Heritage ambivalences: the aesthetics of fictionalised pasts in Roca Barea’s Imperiofobia

ABSTRACT

Roca Barea’s Imperiofobia y Leyenda Negra (Empirephobia and Black Legend) has been a bestseller in Spain since it was published in 2016. However, this historical essay has also provoked intense controversy regarding the veracity of data presented and the ambivalence, or even incoherence, of its arguments. This article analyses Imperiofobia from a different point of view: as a heritage product with a strong narrative dimension. A heritage product can enable an individual story to be inserted into a collective mythological narrative, as in the case of this book. Imperiofobia encourages the reader to become involved in an epic war against the enemies of empires, as well as against the enemies of Spain (mainly the eurozone’s most powerful countries and progressive or left-wing intellectuals). This involvement dimension is essential to understand how, in general, ambivalent and even incoherent narratives about the past can be functional in socio-political dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• Imperiofobia
• aesthetics
• narrative
• Roca Barea
• fantasy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. By 2021, 30 editions of the book had been published (https://www.siruela.com).

2. Imperiophobie. Rom, Russland, die Vereinigten Staaten und das Spanische Imperium. Translated by Christine Merz and published by Westend. https://www.westendverlag.de/buch/imperiophobie/

3. Following the success of Imperiofobia, a significant number of books have been published on black legend or as a defence of Spain and its history. See, for example, Landaluce (2018), Insua (2018, with a foreword by Roca Barea) and Esparza (2021).

4. Quotations from Spanish texts have been translated by the author.

5. This structure and the quotations included in this article are from the sixth edition (March 2017). Although the structure of the book has changed in the 2022 edition, all quotations also appear in this latest edition.

6. On the history of the concept black legend and its use since the nineteenth century see Villanueva (2011). Straehle (2020) analyses its use today.

7. Fiction can be defined as ‘a use of signs meant by the producer to invite the user to imagine, without believing them, states of affairs obtaining in a world that differ in some respect from the actual world’ (Ryan 2020, 78). The problem, as we shall see in this article, is that our relationship with fiction is very ambivalent.

8. Concerning the relationship between heritage and fiction see also van Dijk (2023).

9. Although Lowenthal develops these modes of fabrication more broadly in The Past is a Foreign Country, for the purposes of this article they are more appropriate as formulated in his ‘Fabricating Heritage’.

10. In order to define the United States as an empire, Roca Barea very loosely takes Dandelet’s (2001) concept of ‘informal empire’.

11. In later editions, Roca Barea has removed ‘and now’ from this text.

12. On the concept narrative world see Gerrig (1998) and Ryan (2001).

13. The title is a neologism, which could be translated as Failureology.

14. On the disconcerting nature of these assertions, see Rodríguez Pardo (2018).

15. Concerning the construction of the past and Catalan identity see Vargas (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

José Manuel Barros García

José Manuel Barros García has a PhD in Fine Art. He has been teaching in the Department of Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) since 2004. His main research interests are the stratigraphic study of cultural artefacts and the relations between cultural heritage, aesthetics, and political action.