Intersections Of Race Class Gender And Nation In Fin De Si Cle Spanish Literature And Culture

This volume focuses on intersections of race, class, gender, and nation in the formation of the fin-de-siècle Spanish and Spanish colonial subject. Despite the wealth of research produced on gender, social class, race, and national identity few studies have focused on how these categories interacted, frequently operating simultaneously to reveal contexts in which dominated groups were dominating and vice versa. Such revelations call into question metanarratives about the exploitation of one group by another and bring to light interlocking systems of identity formation, and consequently oppression, that are difficult to disentangle. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. These essays cover canonical authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán, and understudied female authors such as Rosario de Acuña and Belén Sárraga. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. The volume builds on recent scholarship on race, class, gender, and nation by focusing specifically on the intersections of these categories, and by studying this dynamic in popular culture, visual culture, and in the works of both canonical and lesser-known authors.

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and honors Maryellen Bieder's invaluable scholarly contributions. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.

In this study, Irene I. Blea describes the social situation of La Chicana, a minority female whose life is influenced by racism and sexism. Blea analyzes contemporary scholarship on race, class, and gender, scrutinizing the use of language and labels to examine how La Chicana is affected by these factors. The wide-ranging study explores the history of Chicanas and the meaning of the term Chicana, and considers her socialization process, the consequences of deviating from gender roles, and the evolution of Hispanic women onto the national scene in politics, health, economics, education, religion, and criminal justice. To date, little attention has been paid to the political, social, and cultural achievements of La Chicana. The shared lives of Mexican-American women and men at home and inside and outside of the barrio are also investigated. This unique volume highlights the variables that effectively discriminate against women of color. Following a chapter that reviews the literature on Chicanas and focuses on their participation in three major social movements, the text discusses the conquest of Mexico and the blending of Aztec and Spanish cultures. Next, the life of colonial Hispanic women in Mexico and the United States and the role of the Mexican War in shaping the Mexican-American experience are investigated. The following three chapters explore how Americanization disempowered La Chicana; discuss the contemporary cultural roles of la mujer (woman) and their impact on men's roles; and consider the lives of older women. Chapter Seven looks at how some women are defining new roles for La Chicana. Current social issues are compared with and contrasted to those of the 1960s. The final chapters develop a theory of discrimination based on the academic work of racial and ethnic minority scholars and feminist scholars, exploring new directions in the study of Chicanas. This volume is valuable as an undergraduate or graduate text, and as a reference work, as well as a useful resource for social service providers.

An interdisciplinary analysis of gender, race, empire, and colonialism in fin-de-siècle Spanish literature and culture across the global Hispanic world. Unsettling Colonialism illuminates the interplay of race and gender in a range of fin-de-siècle Spanish narratives of empire and colonialism, including literary fictions, travel narratives, political treatises, medical discourse, and the visual arts, across the global Hispanic world. By focusing on texts by and about women and foregrounding Spain’s pivotal role in the colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, this book not only breaks new ground in Iberian literary and cultural studies but also significantly broadens the scope of recent debates in postcolonial feminist theory to account for the Spanish empire and its (former) colonies. Organized into three sections: colonialism and women’s migrations; race, performance, and colonial ideologies; and gender and colonialism in literary and political debates, Unsettling Colonialism brings together the work of nine scholars.Given its interdisciplinary approach and accessible style, the book will appeal to both specialists in nineteenth-century Iberian and Latin American studies and a broader audience of scholars in gender, cultural, transatlantic, transpacific, postcolonial, and empire studies. “Each essay uniquely contributes to the theme of exploring the entanglements of gender and race through individual authors and texts in addition to those discourses that articulate Spanish colonialism and imperialism.” — Alda Blanco, San Diego State University

Offering a fresh, revisionist analysis of Spanish fiction from 1900 to 1940, this study examines the work of both men and women writers and how they practiced differing forms of modernism. As Roberta Johnson notes, Spanish male novelists emphasized technical and verbal innovation in representing the contents of an individual consciousness and thus were more modernist in the usual understanding of the term. Female writers, on the other hand, were less aesthetically innovative but engaged in a social modernism that focused on domestic issues, gender roles, and relations between the sexes. Compared to the more conventional--even reactionary--ways their male counterparts treated such matters, Spanish women's fiction in the first half of the twentieth century was often revolutionary. The book begins by tracing the history of public discourse on gender from the 1890s through the 1930s, a discourse that included the rise of feminism. Each chapter then analyzes works by female and male novelists that address key issues related to gender and nationalism: the concept of intrahistoria, or an essential Spanish soul; modernist uses of figures from the Spanish literary tradition, notably Don Quixote and Don Juan; biological theories of gender prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s; and the growth of an organized feminist movement that coincided with the burgeoning Republican movement. This is the first book dealing with this period of Spanish literature to consider women novelists, such as Maria Martinez Sierra, Carmen de Burgos, and Concha Espina, alongside canonical male novelists, including Miguel de Unamuno, Ramon del Valle-Inclan, and Pio Baroja. With its contrasting conceptions of modernism, Johnson's work provides a compelling new model for bridging the gender divide in the study of Spanish fiction.

Mar Soria presents an innovative cultural analysis of female workers in Spanish literature and films. Drawing from nation-building theories, the work of feminist geographers, and ideas about the construction of the marginal subject in society, Soria examines how working women were perceived as Other in Spain from 1880 to 1975. By studying the representation of these marginalized individuals in a diverse array of cultural artifacts, Soria contends that urban women workers symbolized the desires and anxieties of a nation caught between traditional values and rapidly shifting socioeconomic forces. Specifically, the representation of urban female work became a mode of reinforcing and contesting dominant discourses of gender, class, space, and nationhood in critical moments after 1880, when social and economic upheavals resulted in fears of impending national instability. Through these cultural artifacts Spaniards wrestled with the unresolved contradictions in the gender and class ideologies used to construct and maintain the national imaginary. ? Whether for reasons of inattention or disregard of issues surrounding class dynamics, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literary and cultural critics have assumed that working women played only a minimal role in the development of Spain as a modern nation. As a result, relatively few critics have investigated cultural narratives of female labor during this period. Soria demonstrates that without considering the role working women played in the construction and modernization of Spain, our understanding of Spanish culture and life at that time remains incomplete.

Blood Novels examines the significance of women's blood and bloodlines in nineteenth-century Spanish literature and culture, advancing the study of gender in modern Iberian studies.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, New York caught the attention of Spanish writers. Many of them visited the city and returned to tell their experience in the form of a literary text. That is the case of Pruebas de Nueva York (1927) by Jose Moreno Villa (1887-1955), El crisol de las razas (1929) by Teresa de Escoriaza (1891-1968), Anticipolis (1931) by Luis de Oteyza (1883-1961) and La ciudad automatica (1932) by Julio Camba (1882-1962). In tune with similar representations in other European works, the image of New York given in these texts reflects the tensions and anxieties generated by the modernisation embodied by the United States. These authors project onto New York their concerns and expectations about issues of class, gender and ethnicity that were debated at the time, in the context of the crisis of Spanish national identity triggered by the end of the empire in 1898.