FÁBULAS DEL DESARROLLO: CAPITALISMO E IMAGINARIOS SOCIALES EN ESPAÑA (1950-1975)

Abstract

Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1975) analyses the cultural logics of the Spanish developmentalism by examining literary, audiovisual and artistic practices and collective social life in the interval 1950-1975, when the Franco dictatorship turned from autarchy to industrial modernization. Global accounts of progress, modernity and economic growth entered in tension with the specificities of the Spanish cultural and material productions in the transition from the postwar imaginaries of hunger to the so-called “Spanish economic miracle.” It focuses on a basic paradox: why is it that this “economic miracle” —purportedly secular, rational, and technocratic process— is fictionally portrayed through narratives in which providential or supernatural elements are often involved? In order to answer this question, this work aims at providing a description of the cultural logics of the circulation and the distribution of capital in the process of economic liberalization in the country.

Fables of Development is divided into two chapters. Chapter one studies the Spanish accounts of the USA economic and military interventions abroad during the Cold War, as portrayed in mass-media, comic books, and science-fiction novels and plays that reveal the links between technology, sovereignty, and surveillance in a split global economic order. Chapter two explores the fables of solidarity that challenged the national-catholic politics.

The fantasies of access to capital in equal opportunities through games of chance are understood, in this context, as an element that pre-configured a society of potential consumers through the circulation of capital that allowed the socialization of profits through gambling. These narratives of the redistribution of capital grew parallel to the inequalities fostered by charity, as a device used by the State for the social cohesion in the management

of the public welfare. By examining social imaginaries and practices as well as some fictions created by cultural producers linked to the regime or to the anti-Franco opposition, the dissertation explains the cultural logics that give meaning to the developmentalism in Spain.