Memory narratives: the Canary Islands, cinema, and identity

Abstract

As a political construct, identity is inherently malleable: it can be manipulated, falsified, molded, and adjusted according to specific interests. Far from being an immutable essence, identity is a dynamic and changing construction, constantly subject to reinterpretations. In this process, the past can be instrumentalized to legitimize identity narratives that, although constructed, are presented as authentic and ancestral. In this way, the population may come to accept such narratives as their own, in a phenomenon that could be described as a sort of collective Stockholm syndrome, in which an imposed identity is naturalized through new discursive forms. In this case, we will reflect on how this construct affected Canary Island cinema during the first decades of Democracy.