Reimagining Catalonia from Havana: transcultural identities and narratives of nationalism in the literature of the Catalanists of Cuba (1908–1959)

Abstract

This thesis studies documentary traces of the activism of the Catalanist community associated with the Centre Català of Havana, concentrated mainly around the journal La Nova Catalunya (1908–1959), in order to explore what they reveal about the construction of diasporic identities and of Americanist ideas of nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century. My research proposes a contrapuntal reading of a neglected literature from a perspective that draws primarily on decolonising theories by Fernando Ortiz, in order to highlight the importance of reactivating the studied material to show the ties and tensions between narratives of nationhood and Ortiz’s concept of transculturation, thus contributing to non-Eurocentric accounts of the exchanges between Europe and the Americas. Ortiz himself, who will be shown to be a key player in this twentieth-century Catalan-Cuban milieu, will be read alongside the journal’s leading figure, Josep Conangla i Fontanilles. The research mainly draws on primary sources including an almost complete collection of La Nova Catalunya, books, and written versions of speeches. The approach relies on a theoretical and methodological corpus drawn from Cultural Studies and in dialogue with work in Catalan, Hemispheric American, Latin American and Caribbean studies.