El siniestro estrabismo. Historiografía y nación en la España contemporánea

Abstract

Identity is sustained by the self-perception of society, and in this constructed image, historical memory plays an essential role. The role of historiography is inseparable from an understanding of a group, community or nation as being held together by narrative and a web of meaning. From this perspective, one can investigate the extent to which the development of nationalisms in Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presents genuinely different roots, or whether —conversely— their similarities are greater than their differences, in the construction of identity discourse and in forms of historical forgetting. The analysis of Catalan and Basque historiography, alongside Spanish for shows how the intellectual sources that feed national consciousness, and that underlie the historical discourse of nationhood itself over time, are not specific but rather breathe in a larger European atmosphere, and are frequently the same. Beyond the fabricated self-images and the consequent mutual antagonism, it is quite clear that identities developed in the same cultural stratosphere are in fact engaged in a common project.