Transcultural Encounters Amongst Women: Redrawing Boundaries in Hispanic and Lusophone Art, Literature and Film

Product Description Traditionally women have found recourse in artistic means to interrogate change and upheaval. This volume explores the experiences of women from Spain, Portugal and Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who themselves have crossed cultural boundaries or have described this experience in their literature and film. Areas investigated in this collection of essays include the experience of the exiled or the immigrant and their personal or collective response to displacement and adaptation; the transcultural potential of cyberspace for women, how patterns and styles of the fashion industry have crossed borders; how women have crossed canonical cultural boundaries in search of identity and meaning; and, how global cultural influences have manifested in Hispanic and Lusophone cultural practices and production by or about women, and the challenging question of whether canine writing can be considered a branch of feminist theory. Common to most of the essays are the central issues of identity, values, conflict and interconnectedness and an analysis of the patterns that result from the transcultural encounter of these aspects. Review Edited by three established scholars working in Irish universities and containing new essays by young scholars, this book focuses on cultural production by women in Spain, Portugal and Latin America connected by a common concern with transgressing mainly cultural, but also political and social, boundaries. The works and topics chosen are central to current critical concerns, and of course the richness and vitality of Ibero-American Studies today is due precisely to its being a site of conflict, engagement and hybridity. This book brings the story right up to date, will provoke debate and will be a stimulus for further study. --Professor John Macklin, University of GlasgowThe authors draw on an impressive panoply of critical and cultural theorists, to broach such varied issues as female identity, mother-daughter relationships, censorship, racism, transpecies encounters and the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. Reading through the essays is akin to a process of accretion in which multiple insights coalesce into a powerful set of testimonies that can only enhance our knowledge and understanding. With this publication, the whole is considerably greater than the sum of the parts, not only because of the unity of theme, but because of the intellectual commitment and integrity each of the authors has brought to their task. --Dr Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta, University of BirminghamBy engaging so productively with diverse understandings of the transcultural, the volume avoids simplistic and unhelpfully restrictive formulations of this notion. Instead, it allows for concrete practices in the form of visual and written texts encompassing fine art, literature, oral history, journalism and cultural practices enabled specifically by new technologies to interrogate existing theoretical articulations about the transcultural. The volume will be of great interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as established scholars in Luso-Hispanic cultural studies. --Par Kumaraswami, Manchester University About the Author Patricia O'Byrne is a lecturer at Dublin City University, in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, where she lectures on the comparative literature programme and contributes to a range of undergraduate literature, film and intercultural modules. Her recent publications include 'Testimonial Literature and Spanish Women Novelists' (Romance Studies, 2008) and 'Popular fiction in post-war Spain: the soothing subversive novela rosa' (Journal of Romance Studies, 2008). Gabrielle Carty holds a Masters in Italian film from the University of Reading and a PhD in Spanish film from Queen Mary, University of London. Her research interests are Spanish film, star theory and the role of women in comedy and she has published