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A Very English Caciquismo?: Land, Badlands and Habitus in Fiona Mozley’s Elmet

Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSNChapter

Forthcoming
Publication date2/12/2024
Host publicationBorder Masculinities: Literary and Visual Representations
EditorsAmit Thakkar, Brian Baker, Chris Harris
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages149-170
Number of pages21
Edition1
ISBN (electronic)9783031680502
ISBN (print)9783031680496
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Of indigenous origins, the word ‘cacique’ refers most commonly in Spanish America to a local leader who would liaise and negotiate between the Spanish colonialists and his own community, an embodied manifestation of patriarchy which had a good deal of power to affect the fortunes of that community. The Spanish American cacique has evolved and survived various attempts to curb that power (Amit Thakkar 2012) to become an almost autonomous local bearer of power to this day. Forms of behaviour associated with the cacique can be grouped together under the term caciquismo or, more clumsily in English, ‘local bossism’. But can caciquismo be observed beyond Spanish America? Fiona Mozley’s Booker-shortlisted Elmet (2017), frequently referred to as a ‘Yorkshire western’, features an exploitative, landowning character, David Price. This character, along with his nemesis John Smythe, is analysed in this chapter within the framework of certain features of Spanish American caciquismo, exercising local economic power in much the way caciques of Spanish American novels do, especially in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), which forms a comparative companion to the chapter. Depending on spatially contingent power relations, the term caciquismo might usefully be applied to non-Hispanic characters and to patterns which are hegemonic, sub-hegemonic (Christine Beasley 2008) and complicit, thus defying both spatial and conceptual categorisation. The chapter proposes that it is not consent but Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus ( 2010 [1984]) that underpins caciquismo and that an alternative habitus can counter it. That alternative is represented in Mozley’s novel by the character Smythe and his family as they reclaim land from Price, the cacique.