International Journal of Iberian Studies - Volume 26, Issue 1-2, 2013

This Editorial opens the special issue of the International Journal of Iberian Studies titled ‘Reading Madrid: Perspectives from Urban Cultural Studies’ by suggesting mobility as a trope that is just as relevant to close textual readings and to a wider understanding of Madrid’s cultural production as it is to questions of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, more broadly considered. Appropriately, given the objective at hand, the impetus for this move is sparked by a textual analysis – of Madrid’s presentation throughout the opening sequence from director Pedro Lazaga’s 1965 film La ciudad no es para mí.

In Lavapiés, Madrid, the Centro Social Autogestionado La Tabacalera (The Tobacco Factory Self-Managed Social Centre) recalls the prevalence of the cigarrera in the popular theatre of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while continuing the neighbourhood’s contemporary tradition as one of the epicentres in Madrid for grass-roots activist politics. While these connections activate cultural circuits of meaning that simultaneously evoke local and national imaginaries, they have made La Tabacalera a site where the intersection of the scales of the local, the urban and even the national has been a key component of the convergence of culture and space that urban theorist Henri Lefebvre would call lived space. Through a close reading of a series of cultural events held at La Tabacalera in 2010 and an analysis of the discourses of scale found in the ‘Dossier de Renovación del Convenio’ (‘Renewal Agreement Dossier’) from 2011, the present article will demonstrate how cultural production at the scale of the urban has been employed as a means of resisting spatial and cultural commodification at a range of other scales.

This article examines Rafael Chirbes’ 1994 novel Los disparos del cazador in relationship to important transformations of Madrid’s built environment from the 1940s to the middle of the 1990s. Using as a point of departure the groundbreaking work of the geographer David Harvey on the relationships between cultural production and urban process, this article offers a model for analysis that bridges the gap between the humanities and social sciences and in so doing offers a reading that demonstrates how Chirbes’ text weaves a message of resistance into the fabric of his novel about urban change.

If nineteenth-century notions of order and decorum reached something of an apotheosis in realist representations of Madrid’s gardens, works such as Valle-Inclán’s Luces de Bohemia (1924) and Pío Baroja’s Las noches del Buen Retiro (1934) present gardens as an image of twentieth-century urban society’s excesses and limits. Valle-Inclán’s nocturnal garden with prostitutes and shattered glass suggests the bleakness of protagonist Max Estrella’s social orbit, while Pío Baroja’s vision of Madrid’s Jardines del Buen Retiro pleasure garden conceals hostility and alienation under the guise of nostalgia and social refinement. Both gardens symbolize the ‘degeneration’ of what Jo Labanyi has described as the object of the modernizing state: to define the private self through the assumption of publicly defined roles.

The literature on parks and recreation has traditionally employed definitions of parks as products, rather than processes tied to economic, political and social dynamics that comfortably exceed park boundaries. As a cultural process, mental and physical, local and global, Madrid’s emblematic park of El Retiro is at the intersection of personal choices/desires and constructions of race, class, gender and nation, always articulated through dynamics of power. This article examines the significance of Ecuadorian immigrant gatherings in El Retiro between 2000 and 2003, focusing on the entwinement between the municipality’s decisions over the park’s form and use, and larger patterns of injustice occurring at a variety of scales, as the city (re-)positions itself vis-à-vis current methods of capital accumulation. An analysis of El Retiro’s recently constructed Bosque del Recuerdo, a memorial to the victims of the bomb attacks in Madrid’s trains on 11 March 2004, reveals the ties between the expulsion of Ecuadorians from El Retiro and the pseudo-sacralization of Ecuadorian casualties following the bombings. Through an in-depth analysis of the space for this ‘memorial’, as form and content, this article unearths the mutual constituencies of El Retiro as lived and imagined, local and global, and central in the histories of Madrid’s Ecuadorian residents.

This article examines the recently founded Museo Adolfo Suárez y la Transición – the first Spanish museum dedicated to the Transition to Democracy. Through considering museums as important institutions for the formation of national identities, the article explores the foundation of the museum and its current permanent exhibition in the context of competing narratives of contemporary Spanish history. In doing so, it will be argued that in the context of this museum, the Spanish Transition, as the founding myth for the democratic Spanish nation, also serves to silence the more problematic Spanish history of the twentieth century.

The Truth About Spain! Mobilising British Public Opinion 1936–1939, Hugo García (2010) Brighton, Portland and Ontario: Sussex Academic Press, 337 pp., ISBN 978-1-84519-332-4 (hbk), £55

British News Media and The Spanish Civil War. Tomorrow May be Too Late, David Deacon (2008) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, viii + 196 pp., ISBN 978-0-7486-2748-6 (hbk), £60.00

A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies, Xon De Ros and Geraldine Hazbun (Eds) (2011) Woodbridge: Tamesis, 405 pp., ISBN 978-1-85566-224-7 (hbk), £65

Feminismos Y Antifeminismos, Ana Aguado and Teresa Mª Ortega (Eds) (2011) Valencia and Granada: PUV & Editorial Universidad de Granada, 362 pp., ISBN 978-84-370-7892-2 (pbk), €24.50.

Legacies Of War and Dictatorship in Contemporary Portugal and Spain, Alison Ribeiro De Menezes and Catherine O’leary (Eds) (2011) Oxford: Peter Lang (Iberian and Latin American Studies: The Arts, Literature and Identity, 1), xvii + 270 pp., ISBN 978-3-03911-872-4 (pbk); 978-3-0353-0198-4 (Ebook), £36.