Resisting nationalism in Rompepistas (2009): Pan-national punk attitude in the working class fiction of Kiko Amat

Abstract

In his third novel, Rompepistas (2009), Catalan writer Kiko Amat creates a semi-autobiographical first-person narrative that observes national crisis as inextricable from geographic and economic issues of migration and constructions/locations of class as markers of identity in Spanish and Catalan national imaginaries. In a context of internal tensions and official discourses of consensus to organize the city in terms of what ‘should’ be visible, a teen narrator describes an emotional punk attitude during the summer of 1987 in post-dictatorial Barcelona in terms of embodying a cultural misdemeanor in Catalan nationalist context. Amat’s affective literary response to the role of ‘foreign’ music in his early life imbues the novel with a soundtrack of a pre-internet, pan-national sense of solidarity among working-class teenagers as the disenfranchised ‘other,’ producing a counter-consensus within official national discourses and unfettered neoliberal urban development plans.