Shameful Specters: Remembering Spanish Slavery in Àngels Aymar’s La Indiana

Abstract

Abstract This article reveals a new figure in the contemporary Spanish imaginary, the indiana, and a new literary mode, the indiana melodrama. It argues that the incarnation of the indiana as a virtuous, melodramatic heroine in Àngels Aymar’s 2007 play La indiana rebukes Spanish participation in transatlantic slavery and counters the historical amnesia that Spanish culture frequently displays toward its colonial past. An early forerunner in Spain’s long-delayed path to recognizing its history of slavery, La indiana forms part of activist efforts in Catalonia, the autonomous community in which the play premiered. Applying theories of memory and melodrama, the article explains how many factors in the play—the actors, their voices, the stage space, the soundscape, and the mixing of the Catalan and Spanish languages—transmit memory across racial, temporal, and spatial boundaries. This effect, “theatrical postmemory,” minimizes the distance between past and present, Cuba and Catalonia, memory and history. The article focuses on Aymar’s transformation of two symbols of Spanish (post)imperial nostalgia, the indiano home and the Catalan habanera, a popular musical genre. La indiana deconstructs the melodramatic convention of a happy ending and the concomitant restoration of innocence.