The Space of Culture: Critical Readings in Hispanic Culture

Edited by Stewart King and Jeffrey Browitt

ISBN: 0-87413-892-2          Published in 2005          $30.00 (paperback)          AUP Order Form

This compilation of essays centered on Hispanic literary and cultural criticism utilizes space as an operational concept, not only in its real-geographic sense, but in its metaphorical, theoretical, and discursive manifestations, along with the related notions of the visible/invisible, dominant/dominated, empowered/powerless. The essays range from colonial domination and international struggles over territorial claims, to a meditation on the politics of location, to the issue of spatial representation of mature-age women and gay men within a dialectic of visibility/invisibility in Spanish theater and cinema. The essays are concerned with the heterosexual, male-dominated space of statist, macropolitical issues, as well as the microspatial and affective relations in the spheres of gender and sexual politics. Space also becomes a dimension of imagination and "compensation" in Argentina, in the soundscapes in which the tango becomes metaphor for the failures of Argentine modernity, and the hybrid, discursive space of the quasi-fictional, journalistic exposé in contemporary Argentine politics. Stewart King lectures in the Hispanic Studies Program at Monash University. Jeffrey Browitt is head of Latin American Studies in the Institute for International Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney.