Modernity, Hispanism, and Coloniality: Transatlantic Periodicals and the Field of Hispanic Cultural Production during Primo de Rivera’s Regime (1923-1930)

After the definitive dismantling of the Spanish colonial order in 1898, and throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, the flow of emigrants, exiles, writers, journalists, travelers, diplomats, historians, and students, from America to Spain and vice versa, did not cease, but became stronger. This movement of transatlantic exchange and social interaction reflected upon the macro-cultural field what the commercial relationships involving the trade of raw materials and import-export articles was displaying in the macroeconomic sphere at the time: a renewed, but problematic attitude of interest towards the former metropolis and colonies, respectively. This cultural and economic rapprochement was particularly significant in the 1920 decade, when the imagining of a great Hispanic trans-nation disseminated across the Atlantic became apparent. Through the analysis of three transatlantic periodicals, Revista de la Raza (1914-1928), Raza española (1919-1930) y Revista de las Españas (1926-1930), as well as other additional archival documents, this dissertation investigates the complex intertwined triangular connection between hegemonic power (Primo de Rivera’s regime), cultural institutions (periodicals) and ideology (the discourses of Hispanism) in the 1920 Hispanic world. Throughout four chapters, this study examines the Hispanic postcolonial/transatlantic relationships between 1824 and 1930, the historical, cultural, and economic conditions of emergence and development of Hispanism, its institutionalization as a technology of the Spanish authoritarian power of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), and the textual and symbolic strategies that enabled the homogeneization of the Hispanic socio-cultural national bodies through the discourses of Hispanism. In the case of Spain, Hispanism was particularly convenient both, to carry out the homogenization of the multicultural and multinational diversity in which non-state nationalisms like “catalanismo” were based, and to unify the national body under a modern corporative nation-state. In the other side of the Atlantic, Hispanism allowed the legitimation of a white lineage and a catholic tradition that helped counteracted the claims of “indigenismo” and, liberal/Marxist feminist movements. This dissertation argues that, in its attempt to respond to modern times and its logic of material progress and national homogeneity, these periodicals and their socio-cultural agents symbolically reproduced the dark side of Hispanic modernity: the discourse of coloniality