Cultural Encounters in Contemporary Spain

Cultural Encounters in Contemporary Spain
Author: Debra Faszer-McMahon
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0838757685

Previous critical studies have focused on feminist approaches to Janes's oeuvre. This study seeks to expand those discussions through an analysis of the aesthetics of cultural otherness (rather than simply gendered otherness) within Janes's prolific literary production.

African Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish Texts

African Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish Texts
Author: Debra Faszer-McMahon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317184270

Around the turn of 21st Century, Spain welcomed more than six million foreigners, many of them from various parts of the African continent. How African immigrants represent themselves and are represented in contemporary Spanish texts is the subject of this interdisciplinary collection. Analyzing blogs, films, translations, and literary works by contemporary authors including Donato Ndongo (Ecquatorial Guinea), Abderrahman El Fathi (Morocco), Chus Gutiérrez (Spain), Juan Bonilla (Spain), and Bahia Mahmud Awah (Western Sahara), the contributors interrogate how Spanish cultural texts represent, idealize, or sympathize with the plight of immigrants, as well as the ways in which immigrants themselves represent Spain and Spanish culture. At the same time, these works shed light on issues related to Spain’s racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spain’s economic crisis in shaping attitudes towards immigration. Taken together, the essays are a convincing reminder that cultural texts provide a mirror into the perceptions of a society during times of change.

Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929Ð1939

Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929Ð1939
Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 328
Release:
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780271047201

The news media have given us potent demonstrations of the ambiguity of ostensibly truthful representations of public events. Jordana Mendelson uses this ambiguity as a framework for the study of Spanish visual culture from 1929 to 1939--a decade marked, on the one hand, by dictatorship, civil war, and Franco's rise to power and, on the other, by a surge in the production of documentaries of various types, from films and photographs to international exhibitions. Mendelson begins with an examination of El Pueblo Español, a model Spanish village featured at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. She then discusses Buñuel's and Dalí's documentary films, relating them not only to French Surrealism but also to issues of rural tradition in the formation of regional and national identities. Her highly original book concludes with a discussion of the 1937 Spanish Pavilion, where Picasso's famed painting of the Fascist bombing of a Basque town--Guernica--was exhibited along with monumental photomurals by Josep Renau. Based upon years of archival research, Mendelson's book opens a new perspective on the cultural politics of a turbulent era in modern Spain. It explores the little-known yet rich intersection between avant-garde artists and government institutions. It shows as well the surprising extent to which Spanish modernity was fashioned through dialogue between the seemingly opposed fields of urban and rural, fine art, and mass culture.

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History
Author: Jon Thares Davidann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315507951

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History explores cultural contact as an agent of change. It takes an encounters approach to world history since 1500, rather than a political one, to reveal different perspectives and experiences as well as key patterns and transformations. It studies the spaces between cultures historically to help us transcend human differences today in a rapidly globalizing world. The text focuses on first encounters that suggest long-term developments and particularly significant encounters that have changed the direction of world history. Because of the complexities of these encounters, the author takes a user-friendly approach to keep the text accessible to students with varying backgrounds in history.

Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire

Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire
Author: Assoc Prof John Slater
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2014-10-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1472428137

As the Spanish empire grew, cultural ideas and practices related to sickness and health, sex, monstrosity and death came into contact and conflict. Old ideas took root in new soil, others were stamped out, and new cultures arose. This collection examines the dynamic context in which medical cultures circulated to propose new interpretations of the reception, appropriation, and elaboration of medical cultures in the vast territories controlled by the Spanish monarchy.

Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture

Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture
Author: Gema Perez-Sanchez
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2008-06-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780791471746

Offers a sustained analysis of both high and low queer culture and its connections to cultural and political processes in Spain.

Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America

Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America
Author: Cristián H. Ricci
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000828522

This volume considers the Arabic and African diasporas through the underexplored Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Africans, and Mahjari (South American and Mexican authors of Arab descent) experiences in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches, the authors explore the ways in which individual writers and artists negotiate the geographical, cultural, and historical parameters of their own diasporic trajectories influenced by their particular locations at home and elsewhere. At the same time, this volume sheds light on issues related to Spain, Portugal, and Latin American racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of the Middle East and Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American economic crunches in shaping attitudes towards immigration. This collection of thought-provoking chapters extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Portuguese, and Mahjaris are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens.

