Habitus, Heterotopia and Endocolonialism in Early Spanish Literary Fascism

Abstract

This article explores strategies of symbolic production of national space (e.g. technologies of tropological striation) in early fascist works of Tomas Borras, Luys Santa Marina, and Rafael Sanchez Mazas written a propos the Rif War (1919-27). Considered as perlocutionary speech-acts, these texts conceive Morocco as a heterotopia and embody a fascist habitus produced by a heterogeneous group of writers, intellectuals, politicians and military personnel—in particular the notorious Foreign Legion—posted in Morocco; they all shared the defense of an authoritarian concept of nation as a model for the political organization of Spain as well as an endocolonialist gaze and stance towards their own country. By means of its tropological conquest of Moroccan territory, Fascist writing devoted to the Rif War duplicated the empirical spatial production carried out in situ by the army and the civilian administration of the Spanish protectorate of Morocco. Making it intelligible as well as modifying it, such writing brought to the Peninsula an endocolonial project and an incipient fascist habitus. Its development in the 1930s (the theory of fascism, Falange Espanola, the Falangists’ direct action in the streets of Spain, the tactics and strategy followed by the High Command of Franco’s army during the civil war) would culminate after 1939 in the empiric production of a new administrative, political and economic organization of Spain’s national territory. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol33/iss2/4 Habitus, Heterotopia and Endocolonialism in Early Spanish Literary Fascism Nil Santianez Saint Louis University From the outset, I should underscore my skepticism about the heuristic validity of the concept of “national identity,” the frequent scholarly use of which in recent years has paradoxically left it begging for clarity. Accordingly, this essay will not directly explore any sort of “national identity,” and neither will it conceive the corpus of texts here analyzed as “representations” of Spain, that is, as “re-presences” of an extralinguistic entity. Rather, it focuses on strategies of symbolic production of national space in several texts written on the Rif War (1919-27).1 These strategies of space production, borne out simultaneously with the constitution of a new mentality in some sectors of the Spanish colonial army (Sebastian Balfour 33-4, 65-7, 3258), embodied an incipient fascist habitus whose insidious development would culminate in the military rebellion of July 1936 and the empiric production of a new administrative, political and economic organization of Spain’s national territory after the victory of Franco’s army in 1939. “National space,” instead of the nebulous concept of “national identity,” plays here a more prominent role. What matters is the relationship between space production, a particular habitus and the political organization of a nation during a decisive historical juncture.2 In particular, I will expound four propositions through the analysis of three Africanist works with a strong fascist component, all of them produced by writers who would shortly thereafter join the fascist party Falange Espanola de las JONS: Tomas Borras’s La pared de tela de arana ‘The Wall of Spiderweb’ (1924), Luys Santa Marina’s chilling novel Tras el aguila del Cesar. Elegia del Tercio, 1921-1922 ‘In Pursuit of Caesar’s Eagle. Elegy to the Tercio, 19211 Santianez: Habitus, Heterotopia and Endocolonialism in Early Spanish Literar Published by New Prairie Press