Love, Politics and the Making of the Modern European Subject: Spanish Romanticism and the Arab World

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of Arab Spain by Spanish Romantic dramatists and poets, in the light of the incipient liberal nation-formation project that started to be elaborated from the late eighteenth century onwards. The texts discussed are: Martínez de la Rosa's Aben Humeya o la rebelión de los moriscos (1830), Hartzenbusch's Los amantes de Teruel (1837), and the Duque de Rivas's El moro expósito (1829–33). My hypothesis is that these works should be seen as experiments, trying out alternative models of the nation at a time when no one model had emerged as hegemonic. I consequently propose that these writers variously turn to Arab Spain, not because of a backward-looking interest in the national past, but in order to elaborate a concept of the modern European subject. My main argument is that such subject matter allows the exploration of a 'border subjectivity' based on a melancholic sense of loss for a past in which mobile and plural identities were possible, prior to the enforced cultural homogenization effected via the elimination of the country's Islamic inheritance after 1492. In exploring this 'border subjectivity', I draw on the insights of Luisa Passerini (1999) into the role of post-Enlightenment discourses on courtly and Romantic love in constructing modern notions of European identity. I also draw on Roger Bartra's theorization of melancholy in Renaissance Spain (2000, 2001) to argue that the melancholic emphasis of these Romantic works of the late 1820s and 1830s should be seen as progressive, by contrast with the nostalgic vision of Spain's Arab past that developed with the drift towards more conservative forms of liberalism in the 1840s. My argument is supported by discussion of the development of Arabic studies in Spain from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.