Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile

Lisa DiGiovanniis associate professor of Spanish Peninsular and Latin American studies with a joint appointment in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Department of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College.

• Prologue: Longing for Resistance Introduction: Politics and Poetics of Nostalgia in Spain and Chile1.Unsettling Nostalgia in Roberto Brodsky’s Últimos días de la historia2.Memories of Motherhood and Militancy in Calle Santa Fe by Carmen Castillo3.Unsettling the Archive: De monstruos y faldas by Carolina Astudillo 4.Postwar Prison Nostalgia: La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón 5.Nostalgia and Inner Exile: El corazón helado and El lector de Julio Verne by Almudena Grandes6.Detective Pursuits of an Ironic Nostalgic: Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante

Tracing transatlantic connections between the search for social and economic on the parts of Spain during the Second Republic and of Chile under the Popular Unity government, DiGiovanni (Keene State Univ.) explores memory, nostalgia, and narrative. She demonstrates how nostalgia—often viewed as a conservative stance seeking to return to a lost Utopia—can idealize and critique past moments of solidarity and resistance. In the prologue she writes that the term unsettling nostalgia is a “critically conscious type of longing” that can help reclaim the past in order to “inspire new affiliative claims ... while remaining cautious of monologic idealizations,” challenging past and present nationalist and patriarchal narratives. In the valuable introduction the author examines theory on memory and nostalgia. The volume's six chapters focus on novels, film, and documentaries from 1996 through 2006, including Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella Distante, Dulce Chacón's La voz dormida, Roberto Brodsky’s Ultimos días de la historia, Almudena Grandes’s El corazón helado and El lector de Jules Verne, and work by Carmen Astudillo and Carmen Castillo. This engaging study explores nostalgia as a tool to create community, linking generations in the construction of identity and demonstrating the way nostalgia for past revolutionary projects informs present struggles. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.