Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas – serie

This book is a diary derived from the careful editing of a vast series of notebooks: a complete yet diverse ensemble of investigations, lecture notes, travel diaries, poems, short fictions, summaries, and projects. Owing to the performance of her writing, the image created shows not only the life of an artist but also the way she transmits her experience, and how she conceives the current state of the arts. Between self-help and an artistic Frankenstein, this book covers ten years of atomized writing, scattered notes which have found their axis many years later. Experience is considered to be a multisensorial collage, and drawing is a modest and subtle companion, but also a powerful tool to transform reality. For the author, writing is pouring life directly into notebooks: a mobile registry which records impressions at any time, and at its own pace.

Luisa Valenzuela’s oeuvre is marked by a fixation with marginal characters, those often rendered invisible by society and outside hegemony: the subaltern. Valenzuela’s El Mañana captures echoes of the past, aggravated in a globalized world, takes them apart and reassembles them, to then project them into the future. With a clearly dystopian intention, Valenzuela’s novel reveals how instances of subjugation under despotism may be re-enacted by following a pattern of forgetting and repeating.This book examines the novel’s main fictional characters, who propel the reader to an Argentinean distant and recent past, present and future, challenging and dismantling their founding beliefs, and finally reformulating them from below. The novel is shown to present a decolonial version of the dystopian genre in which a new configuration of power projects the perils of gender, class and patriarchal oppression onto the future, along the lines of coloniality. Ultimately, by addressing themes relevant to the fields of literary fiction, criticism and theory as well as decolonial and postcolonial studies, this book maps out the development of subalternity by performing a situated reading of a major work of Argentinean literature.

«In Reflections on the Veracruz son jarocho, guitarist-ethnomusicologist Randall Kohl brings something special to the surging feast of scholarship treating Mexico’s renowned regional music, the son jarocho. Part history and part cultural analysis, and both qualitative and quantitative in approach, the book explores music as music, music as business, and music as a dynamic expression of Mexican social history. Professor Kohl of the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa interweaves original research with a half century of scholarship to chart key vectors in the evolution of a music, a culture, and a region.»(Daniel Sheehy, PhD, Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Museums and Culture; Interim Director, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings; Director & Curator Emeritus, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings)«While most of the recent English-language scholarship on son jarocho has focused on its use as a platform for activism and identity formation in the US, Randall Kohl’s Reflections on the Veracruz son jarocho takes a refreshing look at the genre’s practice in its home state of Veracruz. This work offers an excellent introduction to the genre for the unfamiliar, including son jarocho’s history, revival, style traits, subgenres, and recent fusions with other idioms. This is a wide-ranging and accessible book, and an important contribution to our growing understanding of this rich regional tradition.»(Gregory Reish, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University)«Randall Kohl's deep understanding of son jarocho shines through in this book. Built on years of ethnographic immersion in the musical community of Xalapa and its environs, this book expertly traverses the textual, performative and cultural terrain of this important musical vernacular of Mexico. This first book in English on the son jarocho will be an invaluable resource for both scholars and general readers with an interest in the genre.»(Anandam Kavoori, Professor, Department of Entertainment and Media Studies, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA)Once associated principally with the Veracruz countryside, the son jarocho music and dance tradition is now establishing itself as a twenty-first-century urban practice caught in a struggle between firmly established customs and newly adaptive strategies. This book presents an overview of the music’s history and musical characteristics along with specific looks at its texts, iconography, past and present academic trends and other details. It also examines the recently closed local centro de cultura, La Casa de Nadie, as a focal point for son jarocho activity in the city of Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico.

Respectable Professionals contains the contributions of fifteen experts about the birth of new professions and the modernization of working practices in old trades in nineteenth-century Spain. The authors consider that professionalism and respectability were the most relevant elements which structured the bourgeois society in the nineteenth century. The economic changes resulting from the abolition of guilds, the extension of the competences of the State and the liberalization of the economy contributed greatly to the renewal of the labour market. This process took place while some other transformations gave rise to the bourgeois society, such as the urbanization, the updating of the educational system or the organization of professional networks and associations. Starting from the sociology of professions, the book reflects on the historical and sociocultural elements that influenced the development of professional society through different case studies that allow us to compare with other European countries. Nowadays we are living through similar changes in the labour market that should lead us to look back and learn from the challenges faced by professionals in the past.

A panoramic, chronological account of the cultural history of the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to 2022, this book examines Cuban revolutionary culture and its control by the state. The book is conceived as a cultural history guidebook about one of the most significant and controversial historical events in Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, using the most relevant and up-to-date sources possible. Examining emblematic cultural events from different periods of the Cuban Revolution, the book is a chronological account of censorship and the control of culture, of how the Cuban state has controlled cultural production and distribution, and how artists and cultural producers have responded to and negotiated that control.The co-authors are renowned specialists in Cuban cultural themes both in Great Britain and in Cuba who have published widely on Cuban cultural issues over the last 15 years.

This book is a collection of essays developed from the meetings of the ‘Poetics of Resistance’ network in Leeds (2008) and Santiago de Compostela (2009). The volume contains contributions from an international group of researchers and cultural producers, who are committed to the activation, promotion and analysis of counter-hegemonic practices both in the development and transmission of knowledge and in the emancipatory tools of cultural production. The essays in the collection are written by scholars, activists and artists from around the world and concern subjects as diverse as poetry, film, philosophy, literary theory, plastic arts and television.The relationship between cultural production and resistance lies at the heart of the book’s concerns. Creativity and its manifestations in art, cultural production and knowledge production are a vital resource for a type of resistance that draws upon the resolve and contribution of the individual to the same degree that it emphasizes the importance of collective reflection and action. The interaction between artistic production, emancipation and resistance therefore cannot be reduced to a commitment to particular ideologies as expressed in art or writing. Rather, the poetics of resistance and emancipation are produced through the negotiation of the subjective and the collective, of reflection and action, and of cultural practices and ideologies.The volume contains contributions in English and in Spanish.

Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) was undoubtedly the most controversial literary figure of his generation. Whilst his genius was recognised by fellow writers, the reading public was slow to accept his work, and his theatre taxed directors and audiences alike. One of the harshest criticisms levelled against him concerned his use of repetition. This study shows how the reuse, recycling and development of material becomes one of the hallmarks of Valle-Inclán’s writing during the first three decades of his literary career, linking one genre with another and blurring the borders between different aesthetics. The repetition of themes and motifs, characters and stylistic devices reveals an underlying interdependence among works that on the surface appear unconnected or even contradictory.Many of Valle-Inclán’s works have been studied in isolation, rather than as pieces of a whole. This book examines the elements that provide significant links in his writing between 1889 and 1922, most of which shares the common backdrop of Galicia, and demonstrates that apparently unrelated works are part of a larger picture. Despite changes in perspective and genre, there are constants that relate individual works to those that precede and follow, creating a unifying pattern of continuity.

This book examines the relevance of the concepts of space and place to the work of Jorge Luis Borges. The core of the book is a series of readings of key Borges texts viewed from the perspective of human spatiality. Issues that arise include the dichotomy between ‘lived space’ and abstract mapping, the relevance of a ‘sense of place’ to Borges’s work, the impact of place on identity, the importance of context to our sense of who we are, the role played by space and place in the exercise of power, and the ways in which certain of Borges’s stories invite us to reflect on our ‘place in the universe’. In the course of this discussion, crucial questions about the interpretation of the Argentine author’s work are addressed and some important issues that have largely been overlooked are considered. The book begins by outlining cross-disciplinary discussions of space and place and their impact on the study of literature and concludes with a theoretical reflection on approaches to the issue of space in Borges, extrapolating points of relevance to the theme of literary spatiality generally.

Questions about dependence and independence are of crucial importance in relation to Latin America, given the region’s history and its current situation. They are particularly relevant at this time, with the bicentenary of independence being celebrated throughout the region. This book examines central issues relating to these two notions in the Latin American context, offering twelve different studies of the themes in question, six of which cover sociology and politics and six of which examine topics in literary and cultural studies. The breadth of the subject matter considered in the volume reflects the wide range of issues that the ideas of dependence and independence raise in this political and geographical context, including, among others: identity, hegemony, wealth and poverty, discursive power, the role of civil society, language and gender. The contributors offer new insights into the fields examined, from discussions of the significance of cultural products such as literary works and films to a consideration of the validity of the concept of independence to ongoing efforts to alleviate poverty and assert national autonomy. As a uniquely interdisciplinary and multi-focused collection of essays, the book offers readers an excellent overview of these issues as they relate to Latin America today.

Jorge Luis Borges was profoundly interested in the ill-defined and shape-shifting traditions of mysticism. However, previous studies of Borges have not focused on the writer’s close interest in mysticism and mystical texts, especially in the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). This book examines the relationship between Borges’ own recorded mystical experiences and his appraisal of Swedenborg and other mystics. It asks the essential question of whether Borges was a mystic by analysing his writings, including short stories, essays, poems and interviews, alongside scholarly writings on mysticism by figures such as William James. The book locates Borges within the scholarship of mysticism by evaluating his many assertions and suggestions as to what is or is not a mystic and, in so doing, analyses the influence of James and Ralph Waldo Emerson on Borges’ reading of Swedenborg and mysticism. The author argues further that Swedenborg constitutes a far richer presence in Borges’ work than scholarship has hitherto acknowledged, and assesses the presence of Swedenborg in Borges’ aesthetics, ethics and poetics.