The plural “materialities” in the title of this special issue is deliberate, for there are many forms of materiality. The topic was chosen because it would allow a variety of issues to be addressed by scholars working on different periods over the course of which matter has been viewed in diverse ways. The chronological ordering of the essays shows that attitudes to matter do not follow a linear progression; the essays on the medieval and early modern periods reveal an importance attached to the material that rivals that of today’s New Materialism, despite the different conceptualizations of materiality in each case. The contributions were selected also to include cultural phenomena in the various romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician. In making this selection, I have wanted to insist on the necessity, when using the term “Iberian,” of including Portugal, study of which is beginning to take hold in departments of Spanish and Portuguese in the US academy, which, until recently, had limited the study of Portuguese-language culture to Brazil.
Critical attention to materiality is not new, of course. It is the basis of archeology, which seeks to reconstruct worlds from the analysis of material remains. Material culture has long been a major subfield of anthropology, which considers the significance for life practices of material objects. Social historians have studied the traffic of commodities to throw light on socioeconomic trends and lifestyles, particularly in the context of empire. My own first encounter with materiality as an object of analysis was in the 1990s in the context of the boom in memory studies, which considers the role played by things as material memories. In English studies, Bill Brown pioneered the study of things in American literature in a 2003 edited volume, followed by a 2004 sequel in which he coined the concept of “thing theory.” These various disciplinary approaches to materiality have largely considered things as objects of use by humans. This focus was turned upside down by the New Materialism that emerged in the early twenty-first century, drawing on the earlier work of Bruno Latour and articulated eloquently in political scientist Jane Bennett’s 2010 Vibrant Matter. Like Latour, Bennett argues against the subject-object binary that relegates the material to the status of object for use by human subjects, insisting that things have agency inasmuch as they can make things happen (to humans or to other things) without human intervention. Additionally, Bennett notes, matter—when observed through appropriate laboratory instruments—is not inert but “lively,” consisting of buzzing molecules and atoms. This last point was elaborated forcefully by quantum physicist Karen Barad, in a 2007 monograph that has acquired something of cult status in recent years. Barad insists that it is inaccurate to talk of interactions between subjects and objects, since subjects and objects do not precede the interaction but are constituted by it. Hence, Barad’s use of the term “entanglements”—assemblages in which everything affects and is affected by (is entangled with) everything else.
This rejection of the subject-object binary overturns what the anthropologist of material culture, Daniel Miller, has termed “the tyranny of the subject” (29). In the introduction to his 2005 edited volume Materiality, Miller notes: “There is an underlying principle to be found in most of the religions that dominate recorded history. Wisdom has been accredited to those who claim that materiality represents the merely apparent, behind which lies that which is reality” (1). Miller’s key examples are Buddhism and Hinduism, for this is not just a Western Platonic or Christian tradition. Miller notes that this relegation of the material to a position of inferiority with regard to the immaterial or spiritual has produced a blindness to the fact that material things, and our relationship to them, are important factors in what makes us human (10, 13). Things, Miller argues, should be valued for what they are, and not as pointers to some transcendental value (29).
William Pietz has argued that secular Enlightenment thought—despite, or perhaps because of, the contemporaneous intensification of the global circulation of commodities—exacerbated the negative valuation of things already present in the Western Platonic and Christian tradition, by seizing on fetishism, interpreted as the worship of things, as a nontheological explanation of the origins of religion (“Fetishism” 138). The term comes from the Portuguese feitiço, applied by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese traders in West Africa to the material objects that were prized by the local population (Pietz, “Problem” 5). As Pietz vividly puts it, for Enlightenment thinkers, fetishism—understood as the attribution to things of supernatural powers—was “the definitive mistake of the primitive mind” since the Enlightenment concept of progress was based on human mastery of the material world (“Fetishism” 139). Peter Stallybrass, in a brilliant article referencing Pietz’s work, has noted that the “fetishism” observed by Portuguese traders was, in practice, the local population’s refusal to sell objects that they valued, thereby withholding them from the market economy that turns things into abstract (immaterial) monetary value. The modern European autonomous subject, Stallybrass continues, “was constituted in opposition to a demonized fetishism, through disavowal of the object” (183; emphasis in original). Pietz traces how later theorizations progressively dematerialized the fetish, from Freud’s sexological interpretation, whereby the fetish stands for something else, to Baudrillard’s semiological reading of fetishism as the worship of signs (“Fetishism” 123–24). In the same article, “Marx’s Coat,” Stallybrass suggests that Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism was one of his “least understood jokes” (184), through which he mocked capitalism’s worship of things for their immateriality (monetary exchange value) as an inferior form of fetishism to that of primitive peoples who valued things for their materiality. Stallybrass nicely proposes that Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism was a way of rescuing from its conversion into immaterial exchange value the coat that he repeatedly had to pawn to pay the rent, thereby restoring his coat to its material use value. Stallybrass concludes: “What have we done to things to have such contempt for them?” (203).
