TOURISM&NATL ID-CONTEMP SPAIN

This course focuses on tourism in Spain by local and international travelers as a means for the construction and commodification of national identities both for external and internal audiences. Tourism gives the nation a performative quality not only to attract the gaze of visitors/consumers but also to validate its own unity and coherence as political and symbolic entity for its own citizens. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Spain occupied an ambiguous place in the mind of European and American visitors, a sort of an-other within, an Orientalized or anachronistic incursion in the south of Europe. It was the most marginal and exotic destination of the Grand Tour where only the most adventurous travelers chose to go, often instead of Greece, a threshold of Africa instead of the origins of Western Civilization.

After losing its American colonies in the 19th century, Spain sought to replace its lost economic and political power with cultural influence. It aimed to be the threshold through which Europe and Latin America engaged with one another. Key figures of Latin American modernismo such as Rubén Darío, José Martí or Gutiérrez Nájera traveled to Spain establishing a systematic dialogue between the former colonial power and the rising influence of the United States.

The arrival of consumer society in the 50’s and 60’s and the accessibility of travel and holidays for the middle classes, progressively turned Spaniards themselves into consumers of their own identity. In that context, the performance of the exotic “difference” that still made the nation marketable and attracted international interest and capital was simultaneous with a progressive assimilation of modern ideas and habits that threatened to erase that very same “difference”. At the same time, both conservative and progressive discourses reacted with fear and resentment towards what was perceived as the threat of secularism or the standardizing and capitalist values brought by a touristic industry that became essential for the economic survival of the nation.

Finally a democratic Spain, systematically dissolved the difference between culture and international relationships in an attempt to project the image of a re-imagined national project, putting in the hands of the Ministry of International Affairs a great part of the responsibility for Cultural Politics. At the same time, t