Commercializing Nostalgia and Constructing Memory in As leis de Celavella

Abstract

In this chapter, Gil Poisa examines how the Televisión de Galicia series As leis de Celavella (2004–2006) reshapes the memory of the Restoration by building a fictional continuity between the political order of the period and the later Francisco Franco dictatorship. She studies how the Primo de Rivera dictatorship is viewed through the lens of rural Galician life in the 1920s that appeals to the audience’s cultural identification and produces nostalgia for a non-remembered past. The series includes references to history, but as the author explains, these do not alter the nature of Celavella. The result, she suggests, is a softened image of the politically instability of the period that promotes a memory of historical continuum in which the Second Republic is merely an interruption.