This special issue attempts to remedy that contempt. The articles that follow take very different approaches, but they coincide in attributing a positive value to the material. Several essays argue for the importance of recognizing that matter, whether corporal or inanimate, has agency, thus undoing the subject-object binary—central to modernity with its emphasis on human mastery—that posits things as the passive objects of human action.
In the first essay, “Solomon, His Jinn, and Molten Copper: The City of Brass in Medieval Spanish Fiction,” Michelle Hamilton traces the legend of the City of Brass, variants of which are found across the Arabic-speaking world in numerous texts from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries. Hamilton focuses on the tale’s Iberian variants, from the earliest ninth-century example to the most developed of its four unstudied Morisco aljamiado versions, written in Castilian in Arabic script. Setting these texts in the context of medieval alchemic treatises and lapidaries, Hamilton explores their depiction of the powers inherent in minerals that—sometimes in the form of metal automata—are given agency and occasionally voice as they guide or obstruct the protagonist’s journey.
In “Material Methodologies in Early Modern Treatises,” Víctor Sierra Matute argues for recognition of the early modern Iberian fascination with material culture and the sensory aspects of experience. To that end, he analyzes three treatises on human nature ranging from 1587 to 1700 (the first of them female-authored) and three instruction manuals for textual production—one on the composition of (oral and written) poetry, one on calligraphy, and the other on printing—ranging from 1496 to 1680. Arguing against a longstanding Spanish philological tradition of formal textual analysis that privileges conceptual abstraction, he proposes a material analysis that respects the early modern concern with materiality and the material conditions of textual production.
Carmen Urbita Ibarreta, in “Materiality and Language at El Escorial: From José de Sigüenza to Miguel de Unamuno and Back,” examines a classic case of the privileging of immateriality over materiality. Not for nothing would the Falangist cultural magazine of the 1940s, Escorial, adopt the name of Philip II’s monument to signal a militant rejection of Marxist (and capitalist) materialism. Urbita Ibarreta shows how José de Sigüenza’s 1605 documentation of the construction process of El Escorial has been repeatedly misread—by Unamuno and others—as depicting the monument as an emblem of Spanish spiritual transcendence, when in fact Sigüenza’s text displays a sustained fascination with the materiality of the massive building operation. She offers Sigüenza’s text as a corrective to the official representations of El Escorial—Philip II’s instructions for its construction and Herrera’s designs—that initiated what would become a longstanding habit of invoking the monument as evidence of a supposed Spanish spiritual mission.
Moving to the late nineteenth century, Nicholas Wolters’s “Bourgeois Accessories: Selling Masculinity, Homosociality, and Empire in Late Nineteenth-Century Barcelona” examines department store catalogs of male apparel and accessories, together with advertisements in the form of cromos (chromolithographic cards) and illustrations in the periodical press, to argue for the importance of such material goods in the “fashioning” of masculinity—a case of “the clothes make the man” and not the other way round. His analysis of this visual ephemera explores how they normalize homosocial practices and, in the case of advertisements for tobacco-related paraphernalia, which explicitly or implicitly refer to tobacco production in colonial Cuba, endorse Spain’s status as a modern imperial nation.
Leigh Mercer’s “Material Culture as an Index of Modernity in Spain’s Silent Film Era” examines the depiction of things in early silent cinema produced in Barcelona (the center of the early Spanish film industry). She argues that documentary footage made at the start of the twentieth century aims to counter the image of a backward, exotic Spain given in the 1890s films shot in Spain by the Maison Lumière, through its focus on material markers of modernization such as crowds of workers, dockland engineering projects, mechanized industrial processes, mass-produced commodities, modern transport, and cosmopolitan urban construction. The trick films of special-effects pioneer Segundo de Chomón, which showcase animated material objects evading human control, should not—she suggests—be seen as mere exercises in fantasy but as showcases for a technological modernity whose effects are not necessarily benign.
