BOOKS by Susan Larson
Comfort and domestic space are complex narratives that can help draw our attention to everything ... more Comfort and domestic space are complex narratives that can help draw our attention to everything from urban planning, everyday objects, and new technologies to class conflict, racial and ethnic segregation, and the gendering of domestic labor. The volume Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain delves into the history of ideas surrounding the modern home. It explores how the collective experience of domestic space has been shaped by government ideologues, technocrats, and artists as well as working- and middle-class Spaniards since the late nineteenth century. The book focuses on the social and cultural meanings of domestic space in ways that invite us to cross boundaries between private and public, the particular and the general, the local and the global, and to pay attention to the role of the cultural imagination in making a house into a home.
Language, Image and Power in Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies Theory and Practice, 2021
This volume explores the history, evolution, and future of Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies as a di... more This volume explores the history, evolution, and future of Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies as a discipline, a pedagogical tool, and a set of working practices by bringing together a diverse group of specialists to examine how the field has grown out of and radically reconsidered some of the basic premises of British Cultural Studies since the 1950s to address the many cultures of the Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking world.
by Susan Larson, Jorge Gorostiza, Nuria Rodríguez Martín, Tom Whittaker, Josefina González Cubero, Alba Zarza-Arribas, Maria de Arana Aroca, Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, Leigh Mercer, Patty Keller, and Carlos Sambricio Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film, 2021
Building on existing film and urban histories, this collection examines Spanish film through cont... more Building on existing film and urban histories, this collection examines Spanish film through contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, the built environment, visuality, and mass culture from the industrial age to the digital present.
This edited volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of film, architecture, and urban studies scholars as they explore the reciprocal relationship between the seventh art and the built environment. The contributors explore a wide range of topics, including the role of film in the shifting relationship between private and public; the ways cinema as a new technology reshaped how cities and buildings are built and inhabited; the question of the mobile gaze; film and everyday life; monumentality and the construction of historical memory for a variety of viewing publics; and the effects of the digital and the virtual on filmmaking and spectatorship.
CONTRIBUTORS: Benjamin Fraser; Jorge Gorostiza; Nuria Rodríguez-Martín; David Foshee; Tom Whittaker; Juli Highfill; Patricia Keller; Josefina González-Cubero; Alba Zarza-Arribas; Emeterio Diez Puertas; María de Arana Aroca; Carlos Sambricio; Vicente Sánchez-Biosca; Samuel Amago; Leigh Mercer; Stephen. Luis Vilaseca
Intellect Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press |
ISBN: 9781789384895
Publisher URL: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo123638318.html
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2023
Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, 2023
The so-called " Silver Age " of Spain ran from 1898 to the rise of Franco in 1939 and was charact... more The so-called " Silver Age " of Spain ran from 1898 to the rise of Franco in 1939 and was characterized by intense urbanization, widespread class struggle and mobility, and a boom in mass culture. This book offers a close look at one manifestation of that mass culture: weekly collections of short, often pocket-sized books sold in urban kiosks at low prices. These series published a wide range of literature in a variety of genres and formats, but their role as disseminators of erotic and anarchist fiction led them to be censored by the Franco dictatorship. This book offers the most detailed scholarly analysis of kiosk literature to date, examining the kiosk phenomenon through the lens of contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, visuality, celebrity, gender and sexuality, and the digital humanities.
There were a number of discourses of modernity in circulation in Madrid in the early part of the ... more There were a number of discourses of modernity in circulation in Madrid in the early part of the twentieth century and these had an impact on the desires and ambitions of those who shaped the spaces of the city. The urban planner, the architect, and the author all have to have some kind of model, some image, some concept in mind before they put pen to paper. Constructing and Resisting Modernity studies the urban spaces imagined by the technocrats who had the power to shape real urban spaces in Madrid and relates them to the fiction of authors such as Carmen de Burgos, José Díaz Fernández and Andrés Carranque de Ríos who responded by creating utopian and dystopian narratives that critiqued a wide range of experiences of modernity.
While the simultaneously creative and destructive forces of modernity in Western Europe have been... more While the simultaneously creative and destructive forces of modernity in Western Europe have been well studied, the case of Spain has often been overlooked. Visualizing Spanish Modernity concentrates on the time period 1868-1939, which marks not only the beginning of the formation of a modern economy and the consolidation of the liberal state, but also the growth of urban centers and spaces made possible by electricity, transportation, mass production and the emergence of an entertainment industry. The authors examine how mass print culture, early cinema, popular drama, photography, fashion, painting, museums and urban planning played a role in the way that Spanish society saw itself and was in turn seen by the rest of the world. Assessing how new cultural forms were instrumental in shaping Spaniards into citizens of the modern world, the authors consider such subjects as the spectacle of the body, notions of race and gender, the changing meanings of time, space and motion, the relationship between technology and everyday life and popular culture.
ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS by Susan Larson
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Spain, 2025
A close look at the history of the academic discipline of geography in Spain since the nineteenth... more A close look at the history of the academic discipline of geography in Spain since the nineteenth century reveals that the “regenerationist” discourses of modernization that gave voice to a national and nationalist geographical project were backed by an ideology that simultaneously pushed for socioeconomic restructuring and cultural revival in ways that were closely connected to ideas about territory, land and landscape. Since the 1960s, the subdiscipline of cultural geography began to draw on key concepts from cultural studies, philosophy, critical theory, postcolonial studies and feminism in an attempt to get beyond the many forms of environmental determinism that have run through the broader discipline of geography, in Spain and elsewhere. After an overview of the basic premises of cultural geography as a discipline, the place-based cultural theories of Julio Caro Baroja (a frequently overlooked practitioner of cultural geography in Spain) and a handful of significant studies of Iberian culture that have grown out of the “geographical turn” in recent years, this chapter proposes that one way to create opportunities for more productive, inclusive and non-essentialist discussions about space, place and culture within Iberian studies might be to pay attention to Latin American geographers (the work of Afro-Brazilian scholar Milton Santos in particular), and to look for ways of thinking like geographers in dialogue with the fields of history, sociology and anthropology.
Tropelías: Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada 10 (2024): 127-137., 2024
En 1944 hasta los años 60 las ideas sobre la función del espacio doméstico en España experimentar... more En 1944 hasta los años 60 las ideas sobre la función del espacio doméstico en España experimentaron transformaciones radicales. La apertura de España en 1953 a relaciones diplomáticas y económicas con una comunidad internacional más amplia hicieron que los arquitectos y los urbanistas tomaran más consciencia sobre la inmensa brecha entre la vivienda tradicional española, que parecía anquilosada en el siglo XIX, y las torres de apartamentos modernos que empezaban a salpicar el paisaje urbano. Este breve artículo plantea unas reflexiones preliminares sobre las tensiones entre varios discursos sobre el concepto del ‘confort’ y el espacio doméstico que se encuentran en la política de la vivienda y en dos novelas españolas de finales de los años 50: Entre visillos (1958) de Carmen Martín Gaite y La piqueta (1959) de Antonio Ferres. Después de un repaso breve del papel central que tuvo la política de la vivienda de José Luis Arrese (arquitecto falangista nombrado en 1957 Ministro de la Vivienda) quien asumió la cesión al sector privado de lo que hasta entonces había sido competencia del sector público y el concepto de Beatriz Colomina de la porosidad entre lo privado y lo público de la casa moderna en la época de la cultura de masas (Privacidad y publicidad: La arquitectura como medio de comunicación de masas, 2010) este artículo apunta hacia cómo estas dos novelas dejan al descubierto la lógica de la práctica doméstica del ‘hogar católico’ franquista.
Palabras clave: vivienda, espacio doméstico, confort, novela social española, Carmen Martín Gaite, Antonio Ferres
Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film, 2021
How does one understand a filmmaker like José Antonio Nieves Conde, a Falangist whose films with ... more How does one understand a filmmaker like José Antonio Nieves Conde, a Falangist whose films with strong neorealist tendencies were radically altered by the Francoist censors for being too critical of the economic injustices inherent to daily urban life after the Spanish Civil War? Many film critics have asked this question and this essay looks for an answer by considering a seemingly inconsequential screenplay written by Alfredo Marquerie in 1955 for the documentary film Obra Sindical del Hogar commissioned by the Delegación Nacional de Sindicatos, which was responsible for organizing all of the industrial workers in Spain during the Franco regime. The plot of El inquilino is remarkably similar to the narrative outlined in this 1955 screenplay and includes the pious, moralizing statements of the Obra Sindical that were put to such humorous use in the feature film two years later. The purpose of this 1955 documentary was to reinforce the confidence of Spanish workers in the state and its official workers’ unions. Nieves Condes’s feature film, however, ultimately undermined the ideology and project of Franco’s housing policies. What Nieves Conde did not know, however, is that the regime would get the last laugh. Just a few months after the release of El inquilino, Spain’s Minister of Housing, José Luis de Arrese, would almost singlehandedly transfer the capacity to satisfy the urgent demand for public housing to the private sector.
