La resurrección de un cadáver putrefacto

"La resurrección de un cadáver putrefacto":Colonialism, Biopolitics, and Regeneration in Joaquín Costa Parker Lawson In 1906, the Aragonese lawyer, historian, and educator Joaquín Costa (1846–1911) lamented Spain's waning geopolitical influence and economic prowess by describing "los años de vida perdidos en perseguir una utopía—la resurrección de un cadáver putrefacto" (Ciges Aparicio 191), a biopolitical and pathological characterization of the country that was consistent with the concept of "regeneracionismo" ("regenerationism") for which Costa is perhaps most remembered. In writings that began in the 1880s and which spanned more than twenty years, Costa was a prominent proponent of reconfiguring and repositioning Spain's imperial practices from Latin America to Africa and would emerge, especially later in life, as the strongest voice in favor of the physical reimagination of Spain's topography to spur its agricultural and industrial production. Costa's regenerationist program was ambitious and multifaceted and entailed what he and Rafael Torres Campos would call "geografía comercial," along with his revolutionary proposal for a "política hidráulica," and a vision for systematic educational reform that was tied to Krausism and the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE). Spiritual, moral, economic, and geopolitical regeneration were key elements to Costa's paradigm, which moved with steady attention to matters from within to beyond Spain's borders and back again, all in the hope of regenerating—and even resurrecting—the putrefactive Spanish corpse. [End Page 297] This article mirrors Costa's multidirectional approach by examining his proposals both for foreign and domestic reforms, with particular focus on the biopolitical rhetoric that undergirded his arguments in favor of Spanish exploration and commercial exploitation in Africa following the empire's protracted decline in the Americas and the Pacific. Even as he looked to Africa as the renewed frontier for Spanish overseas enterprise, Costa never lost sight of the reforms necessary to make Spain a more equitable and democratic society. So too, therefore, does the article ruminate on Costa's calls for the restructuring of Spain's political status quo by dismantling networks of metropolitan "oligarquía" and rural "caciquismo," the two terms that give the title to Costa's most famous published work, which was initially delivered as a speech at the Ateneo de Madrid in March 1901. By analyzing Costa's writing from the 1880s through the early 1900s, the article demonstrates that biopolitical rhetoric concerning the material and spiritual dissolution of Spain and the attribution of markers of health, well-being, and morality to society was a product of the Spanish nation being considered a living, breathing organism, a reflection of growing interests in positivism, naturalism, and empiricism, which sought to merge scientific evidence with conceptions of vitality. However, the article goes on to show that even in Costa's attempts to trace the reforms necessary to achieve a more equitable and democratic society, his frequent recourse to biopolitical and colonialist rhetoric and policies was occasionally no less paternalistic, and even authoritarian, than the very systems that he sought to deconstruct. On this point Susan Martin-Márquez has written of Costa's "dramatic ambivalence" and discusses the complexity of his thought as something that has been largely "flattened out" by previous studies (60). Nevertheless, recent works by Diana Arbaiza and Eric Calderwood have addressed the lacuna that Martin-Márquez identifies, and this present article works to further a dialectical understanding of Costa's paradigm. For Costa and other Spanish intellectuals—whether liberal or conservative—the country's decreasing geopolitical power in the second half of the nineteenth century was a matter of epistemic concern. To hemorrhage the losses abroad, Costa believed, as Diana Arbaiza has shown, that "Spain's regeneration passed through colonial ventures" (58), but such ventures had to be recast within modern practices of geography and commerce and should be redeployed from the Americas to Africa. Indeed, as a co-founder of the Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonistas, which in 1885 was renamed the Sociedad Española de Geografía Comercial, Costa advanced a reformulated [End Page 298] concept of "africanismo," which advocated the exploration and exploitation of the African continent to fuel

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• Rescued from oblivion

  Open Access•Parker Lawson•Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies•2026

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