Featured Faculty Research: Joan Ramon Resina

I came to Stanford in 2006, after nearly a decade at Cornell University and previous appointments at Stony Brook, Northwestern University and Williams College. I hold two Ph.Ds., one in Comparative Literature from U.C. Berkeley, another in English from the University of Barcelona. At Stanford I was privileged to establish the Iberian Studies Program at the Europe Center and to transform a traditional department of Spanish and Portuguese into a cutting-edge Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures.

Although as a comparatist my work has a strong concentration in literature, with several books on various subjects and periods, over the years I have worked on a broad range of cultural issues, from urban studies and cinema to history and political science. Since moving to Stanford, I have published Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (Stanford University Press, 2008), a cultural history of the city of Barcelona from the late 19th to the first decade of the 21st century. This book traces the rise of Barcelona as Spain’s showcase city during the Universal Exposition of 1888 and the Universal Exhibition of 1929, through the bleakness of the post-civil war years and the long dictatorship to the cultural renaissance of the 1970s and 80s and the Summer Olympics of 1992, to the fizzling of the city’s creative force in the 2000s through an overexploitation of image politics and the tourist industry. My next book, Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos (Biblioteca Nueva 2009), was a metadisciplinary reflection on the limitations of institutionalized “Spanish studies.” It argues that this discipline has long served the nationalizing agenda of the Spanish state, creating an academic habitus (Pierre Bourdieu’s term) with little epistemic relation to the cultural complexity of the Iberian Peninsula. The book makes a case for the replacement of Hispanism with a new discipline of Iberian Studies that embraces the cultural and linguistic plurality of the Iberian peninsula, emphasizing a relational approach to its distinct cultures. This approach differs from the traditional understanding of “Iberian” as the juxtaposition of the cultural and political histories of two nation states, Spain and Portugal (and their former colonies). I claim that the exclusion of the cultural production of the other Iberian nationalities has led to a lopsided understanding of the whole.  

My interest in literary journalism and my regular contribution of opinion pieces to various newspapers led me to explore the figure of Josep Pla, one of Europe’s most engaging literary journalists of the 20th century. Josep Pla: Seeing the World in the Form of Articles (Toronto UP, 2017) is the first and thus far the only critical study in English of this master of Catalan prose. Pla, a prolific writer whose work only recently began to be translated to English, was a witness of the 20th century’s crucial events, reporting on European affairs as correspondent in Paris and Berlin in the 1920s and early 30s, traveling to the Soviet Union in the 20s and writing one of the first journalistic accounts about that political experiment, directly reporting Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922, and the declaration of the second Spanish Republic from Madrid in 1931. Besides his lifelong interest in politics, Pla, in a sprawling mass of articles and books totaling 45 volumes, was a keen observer of all aspects of social life: history, travel, cities, boarding houses, the sea, fishing, biography, cuisine, art and literature, time, memory, death, religion, the peasantry, and many more themes. His work is a compendium of the world, somewhat like Balzac’s comédie humaine, and it has been compared with Proust’s magnum opus on memory.

Perhaps it is most striking for the finesse of the descriptions of landscape and local life.  Pla also wrote vivid fictional stories on themes ranging from the years of hyperinflation in the Weimar republic to tales of shipwreck and smugglers in Catalonia’s Costa Brava. He was a master of language, whose work is still unaccountably absent from American literary consciousness. With this book I intended to begin to remedy this absence by calling attention to the wealth of subjects and high quality of his writing.

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r many years I have occupied myself with the question of Spain’s uneasy truck with its historical memory. The problem can be traced to the country’s faulty transition to democracy, which, contrary to the myth spread by media, politicians, and historians at the time, was neither peaceful nor democratic, but the controlled outcome of a bargain in which the Francoists and the army held most of the chips. I lived through that convulsed period and have personal memories of the birth throes of the constitutional regime. Those memories include the military coup d’état of 1981, which, thwarted only by the narrowest of margins, was never investigated in its ramifications. Few protagonists were put on trial, none served full prison terms, and some were pardoned. They were semi-cooperative scapegoats for a state operation with the complicity of political parties and the highest authority. By isolating a few culprits and presenting the king as the savior of democracy, the state turned a military adventure gone awry into the self-serving myth of a mature democracy. Reframing the narrative of the events in this way helped steady the throne, which had been wobbly on account of its origin in the dictatorship. In The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society (Liverpool UP, 2017), I study the necessity and limitations of historical memory, the rise of memory politics in the late 20th century and its relation to society’s need for mourning and also its resistance to mourning. I raise issues of justice and forgiveness, claiming that, by refusing the process of mourning that took place in other post-dictatorial societies, Spain developed a false consciousness and effected the dialectical move that Hegel calls an “Aufhebung,” preserving the core values of the dictatorship in a synthetic democracy that raised the dialectic to a new historical level without resolving it.

In this book I also explore the roots of the violence unleashed by the Spanish civil war. Against most accounts of the war, I propose that the fascist coup leading to the war was to a great degree a reaction against the Republican establishment of an autonomous government in Catalonia. In different chapters I describe the experience of the large contingent of Catalan exiles in French concentration camps and as refugees in other countries. Other chapters are devoted to salient aspects of the war: the significance of the carpet bombing of Guernica by the Condor Legion in the context of aerial bombing in WWII, literary accounts of the Nazi death camps by Mercè Rodoreda and Jorge Semprún, whose autobiographical fiction I study from the viewpoint of testimony. But the book is also concerned with contemporary issues like the excavation of mass graves at the turn of the millennium, the concept of latency as a theoretical tool to explain the pervasiveness of “sociological Francoism” in present-day Spanish society, the emergence of the documentary on historical memory as a TV-specific genre, the ethical dissolution of a society that denies its atrocities, and finally, the consequences for the exhaustion of the transition pact of the tension between denial and awareness of an unhealed past.

More recently, I have edited volumes on the concept of repetition in various spheres of human experience (art, ritual, religion, education, literature, music, dance, etc.) and on the relation between forms of self-inscription, such as autobiography, and the awareness (or development) of identity. My next project is a book on the German trilogy of Italian film director Luchino Visconti. Although I would like to think that it will be completed in the foreseeable future, my interest in and anxiety about political developments in Europe and in the Iberian Peninsula is taking a great deal of my time and energy at present.

At Stanford, Joan Ramon's courses include ILAC 130: Introduction to Iberia: Cultural Perspctives; ILAC 193: The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar; COMPLIT 123/DLCL 143: The Novel and the World; and COMPLIT 366/ILAC 366: The Yellow-Brick Road to the Spanish Nation-State.