Southern exposure: early tourism and Spanish national identity.

ANDALUSIA (Spain); SPAIN

The article discusses the early tourism and national identity of Spain. The author points out that any attempt to analyze Spain's modernity would have to pay some attention to the role of the autonomous community Andalucía in the construction of Spanish national identity. He looks into how Andalucía come to prevail as the flagship identity of an officially European, Western country as diverse and conflict-ridden as Spain. He also ponders on the question of whether Andalucía provided an alternative, peripheral, different kind of modernity, or did it embody a form of primitive but authentic national identity.