This book attempts to map the vernacular diffractions of longing in Spain and Portugal in order to explore their political, aesthetic and social role in the national and cultural imagination of the past two centuries. Special attention is paid not only to discussions on nostalgia in Spain and Portugal (including migrant communities and its descendants as well as peripheral regions such as Galicia) but also for Spain and Portugal overseas (in exiles, former foreign volunteers in the Civil War or overseas migrants). In so doing, this volume attempts to shed light on the reflective and restorative uses of longing in different processes of nation-(re)building (both before and after Democracy was reinstated in the 1970s), the construction of migrant networks, as well as their multi-faceted explorations in anthropology, philosophy, history, literature and the arts of the past two centuries.
