Anne Marie Hallal
“Sol y Sombra: Bullrings, National Identities, and Everyday Life in Mid-century Spain”
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Abstract
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This project examines the intersection of leisure architecture, national identities, and everyday realities in 1950s and ’60s Spain, a period largely ignored by Peninsular cultural historians. My research explores this epoch by focusing on the bullring, one of Spain’s most iconic architectural typologies, as a site where collective history, dominant ideology, and national image were continually enacted, contested, and disseminated. Beyond reproducing official narratives, however, I argue that the mid-century plaza de toros was a place where marginalized individuals and groups experimented with alternative experiences, practices, and identities at a time when Spaniards stood poised between the Franquist government’s conservative social agenda and burgeoning liberal forces. Conceived from this perspective, my project effectively challenges architectural history’s general disregard for the significance of leisure architecture, Spanish cultural studies’ limited discussion of cultural production in Franquist Spain, and bullfight scholarship’s marginalization of the bullring itself. Well-founded in theories of ideology, discourse, power and resistance, everyday life, and nationalism, my project is at the stage where it requires on-site investigation in Spain. Original research conducted in specialized tauromachy archives, in the plazas de toros themselves, and through ethnographic fieldwork in Seville and Madrid is currently paramount not only in order to test my theories and develop my argument, but also to determine my dissertation’s exact parameters. Irregardless of the final breadth of my study, this imminent research will support my dissertation’s basic premise: architecture is an active agent which both produces and is the product of a larger cultural landscape.
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