify radically how the discipline thinks about the interconnected legacies of colonialism, empire, nationalisms, emigration, ethnicity and conflict in contemporary Spain. As the fissures of the Spanish post-1978 territorial consensus widen, this event is intended as a key intervention in the discipline of Spanish peninsular studies and into how it has ‘theorised away’ Spain’s internal national conflicts, their associated discourses and cultural manifestations and the ways in which these remain entangled with enduring forms of post-imperial reason.

Chief among the conference’s aims is to articulate for the discipline of Hispanic (peninsular) studies a new way of thinking about ongoing processes of transnational/national/regional transformation, including independence processes, with a view to re-interrogating questions of democraticity in contemporary Spain and challenging predominant nationalist paradigms. The conference also seeks to engage cultural studies scholarship with pressing socio-political processes developing in contemporary Spain, such as the Catalan process of independence, post-conflict resolution in the Basque Country and the politics of border and immigration control, all of which can be illuminated by postcolonial/decolonial forms of enquiry.