Integration is often, implicitly or otherwise, posited as a social good to be aspired to in contemporary Spanish films about immigration and wider European debates on this topic. Integration, however, can be a problematic notion which tends to insist more on the adjustments of the incoming "others" to a pre-existing common culture than on the necessity of the "host" to adapt. This article explores the extent to which Chus Gutiérrez's 2008 film, Retorno a Hansala, proffers a new paradigm for integration by having the action focus on a white Spanish male's "migration" to North Africa which places him in a "contact zone" outside Spanish borders. It reads this border crossing in the light of current politics shaping the representations of North African Muslim immigrants and also with attention to Spain's historical ties with, and ambivalent stance towards, its Arab and Islamic heritage. Understanding this web of connections as encapsulated within the film's overarching metaphor of "return," this article dwells on the term's multiple resonances and their relationship to present-day issues of integration, including historical convivencia and contemporary ideas of cosmopolitanism that stress solidarity with others regardless of borders and other divisive distinctions.

Javier Cercas's 2009 re-imagination in Anatomía de un instante of the attempted 1981 coup de état, '23-F', and Spain's democratic transition more broadly, though characteristically experimental with genre, goes further than in previous novels by purporting to forgo fiction for the authority of history. Yet Cercas's empathetic retelling, which gives prominence to three of the transition's key politicians as unlikely -and ambiguous -heroes who defended democracy, exploits the affective charge of a not unfamiliar narrative of consensus and national reconciliation. This article interrogates his recuperative and re-mythologizing stance in the discursive context of memoria histórica and recent critical perspectives on the transition, specifically the oft-reiterated and powerfully emotive notion of a pacto de olvido that has almost come to encapsulate the process. 'Pacto de olvido', 'dolor diferido': Javier Cercas's Affective Recuperation of the Transition in Anatomía de un instante The angel of history [...] is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. 1

No abstract

No abstract