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Rite, Flesh, and Stone
The Matter of Death in Contemporary Spanish Culture
Edited by Antonio Córdoba and Daniel García-Donoso
Series: Hispanic Issues
Materials analyzed here—ranging from cinematic and literary fictions, to historical archives and anthropological and ethnographic sources—make explicit a dynamic scenario where actors embody a variety of positions toward death and dying, the political production of mortality, and the commemoration of the dead. Ultimately, the goal of this volume is to chart the complex network in which the disenchantment of death and its reenchantment coexist, and biopolitical control over secularized bodies overlaps with new avatars of the religious and non-theistic desires for memorialization and transcendence.
Introduction: Materiality, Culture, and Death in Contemporary Spain, 1959–2020
Antonio Córdoba and Daniel García-Donoso
Part I: Rite
1. Executioners and Cultures of Capital Punishment in Franco's Spain (1959–1975)
Ana Fernández-Cebrián
2. State of Crucifixion: Tourism, Holy Week, and the Sacred Politics of the Cold War
Eugenia Afinoguénova
3. Carlos Saura: Death, Orphanhood, and the Commoners' Transitions
Angel Loureiro
4. Martyrs and Saints of the Spanish Civil War Era: Enshrinement of the Right and Historical Memory
Elizabeth Scarlett
5. The Future of the Dead: Reconciliation in Post-ETA Euskadi
Annabel Martín
Part II: Flesh
6. Capturing Death: Photography, Performance, and Bearing Witness
Patty Keller
7. Death, Afterlife, and the Question of Autobiography (Biutiful, 2010)
Cristina Moreiras-Menor
8. What Do We Do with the Dead? The Posthumous in Fernando León's Amador
Daniel García-Donoso
9. On Dying Colonialisms and Postcolonial Phantasies in Recent Spanish Cinema
N. Michelle Murray
Part III: Stone
10. A Stone That Makes Them Stumble: Mining the Lithic in Manuel Rivas's O lapis do carpinteiro
William Viestenz
11. Encounters between Memories and the Present: The Muslim Cemeteries in Contemporary Spain
Jordi Moreras and Sol Tarrés
12. The Forensic Eulogy: Science and Invented Traditions in the Commemoration of Republican Dead from the Spanish Civil War
Layla Renshaw
13. De-metaphorization of "the Other" in the Wake of Modern Biopolitics: A Reading of Jesús Carrasco's La tierra que pisamos
Pedro Aguilera-Mellado
Afterword: Politics, Arts, and Disrupted Death Rituals
Luis Martín-Estudillo and Nicholas Spadaccini
Contributors
Index
Antonio Córdoba is an associate professor of modern languages and literatures at Manhattan College.
Daniel García-Donoso is an associate professor of Spanish at the Catholic University of America.
"The essays in this volume move swiftly and deftly across different aspects of culture—fiction and film, but also exhumations, funerals, processions, and inorganic objects. In ways that are at once surprising and innovative, this volume investigates some of the flash points of contemporary Spain."
—Bécquer Seguín, Johns Hopkins University, and writer for The Nation, Slate, Dissent, The Awl, and Public Books
"A solid and necessary volume that opens up new perspectives in the field of Iberian studies by focusing on a central issue for a society, such as death and its cultures, regarding contemporary Spain. The subject is presented in a complex, collective, and panoramic way, focused on its political, social, philosophical, and cultural dimensions."
—Germán Labrador Méndez, author of Libidinal Economy in the Spanish Transition to Democracy
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