Political cultures and collective identities after the cultural turn

Nation and gender in modern Spanish historiography

Abstract

This article reviews the impact of the cultural turn in the study of the political history of modern Spain with a particular focus on studies on Spanish modern nationalism and feminisms. It points to the ways in which, within these fields of interest, this cultural turn has widened the objects, perspectives, and categories of analysis related to the political sphere, in recent and broader historiographical context prone to renewing the questions about the past and its interpretative frameworks. The article states that among its multiple contributions, those that broaden and problematize the notion of political subject are specially groundbreaking. It examines the way in which this subject is constructed in each specific historical context. For this, it is pivotal to analyze the categories through which it is defined and the struggle that takes place in the public sphere, among the various political cultures, to fix its meaning. It conveys, in particular, the importance of placing the struggle to define the meaning of “nation” or “woman” at the center of recent analytical frameworks throughout the long nineteenth century, in order to rethink the making of modern political identities at the heart of the whole modern and contemporary era in Spain.