Negres catalans, nacionistes i bandolers: genealogia d’un equívoc fusterià

Abstract

The “Nationalism” entry in Diccionari per a ociosos, by Joan Fuster, develops, based on the finding in the Diccionari Aguiló of the term nationist [nacionista], an essay on Catalan collective identity in the modern era. According to Fuster, the existence of a term like this in the Catalan language long before the construction of modern national ideologies began anywhere in Europe reveals in an almost premonitory sense the Catalan national condition, halfway between the “excellent” peoples, like France, and the “frustrated” ones, like Occitania. Fuster deployed his hypothesis, however, without having checked the context of the source quoted by Marià Aguiló, a Dominican convent chronicle from the beginning of the 17th century: Lumen Domus. In this paper, we retrace the route Fuster did not take to understand the sense in which this unique witness to term nationist in the Catalan language appears.