Embodied Lorquian archives: Spanish historical memory activism and the artistic regeneration of Federico García Lorca’s corpus
Creators: name: Moe, Elizabeth Ayn
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2020

description: In the twentieth century, Spain’s Fascist uprising, ensuing civil war and thirty-six-year Franco dictatorship jettisoned an estimated 114,226 citizens to mass graves and roadside ditches, and compelled 440,000 others to seek exile. Despite more than forty years of democracy, Spain’s governing bodies have not recovered the remains of the forcibly disappeared, addressed the exiled, sought justice, nor created public memorial spaces. Against this reality, this dissertation examines how the intertwined literary corpus and physical body of Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), Spain’s most famous “desaparecido,” have offered a uniquely resonant site for historical memory activism since the poet-playwright’s homophobic assassination in 1936. Beginning with creative collaborators who knew Lorca intimately, and carrying on into the generations of postmemory, I demonstrate how theater-makers, poets, and performance artists, working in Spain and in exile, have risked their bodies and identities to regenerate Lorca’s dual corpus. Chapter One studies Lorca’s closest theatrical collaborator, Margarita Xirgu (1888-1969), who devoted her thirty-three year exile in Argentina and Uruguay to transferring Lorca’s dramatic corpus to the Americas. Investigating forgotten archival remains—performances, workshops, a film adaptation, a speech, and poetry recordings—I establish Xirgu as the original theater-maker generating a transnational embodied Lorquian archive. In Chapter Two, I argue that Emilio Prados (1899-1962), a lesser-studied figure of Spain’s “Generación del 27,” was unparalleled in his activism on behalf of Lorca’s poetic corpus through his publishing, editing, anthologizing, and writing of verse. Examining archival materials including epistolary, diary entries, annotated manuscripts and books, I reconstruct Prados’s vital relationship with Lorca’s corpus from the beginning of his career in Spain until his death in exile in Mexico. Glossing his archival library, I offer the first transatlantic study of the poet’s seminal work Jardín cerrado, connecting Walt Whitman, Lorca, and Prados in queer kinship and utopia located at the phenomenological limits of the body.Chapter Three returns to Spain to investigate embodied Lorquian archives in the generations of postmemory. I study the case of visual and performance artist and early queer activist José Pérez Ocaña (1947-1983), whose transgressive Lorquian invocations in Ventura Pons’s documentary Ocaña, retrat intermitent (1978) challenged Spain’s institutionalized amnesia at the beginning of the Transition to democracy. Recovering lesser-known archived performances, interviews, and visual art, I argue that Ocaña’s Lorquian autofiction constituted historical memory activism through his recovery of the other. In this endeavor, I initiate a novel theoretical reading of Lorca’s own articulations of flamenco’s deep song and duende to illuminate how Ocaña as performer implicated his audiences’ bodies in his work. In each chapter, my dissertation demonstrates that the early and continued return to Lorca's dual corpus was not morbid fetishism, but rather vanguard activism. Engaging performance and historical memory studies, theories of trauma, queer kinship and futurity, phenomenology, haptic theory, and genetic criticism, I argue that these artists created and were embodied Lorquian archives—many years before an official Lorca archive was possible in Spain or elsewhere. These embodied Lorquian archives established an ethics and aesthetics of corporeal interdependence as a vital strategy to defy exile’s erasure and Spain’s collective amnesia, and to begin to recuperate the lost bodies, citizens, artists, art works, and ideals of the Spanish Second Republic. Transmitting affect and knowledge across borders, their cultural interventions signaled the limitless creative potential where the body meets the archive.