IN-BETWEENNESS AND HYBRIDITY: IDENTITY AND LINGUISTIC DELECTATION IN SERGI BELBEL’S MEXICATAS

Sergi Belbel’s as yet unpublished play, Mexicatas, premiered in late 2018. In the spring of that year a group of eight Mexican actresses, who now live in Catalonia and are members of the theater group Cor de Maguey, approached Belbel and asked him to write a play about their experiences as Mexican immigrants. My essay examines the collaborative process and the ensuing spectacle. It considers questions of personal and social identity, the attitudes of the Mexican immigrants to the Catalan language and customs, and the humor that derives from these, all within an encompassing framework of in-betweenness and hybridity.

LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND POWER IN GUILLEM DE TORROELLA’S LA FAULA

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.

THE BATTLE FOR RE-IMAGINING CATALONIA: CINEMATIC POPULISM, MYTH-MAKING, AND CATHEDRAL OF THE SEA (JORDI FRADES, 2018)

In this article, we argue that the TV series event with the highest audience in recent Catalan history, La catedral del mar /Cathedral of the Sea (Jordi Frades, 2018), is an example of commercial cinematic populism. Cathedral of the Sea is built on formal elements of the classic Hollywood style (for example, continuous editing, linear narrative, lack of moral ambiguity), and a series of substantive dichotomies (people/ elite, the popular hero/ the villain, the good/ the bad) and myths (the savior, the unity of the people). In analyzing their significance, we distinguish three hermeneutic layers, the populist, the general-mythical, and the Catalan historical context, which, in combination, constitute the cinematic narrative. Therein the central hero of Cathedral of the Sea, Arnau Estanyol, personifies the myth of the commoner who, by accumulating a whole range of virtues and social roles, synecdochically stands for the triumphant emergence of the modern Catalan people. This narrative is, we maintain, traversed by a tension between the populist call for emancipation, incarnated by Arnau, and the phantasmal self-gratification based on the depiction of a world devoid of complexity.

MINORITY LANGUAGE FAMILIES IN DIASPORA: LANGUAGE TRANSMISSION AMONG CATALANS AND GALICIANS IN NEW YORK CITY

Understanding why parents transmit which of the languages they speak, and how they do so, is especially interesting in the case of mixed and migrant families, since typically these parents make especially well thought out linguistic choices. In this article is presented one such case, from the USA, a rich multilingual society yet where, due to the hegemony of English, intergenerational transmission of other languages is oftentimes weak. Through a questionnaire and interviews, this article examines linguistic practices and ideologies in multilingual families residing in New York City, in which one parent was born in Catalonia or in Galicia. Potential languages for transmission are two locally available and globally projected languages, English and Spanish; and Catalan or Galician. Not only are these minoritized languages in their countries of origin, but they also have virtually no presence in the American landscape. The two groups differ in the sociolinguistic situation of their homeland: while governmental campaigns succeeded in restoring Catalan in the public sphere and as a symbol for national identity, parallel campaigns have not been comparably successful for Galician. In our sample, transmission of Catalan is higher than of Galician; and in many cases Catalan is transmitted at the cost of Spanish, but this is never the case for Galician, while English remains constant. A motivational analysis reveals that the determining factor is the distribution of integrative and personal values among the languages and their symbolic role in the construction of identity.

BREAKING THE RULES: PRAGMATIC CONNOTATIONS OF (UN)MARKED USES OF FINAL NEOCLASSICAL COMBINING FORMS

This paper analyzes the way speakers perceive the transgression of the rules of word formation, particularly regarding neoclassical final combining forms, which are elements with a marked use and whose morphological combining standards are quite restrictive. This transgression consists in combining a native Catalan word and a final combining form, the result of which has been assigned an expressive value. In order to test these perceptions, we developed a questionnaire and administered it to 152 speakers of Catalan from different backgrounds. These speakers were asked to evaluate 20 neologisms documented in the Catalan press regarding their context of use and their connotations. The results show that speakers perceive that those forms that “break” the expected rules are more likely to appear in an informal or colloquial context, and they generally assign them an ironic or pejorative value. Finally, this study aims to present compounds as a promising topic of interest within morphopragmatics.

“NO M’ESTIMIS MASSA; ESTIMA’M SÀVIAMENT”: LA CONSTRUCCIÓ LITERÀRIA DE LA IDENTITAT MONSTRUOSA DE BARCELONA

This article aims to analyze the process of literary construction of the “monstrous” identity of Barcelona. Specifically, it examines and contextualizes the literary images of the city-as-woman from the mid-nineteenth century until Francoism. The metaphor of Barcelona as a woman is articulated around two axes: the idealization of the city as a compliant and submissive woman, and its monsterification as a rebel woman. Both processes are inextricable and serve to justify (symbolically and literally) the political control of the city.