Between Distant Modernities

For centuries Spain and the South have stood out as the exceptional other within U.S. and European nationalism particularly during Franco's regime and the Jim Crow era when both violently asserted a haunting brand of national selfhood. Brittany Kennedy explores this paradox not simply to compare two apparently similar cultures but to reveal how we construct difference around this self/other dichotomy. Thereby Kennedy charts a transatlantic link between two cultures whose performances of otherness as assertions of selfhood enact and subvert their claims to exceptionality. Perhaps the greatest example of this transatlantic link remains the War of 1898 when the South tried both to extract itself from and be implicated in U.S. imperial expansion and nation-building; simultaneously it marked the end of Spain as an imperial power.Given the War of 1898 as a climactic moment Kennedy explores the writings of those that come directly after this period and who attempted to regenerate what was perceived as a traditional Spain and South in an agrarian past. That desire recurs over the century in novels from writers as diverse as William Faulkner Camilo José Cela Walker Percy Eudora Welty Federico Garcia Lorca and Ralph Ellison. As these writers wrestle with ideas of Spain and the South they also engage questions of how national identity is confirmed and contested.Mainly Kennedy compares these cultures across the twentieth century to show the ways in which they perform national authenticity. Thus she explores not only Francoism and Jim Crow but varied attempts to define nationhood via exceptionalism suggesting a model of performativity that relates to other exceptional geographies.