Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2014

This article examines the redefinition of the cultural references included in the Catalan cultural repertoire, a repertoire conditioned by the main processes of mixture that affect contemporary cultures: transmedia exchange and glocalization. These processes are exemplified in a Pau Riba Christmas performance titled Jisàs de Netzerit o el capítol zero de la Guerra de les Galàxies, a quite unclassifiable show that combines traditional, biblical and consumer cultural references to generate a critical allegory about contemporary Catalan society. The article analyses the uses of parody and hybridization in Riba’s show to discuss how cultural communities survive only if they are capable of finding strategies for the plural reconstruction of what is recognized as cultural heritage.

After the Franco dictatorship, the politics of the past in Spain became a problematic issue. The work of mourning those defeated during the Spanish Civil War had to be postponed during Francoism and recovered during the transition to democracy, a process marked by intense public debates on the history and memory of the Spanish Civil War. During the course of the last decade, the grandchildren of the combatants started to literally unearth the dead and tried to recover their memory. The Catalan documentaries made in 2008, Nedar (Carla Subirana) and Bucarest, la memòria perduda (Albert Solé), give Alzheimer’s disease a key role in the storytelling of the recent past. This article deals with the representation of that disease, understood as a metaphor for the forgetting of history, and the historical and theoretical implications derived from the use of fiction and archival images as means of filling the voids of memory.

In an article that would later be considered the first step towards the development of the Minority Language Media (MLM) area of studies, Cormack provided a set of interlocking variables that he considered should be taken into account to assess the chances for success of MLM development. Since Cormack’s original remit was exclusive to Western Europe, and the area of studies of MLM has developed further worldwide, it becomes important to address whether those seven factors apply equally to other cases. This article tests those variables beyond the European context to assess the theoretical construct. It presents a comparison of the development of MLM outlets in Wales, a European case, and Colombia, an example of a non-European case, based on existing literature. Finally, the article proposes changes in two of the conditions and recommends a more open approach to assessing the conditions, in order for the theoretical construct to be applied elsewhere.

Catalonia’s ban on bullfighting, which was passed by the Parliament in July 2010, caused a political and media commotion. This study analyses the arguments provided by the Spanish press with the aim of verifying how the media is involved in the conflict, accentuating the distance between advocates and abolitionists of the bullfighting tradition. The research compared editorials and opinion articles in Catalan and Spanish leading newspapers, taking a discursive approach. The authors defend that the comment columns did not add new perspectives to stories compared with the opinions offered by the editorials of the newspapers and that these displayed the bullfighting debate as a pretext for reaffirming their position with regard to identity. After conducting a discursive analysis, the authors state that the media is understood to be a political player whose actions influence the evolution of the conflict. This can be done by means of the (de)legitimization of both, the discursively implied participants and their actions. The discursive approach will be followed in order to uncover how ideological beliefs are spread and how the selected newspapers help to construct identity.

Our research utilizes a gender studies perspective in the context of television fiction research to investigate the models of the forms of masculinity and relationships that arise through the analysis of the Catalan TV series Porca Misèria/Pig Misery (Joan 2004). The methodology followed is to carry out a quantitative and qualitative textual film analysis of the male characters based on a scale, in order to evaluate the components of the love relationships. The conclusion that emerges provides four different modes of masculinity (dialogic, narcissistic, caring and Don Juan masculinity) and, accordingly, four different styles of heterosexual love relationships: ‘bonding love’; ‘inclusive love’; ‘caring love’ and ‘Donjuanesque love’. This constitutes a further step towards the future portrayal of men in TV series that manages to steer clear of clichéd representations and is more in tune with the new social realities of masculinity.

Advertising was a key element in the capitalist structures of newspapers in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was the time of urban concentration, mechanization, new forms of transport and the widespread promotion of consumption, the development of civil society, a rising level of culture, the birth of show-business society, the cult to modernity and newness, and cosmopolitanism. And it is within this context that a new Catalan journalistic project began: La Llumanera de Nova York (1874–1881). Advertising represented the main source of income for the press during this period, a press perceived more than ever as a business. The analysis of advertisements appearing in La Llumanera allows us to interpret the implications of the newspaper’s location in New York and witness the commercial strategy of the American businessman, far more advanced than that of the Catalan.

The article studies the role of cinema in the development and dissemination of discourses and narratives concerning Spanish national identity. It presents a historical overview from the beginnings of cinema to the first decades of the Francoist dictatorship. The analysis focuses on two main areas: the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture, and the use of regional symbols in cinema in order to personify the essence of Spanishness.

The aim of this article is to analyse the coverage of Catalan issues such as nationalism and secessionism and of the relationship and conflict between Catalonia and Spain in the Danish daily newspaper Politiken. The article focuses on what is published about Catalan identity, Catalan nationalism and its conflict with Spain, how it is published and, finally, why it is published in a Danish quality newspaper over a time period of five years (January 2008–December 2012). The analysis of the newspaper articles is complemented with in-depth interviews with four journalists at Politiken. The main conclusion of this research is that the contents relating to Catalan issues are dealt with in in-depth articles and reports providing context to their readers from a point of view neither predominantly Spanish nor Catalan.

The Internet has become one of the key digital media in recent decades, and that has generated significant changes in communication between organizations and publics. The different digital tools favour greater communicative interaction between them. The aim of this article is to assess the level of use of digital platforms by public companies in the energy sector in Spain, compared with the use of traditional means. The results indicate that publics make uneven use of digital tools to communicate with the organizations. Moreover, publics are increasingly using these digital tools at the expense of conventional tools to communicate with companies.

Theatre and Performance in Small Nations, Steve Blandford (ed.) (2013) Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books, 180 pp., ISBN: 9781841506463, p/bk, 35$

El periodismo volátil. ¿Cómo atrapar la información política que se nos escapa?/Volatile Journalism: How to Catch the Political Information that Escapes?, Nereida Carrillo (2013) Barcelona: Editorial UOC, 83 pp., ISBN: 9788490299814, p/bk. 11.50€, ebook, 5.99€.

Social Media and Minority Languages: Convergence and the Creative Industries, Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones and Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed (eds) Bristol, Buffalo and Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 265 pp., ISBN: 9781847699046, h/bk. 129,95 €

Mort certa, hora incerta. De l’edat mitjana a la societat digital/Certain Death, Uncertain Hour: From Middle Ages to Digital Society, Ernest Benach and Miquel Pueyo (2013) Lleida: Pagès Editors, 172 pp., ISBN: 9788499753188, p/bk, 17.00€

La Guerra Civil televisada. La representación de la contienda en la ficción y el documental españoles/The Televised Civil War: The Representation of the Battle in Spanish Fiction and Documentary, Sira Hernández (ed.) (2012) Salamanca: Comunicación Social, 219 pp., ISBN: 9788415544203, p/bk, 20€, ISBN: 978841544210, e-book, 5.90€

Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World, Christina Scharff (2012) England: Ashgate, 163 pp., ISBN: 9781409410300, h/bk, £55.00, ISBN: 9781409410317, e-book, £38.50

La comunicación móvil. Hacia un nuevo ecosistema digital/Mobile Communication: Towards a New Digital Ecosystem, Juan Miguel Aguado, Claudio Feijóo and Inmaculada J. Martínez (eds) (2013) Barcelona: Gedisa, 350 pp., ISBN: 9788497847827, p/bk, 27.90€