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History, 1453-Present

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History, 1453-Present
Author: Jon Davidann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2019-02-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 042975924X

One of the hallmarks of world history is the ever-increasing ability of humans to cross cultural boundaries. Taking an encounters approach that opens up history to different perspectives and experiences, Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History examines cultural contact between people from across the globe between 1453 and the present. The book examines the historical record of these contacts, distilling from those processes patterns of interaction, different peoples’ perspectives, and the ways these encounters tended to subvert the commonly accepted assumptions about differences between peoples in terms of race, ethnicity, nationhood, or empire. This new edition has been updated to employ current scholarship and address recent developments, as well as increasing the treatment of indigenous agency, including the major role played by Polynesians in the spread of Christianity in Oceania. The final chapter has been updated to reflect the refugee crisis and the evolving political situation in Europe concerning its immigrant population. Supported by engaging discussion questions and enlivened with the voices and views of those who were and remain directly engaged in the process of cross-cultural exchange, this highly accessible volume remains a valuable resource for all students of world history.

A Laboratory of Her Own

A Laboratory of Her Own
Author: Victoria L. Ketz
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2021-01-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0826501303

A Laboratory of Her Own gathers diverse voices to address women's interaction with STEM fields in the context of Spanish cultural production. This volume focuses on the many ways the arts and humanities provide avenues for deepening the conversation about how women have been involved in, excluded from, and represented within the scientific realm. While women's historic exclusion from STEM fields has been receiving increased scrutiny worldwide, women within the Spanish context have been perhaps even more peripheral given the complex sociocultural structures emanating from gender norms and political ideologies dominant in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain. Nonetheless, Spanish female cultural producers have long been engaged with science and technology, as expressed in literature, art, film, and other genres. Spanish arts and letters offer diverse representations of the relationships between women, gender, sexuality, race, and STEM fields. A Laboratory of Her Own studies representations of a diverse range of Spanish women and scientific cultural products from the late nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. STEM topics include the environment, biodiversity, temporal and spatial theories, medicine and reproductive rights, neuroscience, robotics, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. These scientific themes and other issues are analyzed in narratives, paintings, poetry, photographs, science fiction, medical literature, translation, newswriting, film, and other forms.

Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders

Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders
Author: Raquel Vega-Durán
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2016-09-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611487412

Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain offers a new approach to the cultural history of contemporary Spain, examining the ways in which Spain’s own self-conceptions are changing and multiplying in response to migrants from Latin America and Africa. In the last twenty-five years, Spain has gone from being a country of net emigration to one in which immigrants make up nearly 12 percent of the population. This rapid growth has made migrants increasingly visible in both mass media and in Spanish visual and literary culture. This book examines the origins of media discourses on immigration and takes the analysis of contemporary Spanish culture as its primary framework, while also drawing insights from sociology and history. Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders introduces readers to a wide range of recent films, journals, novels, photography, paintings, and music to reconsider contemporary Spain through its varied encounters with migrants. It follows the stages of the migrant’s own journey, beginning outside Spanish territory, continuing across the border (either at the barbed-wire fences of Ceuta and Melilla or the waters of the Atlantic or the Strait of Gibraltar), and then considers what happens to migrants after they arrive and settle in Spain. Each chapter analyzes one of these stages in order to illustrate the complexity of contemporary Spanish identity. This examination of Spanish culture shows how Spain is evolving into a new space of imagination, one that can no longer be defined without the migrant—a space in which there is no unified identity but rather a new self-understanding is being born. Vega-Durán both places Spain in a larger European context and draws attention to some of the features that, from a comparative perspective, make the Spanish case interesting and often unique. She argues that Spain cannot be understood today outside the Transatlantic and Mediterranean spaces (both real and imaginary) where Spaniards and migrants meet. Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders offers a timely study of present-day Spain, and makes an original contribution to the vibrant debates about multiculturalism and nation-formation that are taking