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ABSTRACT In 2009, Spanish public broadcaster RTVE released 50 años de, a series of documentaries on Spanish cultural icons, trends, and audiovisual memories of the last fifty years. Within that framework, its episodes seem to work towards the felicitous continuation of the Renanian vote for the Spanish nation. The series, which draws its raw materials from the vast archive of RTVE, attempts to achieve that purpose by persistently putting to work different structural and formal devices in the filmic treatment of the selected footage. There is nothing intrinsically extraordinary in this, except for the cultural perplexity that it produced in one of the most contentious peripheries of that Spanish nation, Catalonia, and on the very cusp of divisive times. Through my analysis, I show some peculiarities of nation formation in postdictatorial Spain. I also posit that this peculiar peripheral construction of the nation is not that extraordinary throughout the history of Spain.
Some may find perplexing the idea that a 2009 television series conceived and made in Catalonia, with the institutional support of the Catalan autonomous government, might be considered a cultural artifact that, depending on the level of awareness, is flagrantly or stealthily involved in the attempt to build, rebuild, or bolster the Spanish nation through a vast array of compelling audiovisual rhetorical devices. After all, three years later, on September 11, 2012, what has been called the Catalan sovereign process, an endeavor that seeks Catalan independence from Spain, began in earnest, according to most chroniclers. At the risk of reiterating the obvious, and for the sake of expediency here, it could be stated that this process is based, for many of its defenders, on a historical narrative that sees Catalonia as an ancient independent entity integrated and kept throughout the centuries, first within the Spanish Empire, and l ater by the Spanish State, through violent, repressive, and hegemonic means. Furthermore, many of those in support of Catalan independence seem to operate on the assumption that Catalonia is not and never really was Spain, at least not from a cultural and identitarian point of view. However, the opposite-that is, the Spanishness of Catalonia-even if partial, is, in no small measure, precisely part and parcel, as well as a consequence, of my argument. I...