ABSTRACT
Since the end of the nineteenth century, through architectural, performative and discursive dispositifs, Hispanism has emerged as a memorial regime associated with the figure of Christopher Columbus and the memory of the so-called “Discovery” of America. Since that time, the cult of Columbus – understood as a cultural prosthesis – legitimizes the symbolic requirements of the Spanish State in its post-imperial identity and in its relationship to Latin America and the United States. The construction and redefinition of Columbus memorials, statues and monuments stemming from local and international political upheaval leads to an understanding of how the modern Spanish State deploys their hegemonic identity through such spaces of memory, since the Alphonsine Restoration through to the current crisis of the monarchy, passing through the Franco years and the period of the Transición. At the same time, the loss, crisis and desecration of these memorials allow us to identify alternative democratic demands from critical citizens and political dissidents. I argue that the study of the construction and deconstruction of Columbine monumentality from 1892 to the present allows us to propose a critical theory for the active exercise of a critical Peninsular Studies that is actively engaged with our present moment and its challenges.
