Affect and Belonging in Contemporary Spanish Fiction and Film

Crossroads Visions

Jesse Barker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319579641
• eBook ISBN: 9783319589695
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book brings together recent Spanish fictions and films that point to individualism as the root problem driving diverse circumstances of social, economic, and psychological suffering in the present and recent past. The works privilege sensation, movement, and emotion—rather than identity—as the core elements of existential experience. However, the works also problematize notions of intersubjectivity, confronting ideals of affective immersion and cultural nomadism with the concrete contexts that shape particular lives and social formations. This confrontation underlies a series of 'crossroads', or productive engagements, that guide the book's five main chapters: locally rooted identity and global cultural circuits; historical contexts and universal modes of being; personal authenticity and consumer culture; migration and cultural identity; Spain's historical underdevelopment and impending future crises. All of these issues make affective connection and attachment the greatest existential challenge facing individuals and collectives in the contemporary world, both in Spain and elsewhere.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Figures
• 1 Introduction: Spanish Crossroads—Affect and Belonging in the Democratic Era
• 2 No Place Like Home: Gabi Martínez’s Ático (Top-Floor Apartment) and Javier Calvo’s “Una Belleza Rusa” (A Russian Beauty)
• 3 History and Trauma at the Crossroads: Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words
• 4 Synthetic Skins: Mercedes Cebrián’s La nueva taxidermia (The New Taxidermy) and Pedro Almodóvar’s La piel que habito (The Skin I Live in)
• 5 Unraveling Cultures: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful and Najat El Hachmi’s L’ultim patriarca (The Last Patriarch)
• 6 Unsheltered: Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves (Snow White) and Jesús Carrasco’s Intemperie (Out in the Open)
• Conclusion: Belonging—The Ecology of the Self
• Bibliography
• Index