Building on existing film and urban histories, this innovative volume examines Spanish cinema through contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, the built environment, visuality and mass culture from the industrial through to the digital age. Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film brings together the scholarship of an…[Read more]

How does one understand a filmmaker like José Antonio Nieves Conde, a Falangist whose films with strong neorealist tendencies were radically altered by the Francoist censors for being too critical of the economic injustices inherent to daily urban life after the Spanish Civil War? Many film critics have asked this question and this essay looks…[Read more]

This volume explores the history, evolution, and future of Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies as a discipline, a pedagogical tool, and a set of working practices by bringing together a diverse group of renowned specialists to examine how the field has grown out of and radically reconsidered some of the basic premises of British Cultural Studies since…[Read more]

Review of Katherine R. Larson, The Matter of Song in Early England. Abstract: Katherine R. Larson’s The Matter of Song in Early England is an exceptional study. It offers the perspective not just of an academic—Larson is professor of English at the University of Toronto—but also that of a performer, as Larson is an ac- complished singer. In this…[Read more]

If we affirmatively answer Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw’s invitation to think beyond the ‘fetishization of the modern city’ as the pinnacle of human-centered progress and achievement in order to consider the urban as both a process of transformed nature and the metabolic and social transformation of nature through human labor, the city becom…[Read more]

Conversión de los Saluiseños de la Alta California (c. 1840) by Pablo Tac is the only published document written by an indigenous Californian during the Spanish-Mexican period. Born at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, north of San Diego, California in 1820, Tac wrote the manuscript while studying to be a Catholic priest at a seminary in Rome. C…[Read more]

Conversión de los Saluiseños de la Alta California (Conversion of the Saluiseños of Alta California) (c. 1840) by Pablo Tac is the only published document written by an indigenous Californian during the Spanish-Mexican period. Born at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, north of San Diego, California in 1820, Tac wrote the manuscript while st…[Read more]

Jesús Aguado’s recent book, Carta al padre (2016), deals openly with both physical and emotional trauma suffered at the hands of toxic masculinity. The poetic voice vindicates his younger self, abused by the father, through the written word that transfers power to the weak and disenfranchised. Lacanian naming and patriarchal structures (family,…[Read more]

Libertarias (1996) and Land and Freedom (1995) explore the complex situation
of women militia during the Spanish Civil War. A queer reading of the female
body in these films highlights wartime female masculinity (Halberstam) and
female solidarity. In renegotiating worn expectations of sexuality and gender,
the films question and ultimately…[Read more]

This essay suggests that with the increasing prominence of “historical poetics” as a set of social collectives, methodologies, and debates (especially about literary analysis), now seems to be an ideal time to assess its history and consider its future. The first part of the essay offers a genealogy of historical poetics, accounting for some of…[Read more]

This essay focuses on one example of a collective desire to articulate new ways of thinking about and inhabiting urban space: Elvira Navarro’s 2014 _La trabajadora_, a novel that directly confronts the human cost of austerity measures in Spain by addressing the indignation experienced by those whose life plans have been altered by economic i…[Read more]