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Barcelonan Okupas: Squatter Power! is the first book to combine close-readings of the representations of Spanish squatters known as okupas with the study of everyday life, built environment, and city planning in Barcelona. Vilaseca broadens the scope of Spanish cultural studies by integrating into it notions of embodied cognition and affect that respond to the city before and against the fixed relations of capitalism. Social transformation, as demonstrated by the okupas, is possible when city and art interrelate, not through capital or the urbanization of consciousness but through bodily thought. The okupas reconfigure the way thoughts, words, images and bodily responses are linked by evokin...
Anarchist Socialism in Early 20th Century Spain is the first English translation of and critical introduction to Ideario, a collection of newspaper and journal articles written by Spanish anarchist Ricardo Mella. Given that Mella is virtually unknown to the English-speaking world, this book provides readers access to his extensive body of work about Spain, human nature, and a world increasingly dominated by capitalism. Suitable for both the general public interested in learning more about anarchist ideas and for scholars studying twentieth-century Spain, the three introductory essays help to introduce Mella, ground his work in the context of Spanish anarchism, and draw connections between Mella and the urban in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Stephen Luis Vilaseca’s translation is accessible and engaging.
Does fiction do more than just represent space? Can our experiences with fictional storytelling be in themselves spatial? In Constructing Spain: The Re-imagination of Space and Place in Fiction and Film, Nathan Richardson explores relations between cultural representation and spatial transformation across fifty years of Spanish culture. Beginning in 1953, the year Spanish space was officially reopened to Western thought and capital, and culminating in 2003, the year of Aznar's unpopular involvement of his country in the second Iraq War, Richardson traces in popular and critically acclaimed fiction and film an evolution in Spanish storytelling that, while initially representative in nature, i...
What is socially engaged art history? Art history is typically understood as a discipline in which academics produce scholarship for consumption by other academics. Today however, an increasing number of art historians are seeking to broaden their understanding of art historical praxis and look beyond the academy and towards socially engaged art history. This is the first book-length study to focus on these growing and significant trends. It presents various arguments for the social, pedagogical, and scholarly benefits of alternative, community-engaged, public-facing, applied, and socially engaged art history. The international line up of contributors includes academics, museum and gallery c...
What are Hispanic alternative communities and how are they represented in literature, film, and popular music? This book studies the fictional representation of circles of artists and intellectuals, youth gangs, musical bands, packs of marginal urban dwellers, groups of immigrants, and other diverse associations that share the common trait of being small and subversive collectives, perhaps akin to secret societies plotting to take control of society. These groups usually exist within a larger and established community – typically, the nation-state – though maintaining with it complicated relations of rivalry, criticism, outright violence, and other forms of antagonism. Thus “alternativ...
Pairing cultural analysis in urban contexts with interdisciplinary approaches to political culture, this book argues that recent cultural production in Spain grapples with the conditions and possibilities for social transformation in dialogue with the ongoing crisis, neoliberal governance, and political culture in Spain's democratic history.
Graffiti and street art images are ubiquitous, and they enjoy a very special place in collective imaginary due to their ambiguous nature. Sometimes enigmatic in meaning, often stylistically crude and aesthetically aggressive, yet always visually arresting, they fill our field of vision with texts and images that no one can escape. As they take place on surfaces and travel through various channels, they provide viewers an entry point to the subtext of the cities we live in, while questioning how we read, write and represent them. This book is structured around these three distinct, albeit by definition interwoven, key frames. The contributors of this volume critically investigate underexplore...
The aim of Protests and Generations is to problematize the relations between generations and protests in the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean. Most of the work on recent protests insists on the newness of their manifestation but leave unexplored the various links that exist between them and what preceded them. Mark Muhannad Ayyash and Ratiba Hadj-Moussa (Eds.) argue that their articulation relies at once on historical ties and their rejection. It is precisely this tension that the chapters of the book address in specifically documenting several case studies that highlight the generating processes by which generations and protests are connected. What the production and use of generation brings to scholarly understanding of the protests and the ability to articulate them is one of the major questions this collection addresses. Contributors are: Mark Muhannad Ayyash, Lorenzo Cini, Éric Gobe, Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, Andrea Hajek, Chaymaa Hassabo, Gal Levy, Ilana Kaufman, Sunaina Maira, Mohammad Massala, Matthieu Rey, Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz, and Stephen Luis Vilaseca. *Protests and Generations is now available in paperback for individual customers.
Squatting and the State offers a new theoretical and methodological approach for analyzing state response to squatting, homelessness, empty land, and housing. Embedded in local, national, and transnational contexts, and reaching beyond conventional property theories, this important work sets out a fresh analytical paradigm for understanding the deep, interlocking problems facing not just the traditional 'victims' of narratives about homelessness and squatting but also a variety of other participants in these conflicts. Against the backdrop of economic, social, and political crises, Squatting and the State offers readers important insights about the changing natures of property, investment, housing, communities, and the multi-level state, and describes the implications of these changes for how we think and talk about property in law.
This book explores manifestations and perpetuations of the sentimental in Mainland Chinese cinema from the 1990s to the 2000s. A sentimental Chinese cinema – one that articulates notions of homecoming and belonging – emerged in the 1990s with its distinctive styles. The representations and configurations of this evolving style of Chinese cinematic expression are not only thought provoking in their own right, but also in the way they contrast with past forms of Chinese sentimental cinema and with sentimental aesthetics elsewhere in the world. These new representations have transformed established family centred expressions of the sentimental in Chinese cinema. The new sentimental emphasises togetherness and a yearning for belonging which often appear in the themes of homecoming and home-longing. This also forms a cultural resistance towards the increasingly alienating and isolating forces of globalisation and urbanisation. This book analyses the sociocultural conditions that have allowed for a renewed understanding of the sentimental and the cultural identity markers that are perpetually under contestation.