Spanish Spaces

A pioneering study that fuses cultural geography and contemporary Spanish culture, asking what it means to think of space and place in specifically Spanish terms. It examines how themes of memory and forgetting, nationalism and terrorism, crime and detection, gender, tourism and immigration are explored in contemporary Spanish film and literature.

This edited collection examines the synergistic relationship between gender and urban space in post-millennium Spain. Despite the social progress Spain has made extending equal rights to all citizens, particularly in the wake of the Franco regime and radically liberating Transición, the fact remains that not all subjects—particularly, women, immigrants, and queers—possess equal autonomy. The book exposes visible shifts in power dynamics within the nation’s largest urban capitals—Madrid and Barcelona—and takes a hard look at more peripheral bedroom communities as all of these spaces reflect the discontent of a post-nationalistic, economically unstable Spain. As the contributors problematize notions of public and private space and disrupt gender binaries related with these, they aspire to engender discussion around civic status, the administration of space and the place of all citizens in a global world.

Contemporary cultural geography and contemporary Spanish culture are married in this pioneering study of space and place. Spain's varied terrain—with complex negotiations between the rural, urban, and coastal—offers an ideal setting in which to explore questions of landscape, space, and place. In Spanish Spaces, Ann Davies draws on contemporary Spanish film and literature to explore Spain's sophisticated sense of its geographical and spatial self.

Published by leading outsider art imprint Raw Vision, Singular Spaces is a groundbreaking survey of art environments created by self-taught artists from across Spain. The book introduces and examines 45 artists and their idiosyncratic sculptures, gardens and buildings, most of which have never been published. The sites are developed organically, without formal architectural or engineering plans; they are at once evolving and complete. Often highly fanciful and quixotic, the work is frequently characterized by incongruous juxtapositions, an approach that appears impulsive and spontaneous. Director of the organization SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments), Jo Farb Hernández, combines detailed case studies of the artists and their work with contextualized historical and theoretical references to art history, anthropology, architecture, Spanish area studies and folklore. Breaking down the standard compartmentalization of genres, she reveals how most creators of art environments, who are building within their own personal spaces, fuse their creations with their daily lives.

The Spanish Empire was a complex web of places and peoples. Through an expansive range of essays that look at Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, this volume brings a broad range of regions into conversation. The contributors focus on nuanced, comparative exploration of the processes and practices of creating, maintaining, and transforming cultural place making within pluralistic Spanish colonial communities. The Global Spanish Empire argues that patterned variability is necessary in reconstructing Indigenous cultural persistence in colonial settings. The volume’s eleven case studies include regions often neglected in the archaeology of Spanish colonialism. The time span under investigation is extensive as well, transcending the entirety of the Spanish Empire, from early impacts in West Africa to Texas during the 1800s. The contributors examine the making of a social place within a social or physical landscape. They discuss the appearance of hybrid material culture, the incorporation of foreign goods into local material traditions, the continuation of local traditions, and archaeological evidence of opportunistic social climbing. In some cases, these changes in material culture are ways to maintain aspects of traditional culture rather than signifiers of new cultural practices. The Global Spanish Empire tackles broad questions about Indigenous cultural persistence, pluralism, and place making using a global comparative perspective grounded in the shared experience of Spanish colonialism. Contributors Stephen Acabado Grace Barretto-Tesoro James M. Bayman Christine D. Beaule Christopher R. DeCorse Boyd M. Dixon John G. Douglass William R. Fowler Martin Gibbs Corinne L. Hofman Hannah G. Hoover Stacie M. King Kevin Lane Laura Matthew Sandra Montón-Subías Natalia Moragas Segura Michelle M. Pigott Christopher B. Rodning David Roe Roberto Valcárcel Rojas Steve A. Tomka Jorge Ulloa Hung Juliet Wiersema

This collection of essays explores cultural phenomena that are shaping global identities in contemporary Spain. This volume is comprised of twenty essays that examine literary, documentary, and film representations of the multicultural configurations of Spain. All of the essays treat multiculturalism in Spain, focusing on reconfigured Spanish cities and neighborhoods through Latin American, African, and/or Eastern European migrations and cultures. Principal themes of the volume include urban space and access to resources, responses to the economic crisis, emerging family portraits, public versus private spaces, the local and the global, marginalities, migrations, and public expression of human and civil rights. This project examines the intercultural exchange that takes place in recent productions against an imaginary homogeneous Spanish national identity. These films, documentaries, and narratives seek to unsettle the Spanish preconceptions of the “Other(s).” Therefore, these texts construct a hybrid concept of the nation in which perceived national identities can be altered by interactions with other cultures from a broader world. The originality of the work lies in its focus on contemporary Spanish literature, documentaries, and fictional film to foment exploration of how Spanish cities, big and small, are experiencing transformation in architecture, popular customs and festivals, economics, family dynamics, and social and political agency through the arrival of new residents from across the globe. Some of the essays question the very legitimacy of the term ‘multiculturalism,’ others examine the formation of new communities, and still others explore the changes in religious representations and the environmental effects of the tourist industry. Together, the essays offer a compelling portrait of the changing face of contemporary Spain.

This collection bridges disciplinary scholarship from critical language studies, Latinx critical communication, and media studies scholarship for a comprehensive exploration of Spanish-English bilingualism in the US and in turn, elucidating, more broadly, our understanding of bilingualism in a post-digital society. Chapters offer a state-of-the-art on research at the intersection of language, communication, and media, with a focus on key debates in Spanish-English bilingualism research. The volume provides a truly interdisciplinary perspective, synthesizing a wide range of approaches to promote greater dialogue between these fields and examining different communicative bilingual spaces. These include ideological spaces, political spaces, publicity and advertising spaces, digital and social media spaces, entertainment and TV spaces, and school and family spaces. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in bilingualism, language and communication, language and media, and Latin American and Chicano/a studies.

This book offers a radically new account of the rich and varied culture of contemporary Spain. It focuses on three intellectuals who chronicle contemporary life (including journalist Francisco Umbral); three filmmakers who engage with the many nationalisms of the Spanish state (Victor Erice,Bigas Luna, and Julio Medem); and three crucial topics that are expressed in many media (the replaying of history, the rise and fall of the city, and the practice of everyday life). Ranging from the ethnographic photography of Cristina Garcia Rodero to the high tech architecture of SantiagoCalatrava and from the hyperrealist painting of Antonio Lopez to the neo-flamenco dance of Joaquin Cortes, this book is also the first to draw on theorists of the intellectual field, the production of space, and the arts of bricolage (Pierre Bourdieu, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau). Refutingthe charge that contemporary Spanish culture is trivial or superficial, this book argues that it is fully engaged in the aesthetic and historical project of modernity.