Documents of Revolution

In “Documents of Revolution” I compare various non-fiction prose genres with incipient journalistic media, including scrapbooks, photographs, films and radio poems, to explore the new internationalisms that emerged during the Spanish Civil War. Many studies of the war have prioritized visiting authors and their experience of travelling Spain. By contrast, I show how local critics, writers, and poets, such as the anarchist filmmaker Mateo Santos, the memoirist María Teresa León, and the poet Miguel Hernández, were crucial intermediaries between Spanish working-class oral cultures and foreign visiting authors, such as George Orwell, Nancy Cunard, Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén. I describe three modes of relation between intellectual elites and the working class: occupying, broadcasting, and archiving. By reading for the living internationalism of the working-class, I unearth various internationalisms (anarchist, Black Hispanophone, and feminist-humanitarian) that have not received due attention.

These overlapping networks and diasporas ensured that the revolutionary and multimedia documentary poetics of the war disseminated far beyond Spain’s borders.