The Haunted Island-Nation: Irish Intersections in Canary Islands Narratives

Abstract

This paper focuses on a relatively recent phenomenon: the appropriation of Saint Brendan’s narrative as a tool for utopian Canary Islands nation-building. Being one of the favourite lenses of the Canary Islands imagination it is not surprising that the construction of Canary Islands national consciousness (a highly heterogeneous and, till recently, somewhat marginal, process that stretches from the end of the 19th century up to our days) mines the Irish narrative for its own purposes. Nonetheless what is most interesting is the way in which the Irish narrative haunts representations of (national-ist) Canary Islands utopias. Thus, it is not only that Canary Islands nation-builders appropriate the story of Saint Brendan in order to forge their political horizon, but also that the story infects, in turn, their discourse, rendering their horizon utopian. In this paper I look at how such dynamics are instantiated in a number of sources, stretching from the late 19th Century up to the 1980s.