International Journal of Iberian Studies - Volume 31, Issue 2, 2018

I suggest an analytical and reflective study around national identities, nationalisms and geopolitical controversial concepts, through which it was intended to extend the external projection of Spain and Portugal and frame transnational communities of destiny: Hispano-Americanism, Pan-Lusitanism and Pan-Latinism. Were these utopian expectations? Nationalist expectations to rebuild great nations of the past? What political impact did these proposals have? Did they contribute to deterritorializing and redefining the national identities of the Portuguese and Spanish elites? They were inciting but also controversial concepts. They carried an imperial historical background and projected future horizons. But they also raised national and indigenous resistances (indigenismo) and lively, strong debates in the old colonizing nations and also in Ibero-America. What was at stake was a consciousness of national identities and different strategies of defence and response of the Ibero-American nations vis-à-vis the powerful Northern empires.

Inherent features of African postcolonial literature have hampered reception quantification, which is even more often neglected in countries with limited experience of African decolonization processes. This has been exemplified through the Spanish case, where there was no quantitative data available to report on current reception trends. Hence, by exploiting the BDAFRICA database, a relevant specialized bibliographical research tool, we have provided an unparalleled study that covers 42 years of African literature reception in Spain (1972–2014). The methods described in this paper are descriptive. Quantitative information that is subject to a descriptive analysis has been selected from BDAFRICA. The results provide clear evidence of the sustained increase in the production of African fiction books and offer academia unparalleled data, thereby opening the door to manifold research lines.

During the 1940s, Francoist censorship troubled and banned the representation of homosexuality in cinema. However, some representational cracks existed and some queer characters (sissies, transvestites, mannish women) were visible, almost always as comic figures. These representations (especially, effeminate men) were frequent in films directed by Juan de Orduña, a homosexual filmmaker integrated in the Francoist cinematographic industry. This article studies these characters and proposes some hypothesis to read Orduña’s authorial position towards them. In particular, it suggests that Orduña negotiated his creative expression with dominant discourses concerning homosexuality in order to represent it, as other homosexual creators had made before him and many others would make afterwards in Spanish culture. Scripts, censorship documents and films are compared to show how significant elements related to homosexuality were added when filming. Specifically, this article focuses in a queer character, Tío Frasquito, and how it was developed during the production of Orduña’s film Pequeñeces (1950).

Why Minority Governments Work. Multilevel Territorial Politics in Spain, Bonnie N. Field (2016) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 261 pp., ISBN: 978 1 137 55979 1, h/bk, 978 1 137 55980 7, e-pdf, $119.99, $89

The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society, Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, vol. 15, Joan Ramon Resina (2017) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 322 pp., ISBN: 9781786940223, h/bk, £85.00

Literature of Crisis: Spain’s Engagement with Liquid Capital, Olga Bezhanova (2017) Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 175 pp., ISBN: 978-1611488364, hbk, $90.00