Persona Recovery through Homage

Poetic Tributes to Spain’s Generation of 1927

Abstract

Tània Balló’s Las sinsombrero documentary series (2015-2021) about modern Spanish women led to the creation of multimedia projects and online spaces for paying homage to forgotten women throughout history. However, such crowdsourced and scholarly recuperation efforts are at odds with the prevailing canonization of the Spanish avant-garde artistic group known as the “Generation of 1927”. A deliberately constructed practice of homage has historically excluded women’s legacies and granted nearly exclusive support for the ten male poets considered the originators of the Generation of 1927. Modern women writers like María Teresa León and Concha Méndez lacked such cultural support and thus constructed personas in their life writing by placing themselves outside the sphere of influence of the Generation of 1927 despite their successful literary careers.

This creative piece brings together persona studies and homage to study how performances of prestige by writers and literary historians reveal the gendered, classed, and sexualised ways that the literary history of the Generation of 1927 has been constructed. My proposed theory of homage uncovers the closeted and undocumented sapphic and sororal relationships between women, and imagines queer feminist futures where women’s work is central to understanding the cultural milieux of the Generation of 1927. These poetic tributes are what I call “life-making homages” that celebrate and grant prestige to recuperated knowledge of writers’ queer, undocumented lives. The paper and accompanying poems demonstrate how, through life-making homages, scholars can propose alternate paradigms for tracing the development of the Generation of 1927 as part of Spain’s cultural heritage.