Addressing the Post-Imperial Condition

When a young, socialist Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) published a series of five essays in La España Moderna between February and June 1895, little did he imagine the lasting impact they would have on twentiethcentury Spanish literature. Compiled seven years later as En torno al casticismo (1902), these essays quickly became some of the most commented upon texts of the Spanish literary canon as well as the object of a bitter ideological debate within Hispanism. Critics of different ideological allegiances have used En torno al casticismo to highlight those aspects of the text that supported their particular concept of national community while brushing aside those aspects that contradicted it. Both the right and the left have used En torno al casticismo to support their own visions of the political community: on the right, Ernesto Giménez Caballero argued for the relevance of En torno al casticismo to Fascist ideals in the late 1920s, and in the late 1940s Pedro Laín Entralgo saw it as an exemplification of the Falangist ideals of the times; on the left, José Carlos Mainer, Pedro Cerezo Galán, and Carlos Serrano have recently presented En torno al casticismo as advocating a liberal nationalism, while Eduardo Subirats has decried the essays’ authoritarian, undemocratic aspects, and Joan Ramon Resina and Jo Labanyi have deplored its centralizing aspects – these last three critics advocating a more plural, decentralized, democratic vision of the political community.

Although there have been numerous interpretations of En torno al casticismo 's political thrust and ideological underpinnings, next to nothing has been written on the way in which the text addresses Spain's transition from an imperial nation to a post-imperial one. In fact, as various scholars have remarked, the Spanish Empire qua empire left only a few marks on fin-de-siècle Spanish literature (Blanco “El fin”; G. Gullón 109; Serrano, “Conciencia” 335), but Spain's imperial past certainly informed the general argument of En torno al casticismo, leaving a number of subtle, diffused traces.

Focusing on those passages of the essay that evoke the early modern Spanish Empire, my reading of En torno al casticismo will highlight the relationship between emotions attached to empire and the essay's national imagination.