The Other Catalans

representations of Immigration in Catalan Literature

Fernández, Josep-Anton

The first book to explore how Catalan literature has depicted the social and cultural consequences of immigration in the twentieth century.
Catalonia has for centuries been a destination for immigrants: first from neighboring regions, then from all over Spain, and in the last twenty-five years from the whole world. Currently, sixteen percent of the Catalan population was born outside Spain, and well over seventy-five percent of Catalans have a migrant origin. Yet the Catalans see themselves as a distinct society, and many of them are claiming political self-determination.
Surveying the 1930s to the present, The Other Catalans provides a comprehensive examination of Catalan literature on immigration or by authors of migrant origin. It combines detailed readings of major texts with an awareness of the historical developments regarding immigration, providing readers with vital contextualization of migration and its literary representations. Covering both Catalan responses to immigration and literary accounts of the migrant experience, the book examines how immigration has shaped discourses of identity and otherness in Catalan culture; how the work of mourning is affected in migrant literature; how issues of language and space articulate with social and political conflict in these texts; and in what ways these issues are inflected by gender and sexuality.