Poetics of politics: Narrative production of national identity in Galicia 1970-1989

Abstract:

This thesis investigates the appearance of two distinctive Galician political communities at the wake and aftermath of the pivotal conjuncture of the transition to democracy in Spain: 'the colony', first, and later 'the nation'. Taking the movement at its own word, it argues that nationalism was to a great extent sustained by a storied citation and (re)narrativization of the movement and the community from a hybrid 'colonized' and 'national-popular' identity to a purely nationalist 'popular' one.

The main body of the thesis unravels the unstable logics, tensions and effects of the discourses of colonialism and sovereignty through an in-depth examination of their key enunciative strategy: their indexical and multilayered web of storytelling practices. The negotiation of Marxism and nationalism in the movement over time is here used as a theme to explore wider issues and mechanisms of national, collective identity construction, coherence and transformation. The thesis is divided into three parts. Chapters 1 and 2 present the theoretical and methodological context of the study, which draws on post-structural theories of discourse and narrative analysis. The second part -chapters 3 to 6- introduces the socio-historical context of the case as well as the key storylines and strategies through which the 'colony' was performed. These narratives include the foundational myth of loss, the narratives of a modern colonization and the small tales of 'national-popular struggles'. The third part -chapters 7 to 9- examines the key narrative strategies of ventriloquism and metonymic displacement in the tales which de-ambiguated the movement towards nationalism and performed a new discourse of 'sovereignty, which ultimately allowed the radical movement to survive the transition.

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