Before Babel. Global Media, Ethnic Hybridity, and Enjoyment in Basque Culture

GABILONDO, Joseba

Publication year:

1999

ISSN:

0212-7016

Read the article online

Summary

This article traces the ways in which Basque language and culture have historically situated themselves before modernization (Babel) as a way to approach their contemporary location in front of globalization. By analyzing three different media (literature, television, museums), this article concludes that Basque culture is being hybridated with globalization in ways that resituate it beyond both Basque and Spanish nationalisms as well as their hegemonic subject structures. The article focuses on the relationships between three new emerging subject positions (the post colonial immigrant, the male homosexual, and the new woman) and the historically hegemonic nationalist one. The article concludes that the effects of the new globalized position of Basque culture are mixed but nevertheless represent a continuity rather than a break in history and culture because of the pre-modern and pre-nationalist foundation of Basque culture. The article proposes new tools to understand this continuity in politically productive ways while challenging reductivist understandings of globalization: jouissance, hybridity, and ruins.