A stage for nations: Spain and Latin America on display in the twentieth century Giulia Quaggio and Marcela García Sebastiani ABSTRACT The present dossier collects a series of multidisciplinary empirical essays on the entangled relationship between Spanish identity and exhibits. Since the nineteenth century Spain has been both a parti- cipant and a venue for universal exhibitions, confronting itself with an imagery dramatically divided between traditional representa- tions and an advocated modernity. Despite being a country incap- able of competing economically with other western imperial powers, the case of Spain has a particular interest because of its cultural diversity, nostalgia for a past great empire and presentation as an exotic frontier between West and East, North and South of the world. The research studies carried out here mostly focus on the international scope of exhibitions and cover diferent transnational phenomena, inserting diferent imagined communities in wider and more ambitious spaces in Europe and Latin America. Notably, some exhibitions convert into special instruments for shaping col- lective identities in an interconnected Hispanic world in which post- imperial Spanish national identity is a reference to link countries and continents. Ultimately, all the essays move away from the examination of exhibitions as public arenas of symbolic confict between diferent identity proposals as singular places of collective memory. KEYWORDS Spanish nationalism; Exhibitions; Symbolic Politics; Iberian and Latin American Identities; Post- Imperial nationalism. Anderson´s nationalism studies took the lead in exploring the constructivist function of exhibitions and world’s fairs as complex systems of cultural representation that shape national identities and promote nation building processes (Anderson 1983). Since then, much of recent scholarship concerning nationalism has worked to frame the study of exhibitions as a stage on which various political, social and cultural entities perform and imagine national identity in particular places and times. As material and public manifesta- tions of the nation, these exhibitions have served as shared portraits of collective identity viewed and understood in local, national, and international contexts. Typically, the diverse actors who organize these events use exhibitions to ensure the promotion and dissemi- nation of what they want to represent on their terms and, by extension, each nation’s current political policy and international business agenda. Nevertheless, exhibitions also crystallise criticism and sometimes help to strengthen conficting identities, emphasising the cultural and political diversity of a country. Both the selection of symbolic contents by public and private agents shown at the exhibitions and the perception of all these cultural components participate in the process of imagination and construction of a distinctive CONTACT GiuliaQuaggio giulquag@ucm.es; Marcela García Sebastiani mgarciasebastiani@cps.ucm.es JOURNAL OF IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES 2020, VOL. 26, NO. 3, 205–212 https://doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2020.1851916 © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group