Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish Literature and Culture ed. by Jennifer Smith and Lisa Nalbone

Reviewed by: Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish Literature and Culture ed. by Jennifer Smith and Lisa Nalbone Joyce Tolliver Smith, Jennifer, and Lisa Nalbone, editors. Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2017. Pp. 213. ISBN 978-1-138-20647-2. In this new addition to Routledge’s New Hispanisms series, Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish Literature and Culture, Jennifer Smith and Lisa Nalbone offer a collection of recent scholarship by both well-established leaders of our profession and by emerging scholars. The theory that forms the foundation of all studies in the volume—that “subjectivity is created through simultaneously held subject positions” (1)—reflects current Anglo-American critical approaches to literary works, while also accurately reflecting our field in terms of the authors studied. Of the nine essays included in the volume, two analyze works by Galdós and four deal with works by Pardo Bazán. Although the volume features a heavy representation of analyses of works by these two canonical authors, most of the works analyzed here have received relatively little critical attention. Each of these six studies affirms the relevance of these author’s works to current concerns about the configuration of the Spanish nation and about the roles played by social class, gender, and race in that configuration. Both Margot Versteeg and Maryellen Bieder discuss Pardo Bazán’s overlooked but culturally significant play “El becerro de metal,” offering differing but compatible analyses of how this play reflects the author’s repudiation of the notion that the economic woes of post-1898 Spain could be ameliorated by repatriating Sephardic Jews. Both analyses skillfully discuss the interdependences of religion/raza, class, nation, and gender in Pardo Bazán’s play. In her examination of Pardo Bazán’s purported antisemitism, Bieder also considers Una cristiana and its sequel La prueba, placing the author’s use of the tropes of the judío within a nuanced historical context. Carmen Pereira-Muro offers a new reading of Insolación, building on previous analyses that noted echoes of Merimée’s novella and Bizet’s opera Carmen, arguing that this intertextuality works parodically to undermine both monolithic notions of Spanishness and of Spain as “a metonymic South” (198), while also offering a new affirmation of female sexual passion as a response to Merimée’s censure and silencing of Carmen’s desire. Christy Presson Shaughnessy brings to our attention the remarkable story “La sonrisa blanca,” in which, she argues, Pardo Bazán ambivalently portrays the racial conflict inherent to the historic prize-fighting boxing match between the Canadian Tommy Burns and the African-American Jack Johnson—and, by implication, expresses her own ambivalence about race, power, and masculinity. Dorca and Coffey, who have both contributed significantly in their previous work to our understanding of Galdós’s creative analyses of modern Spanish history, each show how the novelist’s historical fiction grappled with the tensions of empire. While Dorca focuses on Galdós’s understanding of the Peninsular Wars (1808–14) as constitutive of the Spanish nation—both in the heroism of the 1808 wars and in the later enabling of the repressive regime of Fernando VII—Coffey convincingly argues that Galdós portrays his [End Page 144] protagonist’s amorous relationships as allegories for Spain’s fraught relationship with its former and waning colonies. The three studies included in this volume that do not discuss works by either Galdós or Pardo Bazán serve as a welcome and necessary reminder that the period’s preoccupation with the concepts and the lived realities of race, gender, class, and nation permeated not just the intellectual sphere, but also Spanish popular culture. A particularly rich source of information about dominant conceptions of race, gender, class, and nation is found in the zarzuela, which might be considered the period’s analogue to present-day films or televised series. It is particularly appropriate, then, that both David George and Mar Soria examine how this genre represented and contributed to attitudes towards who and what constituted “lo...

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