The Location of the Philippines within Spanish Official Frameworks

This article explores several notions of location in relation to the Philippines. Contrasting Filipino studies which problematise conceptions of the Philippines as Asian, this essay focuses on Spanish perceptions of the archipelago in official political and economic plans regarding Spain’s presence in Asia in the 21st century. The Philippines plays an important role in these plans, as it is listed as a priority country for Spanish actions in this region, mostly due to the shared colonial links. Despite this shared history, there are several Spanish ambivalent perceptions that locate the Philippines as a country connected to Spain and, at the same time, in the periphery of countries with a Hispanic heritage, which is evident in the location of Fil-Hispanic studies within Hispanic scholarship. Furthermore, Spanish official perceptions are often politically motivated, in relation to the practical uses that the location of the Philippines can have for Spain as a gateway to Asia, in particular, the neoliberal focus of certain Spanish policies, which re-establish a centre-periphery dynamics in a neo-colonial global context.

Detectar la nació. Una lectura perifèrica sobre la novel·la criminal i la condició postcolonial a Catalunya

This article examines the function of crime fiction in post-Franco, democratic Catalan culture. Drawing on postcolonial literary approaches to Catalan literature and culture, the article explores the ways in which writers and intellectuals actively produced crime fiction narratives as a means of overcoming a crisis in Catalan identity caused by the Castilian cultural and linguistic assimilation policies enacted by successive centralist regimes. The article examines the different narrative strategies typical to the genre that Catalan- and Castilian-language writers from Catalonia employed to resist the homogenising practices of the nation-state and to construct a particular Catalan community.

Sexualidades periféricas

This essay considers the problematic construction of alternative masculinities in Spanish cinema during the Franco regime and their reconstruction during the Transition. The analysis examines the cultural parameters of the performance of difference on screen, focusing on the representation of peripheral masculine sexualities, at odds with the fundamental elements of the hegemonic Francoist national-catholic ideology, whereby homosexuality and otherness are commonly denied, neutralised or made invisible to reaffirm the heteromasculine national paradigm. It also explores the fissures in the construction of hegemonic masculinity in Spanish cinema and diverse attempts of deperipheralisation.

Between Two Sides of the Atlantic

The growing field of Galician cultural studies has been moving rapidly out of the periphery of academic scholarship. The latest developments in this field have been marked by the effects of globalization and the expansion of its scope to include areas previously considered as a ‘periphery’ of cultural studies, such as visual arts. Influenced by these tendencies, this paper focuses on two contemporary Galician visual artists, both internationally acclaimed, sculptor Francisco Leiro and painter Antonio Murado. They are both prominent Galician artists whose sources of creative power are linked to their Galician roots. Currently they are both based in New York, one of the most important centres of contemporary art in the global stage. This essay discusses Leiro and Murado’s oeuvre as an example of the cross-cultural connections between the two sides of the Atlantic.

De Ventas a Ravensbrück

This article discusses the testimonial writings of the Catalan-Galician political activist Mercedes Núñez Targa who was imprisoned in Spain, France and Germany at the end of the Spanish Civil War. In her works, Cárcel de Ventas (1967) and Destinada al crematorio (1980), Núñez Targa details the horrific conditions that Republican prisoners endured and documents the widespread practice of gendered violence inflicted on women in Francoist camps and prisons. This analysis focuses particularly on her description of her experiences in Ventas women’s prison in Madrid. Núñez Targa deploys the testimonial genre to recount both her own experiences and those of her fellow prisoners, highlighting the particularly cruel treatment directed at pregnant women and mothers as part of the regime’s efforts to prevent the transgenerational transmission of left-wing ideologies.

Reyes de la gasolinera

The purpose of this essay is to open an academic discussion on a marginal but highly popular cultural phenomenon during the Spanish Transition to democracy: the rumba vallecana music subgenre. This study contextualises rumba vallecana in its historical and sociocultural territory and argues how and why the subgenre and its creators enjoyed a privileged, albeit paradoxical, position in order to challenge normalised identity and social constructions under the so-called ‘sociological Francoism’. The paper concludes that rumba vallecana was an essential cultural discourse embedded in the social identity changes that took place in Spain during the 1970s and 1980s.

Writing from and for the Periphery

This article explores the notion of the periphery as it concerns Hispanic food studies. It argues that the periphery has a multiplicity of meanings in this context, and also that it is useful for various methodological and substantive reasons. These include the initial academic marginalisation of food studies itself, the slow acceptance of culinary texts as an object of academic study, as well as the ongoing drive to move food studies from the margins of Hispanic cultural studies. By reference to the Author’s own research on Spanish culinary nationalism, this article also shows how the tension between centre and periphery is key to understanding Spanish food discourses of the past few centuries. This discussion hopes to show that the academy is increasingly paying attention to peripheral cultures and objects of study.

Capitalismo cool y clase media periférica en Animales domésticos de Marta Sanz

Marta Sanz’s novel Animales domésticos (2003) is an exploration of what it means to be middle class in Spain. This analysis explores a specific contention in the symbolic relationship between centre and periphery in the current power distribution within the European Union: that of being a European middle-class subject in a Spain ruled by neoliberalism. This issue is examined through the prism of Jim McGuigan’s theorisation on cool capitalism, which in this reading of Sanz’s novel allows the characters to cope with both personal and social disaffection by wearing a mask crafted by a certain middle-class ideology particular to Spain. The novel then becomes a symbolic playground in which such middle-class ideology characteristic of neoliberalism is shown as rooted in Francoism, inequality and chronic disaffection. This ultimately points at the impossibility of being represented as belonging to the centre (i.e. to the European middle classes) in the periphery (i.e. in a Spain that occupies a subaltern position in the political economy set by the European Union). Accordingly, in Spain one can only aspire to be a permanent contradiction: a peripheral middle class.

Historical Fiction in Spain

Medieval historical fiction is a popular genre in Spanish publishing. This essay interrogates the popularity of these novels, and explores the possible theoretical frameworks for understanding its contribution to Spanish cultural identity. It traces the rise of medieval historical fiction set in the “España de las Tres Culturas” from the early 1990s, with particular reference to 1992’s Quincentennial commemorations. Furthermore, the subject matter of these novels (convivencia between ethno-religious communities) links it to modern social and political issues – Islamic immigration, terrorism, cultural diversity, Holocaust memorialisation and historical memory – that also arose in the 1990s, giving it special relevance. To understand the contribution of this genre to Spain’s historical vision, this essays examines its relation to both history and memory, highlighting the problem of reading historical fiction in either of these ways. The paper concludes that a better way to understand historical fiction’s contribution to Spanish cultural identity is to see it as a part of a process of constructing a national mythscape, rather than as part of Spain’s history or collective memory.

Hambre y pan duro. De los años de la autarquía a la gastronomía globalizada en ámbito español

This article addresses four different ways in which food speaks to us: a surrealist approach in Buñuel’s cinema, table manners as discussed by Larra, the shortage of food and hunger that was an obsessive and persistent reality during the Spanish civil war and post-war period of the 20th century, or the recent sophistication and cosmopolitanism of Spanish cuisine due to the transformation of the country by the presence of immigrants. This study focuses on highlighting the passage from a culture of survival during the civil war and the Franco regime to one of greater abundance and sophistication with the arrival of democracy. The current recognition of Spain as one of the gastronomic destinations in the world modifies part of a historical and cultural past, which includes the ethnic transformation experienced by Spanish society. From the perspective of food studies, one can examine the relationships of the individual with food, and analyse how this association produces a large amount of information about a society.