Finding Josep Solanes: mobilizing the legacies of Republican exile in Spanish cultural studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using the example of Republican exile Josep Solanes, this article argues that the category of exile and the reality of the Republican exile of 1939 can be mobilized for a political questioning of how the meanings of “Spanish” in twentieth-century Spanish culture came to define and frame disciplinary areas. Addressing this still very little-known author, the article reconstructs the disciplinary fields, historical conflicts, personal encounters and border and language crossings necessary to assess Solanes’s work, the conditions of his radical intervention in the field of psychiatry – first in Catalonia and later in France and Venezuela – and how they framed his conceptualization of the experience of exile. The last part of the article, through a consideration of Solanes’s explorations of the exilic as a postnational condition, reflects on what could be the political and ethical conditions to recuperate a legacy that resists being inscribed in, or identified with, the nation. The article should be read as an introduction to the barely known figure of Solanes that lays out the importance of his work and signals its potential for further research on new directions in the study of exile.