Majos, the “españolísimo gremio” of eighteenth-century popular theatre: casticismo, unsettledness and abjection

Abstract

The majos of Madrid’s eighteenth-century popular theatre were proud of their casticismo, or genuine ‘Spanishness’ (as opposed to ‘foreignness’). However, from their inception in literature, majos refer audiences to the struggles underlying urban cosmopolitanism, such as immigration, poverty, displacement, and what Fumerton terms ‘unsettledness’, a condition of instability characterizing the lives of countless persons in the capital’s urban environment. Paradoxically, two essential characteristics of the ‘Spanishness’ of Madrid’s majos are their marginalization and unsettledness. I draw on Kristeva’s notion of ‘abjection’ to approach some of the ways in which majos are at the same time familiar and foreign/ different, central and marginal, and argue that majos configure an abjection inherent in the cultural construction of ‘castizo’ community belonging during the past.