Lexington Books Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile: Longing for Resistance in Literature and Film

Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile: Longing for Resistance in Literature and Film reframes nostalgia to analyze how writers and filmmakers have responded to 20th-century dictatorial violence and loss in Spain and Chile. By reaching beyond reductive definitions that limit nostalgia to a conservative desire to defend traditional power hierarchies, Lisa DiGiovanni captures the complexity of a critically conscious type of longing and form of transmission that she terms "unsettling nostalgia." Using literature and film, DiGiovanni illustrates how unsettling nostalgia imbues representations of pre-dictatorial mobilization during the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) and the Chilean Popular Unity (1970-1973), as well as depictions of clandestine resistance to the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) and the Pinochet regime (1973-1989). Positive memories of efforts to upend power hierarchies coexist with retrospective critiques that fissure romanticized views of revolutionary struggle. Unsettling nostalgic works engender deeper understandings of the complexities of political movements and how stories of resistance are meaningful today. By calling attention to the parallels between nostalgic modes that resist multiple injustices based on gender, class, and sexuality, this book traces an evocative continuity between Spain and Chile that goes beyond the initial work that links forms of militaristic authoritarianism. Scholars of Latin American studies, film studies, literary studies, history, women's and gender studies, memory studies, and rhetoric will find this book particularly useful. Review 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.--CHOICE Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile provides solid and well-documented research and a valuable contribution to the study of transnational connections between the respective legacies of Spain and Chile's traumatic pasts of war, exile, and dictatorship. Particularly, this monograph provides a broad and groundbreaking definition of 'unsettling nostalgia' in literature and film concerned with memories of revolutionary periods and repressive dictatorships.--Maribel Rams, Western Washington University About the Author Lisa DiGiovanni is 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.