Jews and Jewishness in Carme Riera's Dins el darrer blau
Jews and Jewishness in Carme Riera's Dins el darrer blau
This essay discusses how Riera's Dins el darrer blau (1994) revisits the past in order to create a “culture of memory,” a process whereby society confronts its traumatic past and the history of exile and repression. Riera's novel is based on historical events that occurred in the City of Mallorca from 1687 to 1691. I suggest that this work engages with ideas of collective memory relating to the Jewish historical experience. Much of Dins el darrer blau corresponds to the writing on diaspora, implicitly questioning the relation between collective memory and nation. Riera shows what happens when the process of memory transcends ethnic national boundaries—what Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider (2002) have referred to as “cosmopolitan memory”. From this perspective, the persecution of Jewish converts in Mallorca can be remembered beyond the personal or even the group identities of the Jewish victims and the Catholic perpetrators on the island.
Keywords: Jews, Jewishness, Carme Riera, Dins el darrer blau, collective memory, nation, cosmopolitan memory
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
