Enjuto Rangel, CeciliaSedano Naviera, Nagore2019-09-182019-09-182019-09-18https://hdl.handle.net/1794/24898Since the 1980s, Spain has attempted to recuperate the intellectual legacy of the republican exiles who fled the country after losing the Civil War (1936-1939). However, in doing so, it has produced the recuperation-integration paradigm that governs contemporary memory politics. The problem with this model is that it naturalizes an illusory, teleological line of continuity between the democratic principles of post-Francoist Spain and the Second Republic. Duelos disidentes contributes to the critique of this recuperation-integration paradigm by examining the political projects delineated in the memoirs of Spanish, Basque republican, and Basque nationalist women-in-exile. Published between 1970 and 2011, what unites the memoirs of these three women—María Teresa León (1903-1988), Aurora Arnáiz (1913-2009), and Arantza Cazalis (1929)—is the defense of the Second Republic (1931-1936) as an alternative to the capitalist liberalism that started to develop under Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). I argue that the autobiographical works of León, Arnáiz, and Cazalis politicize emotion to articulate an aesthetics of female mourning that disrupts the continuity between the Second Republic and post-Francoist, neoliberal Spain. This aesthetics advances a double critique: on the one hand, it condemns the exclusion of women from the official history of the Spanish Civil War; on the other, it formulates an alternative to the temporality of the patriarchal capitalist nation (León, chapter 2), the legal person of the liberal political tradition (Arnáiz, chapter 3), and the elitism and colonial imaginary of the literary canon of the exile of 1939 (Cazalis, chapter 4). But as I defend in Duelos disidentes, the misencounter of these women-in-exile with Latin America reveals the limits that arise from the nationalist ideologies camouflaged in their (anti)colonial transatlantic rhetoric. This study elucidates how an aesthetics of mourning can serve as an alternative paradigm of historical memory that does not neutralize its political component. In the process, it sheds light on the colonial imaginary that troubled the relationship of progressive, European exiles with Latin America, contributing to current debates about the memory of colonialism, anti-capitalist struggles, and women in politics. This dissertation builds on previously published material.en-USAll Rights Reserved.AutobiographyExileFeminist Affect StudiesGender StudiesMemory StudiesTransatlantic StudiesElectronic Thesis or Dissertation