Browsing by Subject "Nationalism--Spain"

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Creating a national passion: football, nationalism, and mass consumerism in modern Spain
(2004) McFarland, Andrew Michael; Louis, William Roger, 1936-; Boyd, Carolyn P., 1944-
The introduction of football to Spain permanently changed the day-to-day lives of thousands of Spaniards in the century since. This dissertation is a study of how the sport entered the country and developed from the exclusive purview of the urban bourgeoisie into a massive entertainment industry. This transition occurred over a scant thirty years between 1890 and 1920 and has profoundly marked Spain’s history ever since. The first athletic communities were established in Spain because of the national self-doubt after the Spanish-American War of 1898, which led a generation of thinkers to ask what was wrong with their country. The proponents of athletics answered that the Spanish race had degraded physically after centuries of war and struggle. In response, the urban, Spanish middle class made physical education part of their lifestyle. They organized the Federación Gimnástica Española with branches all over the country and the influential secondary school, the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, introduced physical education into its program. These thinkers borrowed the British idea of “muscular Christianity” and sought to create balance between physical strength and mental ability. As a result, significant athletic communities developed in Barcelona, Bilbao, and Madrid, which embraced numerous sports to improve their physical hygiene and as a form of conspicuous consumption. From these athletic communities sprang groups of friends and co-workers who were interested in football. Between 1900 and 1910, the great clubs of Spain were founded and developed local identities, including F.C. Barcelona, Real Madrid C.F., and Athletic de Bilbao. As clubs grew larger, they gradually transformed into companies that catered to popular culture. In the 1910s, stadiums, stars, and sports journalists brought football into contact with the masses, seating at matches defined class distinctions, and clubs marketed their identities. Also, regulatory institutions developed such as RFEF and referee organizations that provided uniform rules to satisfy the paying fans. By 1920, everything was in place for football’s explosive growth and rise to equality with bullfighting as Spain’s most influential form of mass entertainment.
Negotiating Golden Age tradition since the Spanish Second Republic: performing national, political and social identities
(2004) García-Martín, Elena; Holloway, Vance R.
Traditionally, the study of Golden Age drama has been restricted to regarding the plays either thematically or historically, disregarding their impact upon the present. However, once on stage, these documents from the past become active constituents of a national heritage upon which the present of a contemporary society is projected. I propose Golden Age drama as an ideal vantage point from which we may discern the tensions, struggles and desires of modern Spain. Considering the Spanish Civil War as the most decisive point in the history of contemporary Spain, I focus, first, on the frequency with which selected historical plays of Lope de Vega, Cervantes and Calderón were reenacted as ideological banners by both factions in the conflict. The pervasive presence of Golden Age drama in the education, theaters and press of Republican and early Francoist Spain prompts the questioning of the role of cultural tradition as a political tool around the time of the Civil War. This approach will allow for the treatment of dramatic heritage in all its fluidity and complexity by dealing with history, not as a fixed residue, but as an artifact that may be controlled through means of cultural production, as a process that needs to be continually renewed, and as a performance where claims about tradition, culture and national identity are invariably contested. I have selected plays that focus on, and are performed by actual Spanish communities—Fuenteovejuna, Numancia, and El Alcalde de Zalamea—so as to reveal some of the dynamics between time/place, nation/community and elite/masses at work in particular interpretive moments of the Spanish tradition. This dissertation examines these plays as they have been variously represented by, the Republicans as revolutionary icons, by the Francoists as emblems of conservative nationalism, and by contemporary rural communities as episodes of local, actualized history. The contrast between these various versions of heritage yields valuable insights into the role of cultural tradition as a political, sociological and ideological tool.