2026 Theses Doctoral

A Strait of the Avant-Garde: Spain, Morocco, and the Transcolonial Imagination (1898-1936)

Sala Sallent, Arnau

This dissertation examines the emergence, development, and contested transformation of what it conceptualizes as the transcolonial imagination: the cultural logic through which Spanish national and subnational formations repositioned colonial discourse, thereby articulating imagined solidarities with the Riffian anticolonial resistance in Morocco. In the period between 1898 and 1936, the transcolonial imagination served to process and critique the experience of imperial collapse and recolonization, while it simultaneously repurposed colonial logics within Spain’s internal projects of national self-definition.

Challenging conventional accounts that privilege the metropolitan origins of the Spanish avant-garde, as well as generational literary-historical categories, this study argues that colonial warfare and its aftermath—most notably in Morocco—served as a foundational experience for the aesthetics and the political consciousness of the avant-garde. The central problem it addresses is the capacity of the avant-garde to articulate the mutual implication of the colonial experience and the competing internal nationalist and regionalist projects of Spain, giving rise to divergent—and at times mutually constitutive—sensibilities, ranging from anarchist anti-colonial critique to fascist imperial revival. From this perspective, the dissertation contends that metropolitan anti-colonialism—resistance to empire from within imperial centers—must be studied in tandem with Spain’s internal nationalist projects and their competing visions of modernity.

The dissertation expands the concept of the transcolonial—a term from Postcolonial Studies that highlights lateral affiliations between peripheries rather than hierarchical center–periphery relations—to account for the imaginative self-colonizing gestures of Spain’s peripheries, most notably Catalonia, Galicia, and Andalusia, as these regions articulated imaginative forms of solidarity with the Rif during the 1920s. This inquiry is grounded in an interdisciplinary methodology that privileges a sociocultural approach—attentive to the formation of intellectual cohorts and the circulation of ideas across publishing, artistic, and literary networks—combined with a philological commitment to close reading. It draws from theoretical work that has revised the Saidian framework of Orientalism to account for Spain’s singular relation to North Africa, premised not on otherness but rather on sameness, whereby Spaniards and Moroccans, and the Peninsula and North Africa, are imagined to be ethnically and geographically united. The study is further informed by theories of nationalism, memory studies, and visual culture studies, and engages a heterogeneous corpus that includes painting, poetry, caricature, the novel, photography, cinema, and essays.

The dissertation reaches four principal conclusions. First, the chronology of the Spanish avant-garde must be reassessed to incorporate early anti-authoritarian experiments from the turn of the century, emerging from late-bohemian and philo-anarchist culture in Barcelona under the conditions of imperial collapse. These works—ranging from experimental poetry to Expressionist caricature—establish the geopolitical triangulation linking the Caribbean, the Peninsula, and North Africa as spaces that enabled the circulation of both repressive policies and revolutionary commitments.

Second, military conscription into colonial warfare constituted a shared, structuring experience that functioned as a generative event for a significant cohort of intellectuals born around 1899. The experience of forced service in the Rif War produced a spectrum of responses—from the transcolonial solidarities articulated by Catalan and Galician writers, who reconfigured the conflict as one of shared subjugation, to the ironic vitalism and imperial nostalgia that would later inform fascist aesthetics—demonstrating that the Spanish avant-garde was neither intrinsically progressive nor proto-fascist. Rather, it constituted a contested field in which shared aesthetic forms and historical experiences gave rise to antagonistic political formations.

Third, the experience of colonial warfare reverberated in Spanish avant-garde culture in two distinct but interconnected ways. On the one hand, formal innovations—montage, fragmentation, the grotesque—served as tools of counter-memory against the attempt by Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship to monumentalize the Rif War, and more specifically the Disaster of Annual (1921). On the other hand, as Rif War veterans were reincorporated into the Peninsula, they emerged as organic intellectuals in pre-Republican political and cultural life. For them, the Rif War progressively acquired a mythical status, central to both left- and right-wing projects of political regeneration.

Fourth, the avant-garde provided a momentary resolution to the appropriative logics of otherness that inform both the transcolonial imagination and colonial discourse, as performed in the Andalusi-inspired metaphysical poetry of the late Federico García Lorca. This attempt—characterized by the instability of sameness and difference in relation to the other—was, however, abruptly reabsorbed into the reconfiguration of the cultural field in relation to the colonial other, following the participation of Muslim troops on the Francoist side during the Civil War.