In “Hard Labor and Sweet Delights: Luisa Carnés’s Tea Rooms and Luis Marquina’s El bailarín y el trabajador,” Juli Highfill pairs a recently reissued 1934 novel with a little-discussed 1936 fiction film, featuring the consumption of cakes and production of cookies, respectively. If Carnés’s proletarian novel flaunts a feminist message, documenting the exploitation of female labor (which she had experienced in person) at a fashionable tearoom, Marquina’s lighthearted musical comedy attempts interclass reconciliation though its ballroom-dancing bourgeois male protagonist’s reinvention of himself as a worker in a cookie factory. Both texts, she argues, illustrate the demand of the Manifesto of the Federation of Artists, during the Paris Commune, for the right of workers to “communal luxury,” exemplified by the cakes and cookies that the workers serve and produce but cannot afford to consume themselves.
“‘What Fits in One Hand’: On the Entanglement with Things of Republican Women Writers and Artists in Exile,” by María Rosón and Ana Pol, engages with the New Materialist stress on the agency of matter in a study of the things that Spanish Republican women writers and artists chose to take with them into exile, and those that they left behind or that got lost on the way. Asking what these present or absent things did to their female owners (rather than what their owners did with them), they analyze various kinds of self-writing, including film and artistic production, noting that the work of these women exiles shows a particular sensitivity to the vitality of things, which speak to them in an entanglement of things and subjectivities.
Lee Douglas, in “The Probable Revolution: Archival Images, (Im)materiality, and the Reactivation of Portuguese Militant Cooperative Cinema,” offers an anthropological study of the archiving and repurposing of the revolutionary cinema that documented Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution—a cinema that was concerned with its own material conditions of production and aimed to capture the materiality of the revolutionary process. She argues for the concept of “(im)materiality” to capture the complex mix of the material and the immaterial involved in digitization, which, while divorcing the image from its material support, allows a reactivation of the material textures of the images through editing, releasing new meanings. Her argument is illustrated by discussion of her own practice as codirector of a visual essay that reworks images from this revolutionary cinema.
Carlos Varón González’s “‘Acaricié las cosas’: Family Matters and Rural Words in Luz Pichel’s Cativa en su lughar” examines Pichel’s self-translation of her Galician-language poetry book Casa pechada, triggered by her return, on her father’s death, to her native Galician village to dispose of the things in his house. Finding that translation into Spanish did not capture the qualities of the often obsolete rural things that shaped her father’s life, she decided to produce the translation in Castrapo, a local pidgin romance variant that mixes elements of Castilian, Galician, and Portuguese. This nonstandard vernacular provided her with a language to talk about humble local things. Varón González argues that Pichel uses the materiality of this local language—its phonetic specificities—to convey the emotions evoked by these material witnesses to a bygone rural way of life that Pichel herself had rejected.
In “Skin to Skin: Immune System Discourse in Twenty-First-Century Catalan Narrative,” William Viestenz analyzes two recent Catalan historical novels—Albert Sánchez Piñol’s 2012 Victus: Barcelona 1714 and Martí Domínguez’s 2019 L’esperit del temps—in light of Roberto Esposito’s theoretical writing on immunity and community. Noting that the skin can function to exclude or touch the other, he argues that Sánchez Piñol uses the motif of the open wound in a dual material and symbolic sense, to argue for a notion of community that forgoes immunity (the body’s self-defense against external threat). Domínguez’s historical recreation of a (real-life) Nazi biologist explores skin as a phenotype that determines who shall live and who shall die, noting, in keeping with Esposito, that the defense of life can easily be invoked to justify the death of those regarded as threatening the “national body”—a concept that Nazi extermination policies took literally.
The issue ends with Parvati Nair’s “With Strings Attached: Material Goods, Transnational Migrants, and Border Dynamics among the Manteros of Contemporay Spain,” based on fieldwork conducted in Barcelona in 2018. Drawing on her interview with an undocumented Senegalese migrant, she examines the material conditions governing the precarious survival of the manteros who sell counterfeit goods in Spanish city centers, displayed on a blanket (manta) that can be quickly snatched up at the sight of the police by pulling the strings attached to its corners. She reads these counterfeit goods (mostly imported from China) as symptomatic of the paradox whereby the global circulation of goods that feeds neoliberalism leads to the proliferation of borders that restrict the movement of people; undocumented migrant vendors, she argues, embody both sides of that paradox. The essay ends by discussing the manteros’ attempts to self-organize by creating their own fashion brand, Top Manta, sponsored by celebrities, which produces its own fashion items for sale, helping the manteros to survive in the neoliberal economy that marginalizes them even as it inscribes them within it.
Nair’s subheading “Things That Matter” encapsulates the focus of this special issue as a whole.
