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Dreams of Iberia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2020

Extract

‘Spain is different’, the Spanish tourist board famously declared in the 1960s as part of its strategy to attract mass tourism to the country. The campaign played a key role in opening up Spain's economy during the later years of Franco's regime – the so-called apertura – following two decades of autarchic rule that had left the country geopolitically isolated. As the slogan suggested, however, exoticism was a key part of Spain's nation-branding. Ideas of Spanish difference were now marketed for their tourist appeal, with images of gypsies and flamenco joined by sizzling beaches and ice-cold sangria.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

Ditlev Rindom, King's College London; ditlev.rindom@kcl.ac.uk

References

1 Recent studies include Pack, Sasha D., Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe's Peaceful Invasion of Franco's Spain (New York, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Rosendorf, Neal M., Franco Sells Spain to America: Hollywood, Tourism and Public Relations as Postwar Soft Spanish Power (New York, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Cited in Agarez, Ricardo, ‘Regional Identity for the Leisure of Travellers: Early Tourism Infrastructure in the Algarve (Portugal), 1940–1965’, The Journal of Architecture, 18/5 (2013), 721–43, at 721CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See, for example, Isabella, Maurizio and Zanou, Konstantina, eds., Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century (London, 2016)Google Scholar.

4 See Cárcel, Ricardo García, La leyenda negra: Historia y opinión (Madrid, 1992)Google Scholar; and more recently, Townson, Nigel, ed. Is Spain Different? A Comparative Look at the 19th and 20th Centuries (Brighton, 2015)Google Scholar.

5 Recent winners focusing on music theatre include Thomas, Susan, Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage (Champaign, 2009)Google Scholar as well as Young's, Clinton D. Music Theater and Popular Nationalism in Spain, 1880–1930 (Baton Rouge, 2016)Google Scholar.

6 A prominent example is Levitz, Tamara, ed., ‘Musicology Beyond Borders?’, colloquy, Journal of the American Musicological Society 65/3 (2012), 821–61Google Scholar.

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8 Exceptions include de Brito, Manuel Carlos, Opera in Portugal in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar and Gilbert Chase's classic The Music of Spain (Norton, 1941).

9 See Walton, Benjamin, ‘Italian Operatic Fantasies in Latin America’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17/4 (2012), 460–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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15 Here as elsewhere throughout Young's book, Siegfried Kracauer's classic study Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (1937) appears a significant model, although Young is at pains to distinguish the Spanish class milieu from the French.

16 Other recent studies that have considered zarzuela's relationship with nationalism in broad terms include Delgado, Maria M. and Gies, David T., eds., A History of Theatre in Spain (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially Rafael Lamas's chapter, ‘Zarzuela: High Art, Popular Culture, and Music Theatre’, 192–210; and Christopher Webber's handbook The Zarzuela Companion (Lanham, MD, 2002). The Spanish-language literature on zarzuela is unsurprisingly extensive, but mainly focused on composers; see, for example, Sánchez, Víctor Sánchez, Tomás Bréton: un músico de la restauración (Madrid, 2002)Google Scholar.

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19 In a related vein, see Revuluri, Sindhumathi, ‘French Folk Songs and the Invention of History’, 19th-Century Music 39/3 (2016), 248–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Miller, Richard (London, 1980)Google Scholar outlines distinctions between pleasure and jouissance, the latter according to Barthes offering a quasi-orgasmic refashioning of the reader's subject position.