Intimate Otherness: Immigration in Recent Spanish Narrative

This dissertation explores the personal spaces shared by Spaniards and immigrants in recent fiction. Traditional gender models and stereotypical images of immigrants are employed but modified, informing new models of Spanish identities in novels such as José Ovejero's Nunca pasa nada, Pablo Aranda's Ucrania, Lucía Etxebarria’s Cosmofobia, and young adult fiction. This work addresses how the sociocultural negotiations occurring in present-day Spain are represented in narrative. Building on migration studies, Spanish literary history, and concepts of hospitality and intimacy, I show that, whereas most current work on immigration in Spanish literary studies has focused on the public social sphere, intimacy is paramount to questions of gender constructions, race relations, and hospitality. Personal encounters take place in settings where racism, prejudice and cultural intolerance coalesce. However, they also function as sites for interethnic and intercultural affection and dialogue. By prioritizing the study of relationships and immigration, this project offers alternative ways to theorize how intimacy and otherness function together, without automatically characterizing immigrants as postcolonial phantoms or specters returned to haunt a guilty Spanish imaginary.