Castelao's Absent Presence in Post-Civil War Galician Nationalism

Abstract

The discourse of Galician nationalism inherited from the nineteenth-century Rexurdimento was embedded in Volksgeist-related imaginative figurations that were essentialist in character and which contained and projected a consciousness of the transcendent. Within the twentieth-century ‘Xeración Nós’, this discourse remained resilient in the work of Vicente Risco, Ramón Otero Pedrayo, and, in the post-Civil War period, in Ramón Piñeiro. It was counterpointed by Castelao in Sempre en Galiza, where the emphasis is upon a politically engaged conception of povo in which the dominant rhetoric is one of heroic resistance to external oppression, consonant with Castelao's own experience of political defeat and enforced exile. In a context in which transcendent rhetoric is a self-apportioned entailment of the Franco regime, Castelao's politicized discourse provides inspiration for a fundamental reorientation of Galician nationalism evidenced in the ‘longa noite’ of Celso Emilio Ferreiro and its metaphorisation of elemental suffering.