Consideraciones de la identidad cultural y la demarginalización en la novela negra española contemporánea

Abstract

If we look at the historical context of Spain, Castile has held its central dominance over the peripheral territories of the Iberian Peninsula, particularly Galicia, the Basque Country, and Catalonia. It is evident that with the victory of the Catholic Monarchs of Castile against the Moorish invasion, the inhabitants of these peripheral regions were relegated to secondary, and marginal positions as the cultural others. Until the 1980s, with the end of Franco’s dictatorship, numerous writers have managed to empower marginal literary genres written in vernacular languages, and among them detective fiction, which has provided profound reflections on issues of displacement, and marginality. Crimen en Compostela (Crime in Compostela), published in 1984 and written by Carlos González Reigosa, has been considered by the critics as the first hard-boiled crime fiction in Galicia. Although the narrative frame is centered on a mysterious murder of a wealthy property developer, our writer attempts to reconstruct Galicia’s glorious past and seek the Galicians’ cultural roots and identity. Gálvez en Euskadi (1983) is the second detective novel of a series by Jorge Martínez Reverte featuring Julio Gálvez. Being a non-Basque, the author wants to communicate some understanding of the complex Basque situation through the publication of this work. Moreover, Martínez Reverte tries to differentiate between the Basque separatism, the nationalism and the terrorism of ETA, ideologies which have provoked discourses of violence. Brigada Central, written by Juan Madrid, is a series of detective novels featured by Manuel Flores, a gypsy detective. Framed in the final years of 80s, Flores el Gitano is the first novel of this series and narrates how Flores takes his colleagues to go all over the peripheral areas of Madrid to solve all types of crimes. The present essay aims to study the textual analysis of Crimen en Compostela by Carlos González Reigosa, Gálvez en Euskadi by Jorge Martínez Reverte, and Flores, el gitano by Juan Madrid. We will explore how these three writers subvert the formula of American hard-boiled tradition, and how they elaborate the representations of detectives as the cultural others with questions of gender, race, ideology and language in order to convey their heterogeneity, autonomy and demarginalization.