A stage for nations: Spain and Latin America on display in the twentieth century

ABSTRACT The present dossier collects a series of multidisciplinary empirical essays on the entangled relationship between Spanish identity and exhibits. Since the nineteenth century Spain has been both a participant and a venue for universal exhibitions, confronting itself with an imagery dramatically divided between traditional representations and an advocated modernity. Despite being a country incapable of competing economically with other western imperial powers, the case of Spain has a particular interest because of its cultural diversity, nostalgia for a past great empire and presentation as an exotic frontier between West and East, North and South of the world. The research studies carried out here mostly focus on the international scope of exhibitions and cover different transnational phenomena, inserting different imagined communities in wider and more ambitious spaces in Europe and Latin America. Notably, some exhibitions convert into special instruments for shaping collective identities in an interconnected Hispanic world in which post-imperial Spanish national identity is a reference to link countries and continents. Ultimately, all the essays move away from the examination of exhibitions as public arenas of symbolic conflict between different identity proposals as singular places of collective memory.