Catalan Political Modernism: The Case of Gabriel Alomar i Villalonga (1873–1941) and Modernism on the Periphery

Abstract

In this study, Bird discusses the historical development of modernism as an aesthetic and political stance in the essays of the twentieth-century Catalan essayist Gabriel Alomar i Villalonga (1873–1941). Because of the hegemonic position of the Castilian viewpoint in the modern period, the Spanish nation-state has been curiously disconnected from the Mediterranean world; by examining Alomar’s early essays, we can discover a covered-over Mediterranean perspective in Spain, the perspective of the more Mediterranean-focused Catalans. As a critical social theorist, Alomar diagnoses Spain’s self-perceived “backwardness” at the beginning of the twentieth century as an effect of Castilian isolationism, and prescribes as political therapy an integration of the more Mediterranean, more generally European outlook of the Catalan identity.