A Critical Re-evaluation of Languages of War in Spain's Relations with Morocco (1859–1921)
2011; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3828/bhs.2011.41
ISSN1478-3398
Autores Tópico(s)Hispanic-African Historical Relations
ResumoThis study of war languages and two of Spain's wars in Africa recovers a diversity of discourses on armed conflict, foregrounding and reviewing the problematic figure of the soldier and the defining experience of combat relevant to the emerging field of men's studies. It uses analytical tools derived from Klaus Theweleit's psychoanalytical study of Freikorps literature, Male Fantasies. Women, Floods, Bodies, History (1977), and Eugene Sledge's combat narrative, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981), to identify characteristics of war languages and to offer fresh readings of two war diaries, a medical memoir and a novel. Focusing on the body threatened by mutilation and dissolution, it traces the subversion of triumphal war rhetoric. It notes the framing of the male soldier's fear as hostility towards the feminized Madre Patria – mothers, lovers and society women – perceived as having sent him to war, and the conception of male support networks. It discusses war as a space idealized as a quest but actualized as abjection.
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