Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

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In the late seventies, Jimmy Carter had grasped that our long national adolescence was coming to a close. He asked us, in effect, to decide what kind of nation we wanted to be when we grew up.

Alarmed by the question and its implications, the country elected Ronald Reagan who told us to go back to doing what we had been doing and that, insofar as we had problems as a people, it was with overly introspective officials like his predecessor in the White House.

Yes, to come of age in the eighties was to be told, again and again by the makers of public opinion, that the past did not really matter, that, in fact, only navel-gazing losers spent their time and energy trying to decipher its inevitably depressing lessons.

So, armed with little more than the puerile hope some day becoming a latter-day Hemingway Hero, I ventured to the Iberian Peninsula where I found, to my delight, that the tradition of sitting around and telling stories about the past was in surprisingly good health.

In time, I moved from the realm of personal and familial accounts to that of collective narratives, with a special emphasis on the stories that Basques, Catalans, Castilians, Galicians and Portuguese—and in a somewhat less sustained and vigorous fashion, Asturians, Valencians, Mallorcans and Canary Islanders—had generated to explain their unique “places” in the world.