ZARCH: Journal in Interdisciplinary Studies in Architecture and Urbanism, 2021
If we affirmatively answer Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw's invitation to think beyond the 'feti... more If we affirmatively answer Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw's invitation to think beyond the 'fetishization of the modern city' as the pinnacle of human-centered progress and achievement in order to consider the urban as both a process of transformed nature and the metabolic and social transformation of nature through human labor, the city becomes a 'hybrid of the natural and the cultural, the environmental and the social' (Kaika and Syngedouw; 122). This essay argues that markedly different ways of imagining monumental public spaces and the relationship between nature and the city have arisen since the economic crisis of 2008 in Spain. Urban cultures create opportunities to imagine these new social, material and symbolic transformations and are exemplified in the documentary films of Víctor Moreno Edificio España (2012) and La ciudad oculta (2018). Considered together, the two films capture the scale, depth and three-dimensionality of spaces that are made up of both organic and non-organic material flows in ways that encourage us to question some of our basic assumptions about the urban.
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Si respondemos afirmativamente a la invitación de Maria Kaika y Erik Swyngedouw de pensar más allá de la “fetichización de la ciudad moderna” como cúspide del progreso y del logro centrados en lo humano para considerar lo urbano a un mismo tiempo como proceso de naturaleza transformada y como transformación social y metabólica de la naturaleza a través del trabajo humano, la ciudad se convierte en un “híbrido de lo natural y lo cultural, lo medioambiental y lo social” (Kaika y Swyngedouw, 122). Este ensayo sostiene que desde la crisis económica de 2008 en España han surgido modos notablemente diferentes de imaginar los espacios públicos monumentales y la relación entre naturaleza y ciudad. Las culturas urbanas crean oportunidades de imaginar estas nuevas transformaciones sociales, materiales y simbólicas y las películas documentales de Víctor Moreno Edificio España (2012) y La ciudad oculta (2018) son un ejemplo de ello. Consideradas en su conjunto, las dos películas captan la escala, profundidad y tridimensionalidad de espacios que están hechos de flujos materiales orgánicos y no orgánicos de un modo que nos insta a cuestionar algunos de nuestras premisas básicas sobre lo urbano.
Cartographies of Madrid: Contesting Urban Space at the Crossroads of the Global South and the Global North, 2018
This essay focuses on one example of a collective desire to articulate new ways of thinking about... more This essay focuses on one example of a collective desire to articulate new ways of thinking about and inhabiting urban space: Elvira Navarro’s 2014 _La trabajadora_, a novel that directly confronts the human cost of austerity measures in Spain by addressing the indignation experienced by those whose life plans have been altered by economic instability and labor precarity. Specific attention is paid to the notable presence in contemporary works of urban social criticism of references to garbage, trash, waste, and detritus of all kinds. In many of these works, garbage and its recycling appear as recurring themes but also function at the conceptual level to propose an aesthetic all their own. _La trabajadora_ is a direct response to the material conditions of the city and serves as a prime example of art that envisions the reuse and repurposing of refuse within the urban space it occupies.
El Madrid de Carranque de Ríos: De la ficción cinematográfica a la edición interactiva, 2019
En la década de 1990, el concepto ‘intermedialidad’ puso en contacto distintas disciplinas académ... more En la década de 1990, el concepto ‘intermedialidad’ puso en contacto distintas disciplinas académicas (estudios literarios, estudios mediáticos, sociología, estudios cinematográficos e historia del arte) desde la intención por encarar y mejor comprender el ambiente cultural visual/escrito/auditivo que caracterizó los comienzos del siglo XX. Conectando a los escritores con las nuevas tecnologías que caracterizaron la ciudad moderna, este artículo afronta en qué medida cuánto la novela _Cinematógrafo_ (1936) de Andrés Carranque de Ríos reflejó tal preocupación. El artículo estudia el impacto del cine tanto en la forma como en el contenido de la novela a la vez que tiende lazos con otros textos de la época que recrearon similares imaginarios urbanos. Y aunque _Cinematógrafo_ centró su trama en el Madrid de los años 20, la pretensión del artículo es valorar aquella desde experiencias similares llevadas a término en otros países por otros autores.
El urbanismo de la transición. El Plan General de Ordenación Urbana de Madrid de 1985. Carlos Sambricio and Paloma Ramos, eds., 2019
Bulletin d'Histoire Contemporaine de l'Espagne, 2019
The purpose of this essay is to better understand the motives of the real estate mogul and constr... more The purpose of this essay is to better understand the motives of the real estate mogul and construction magnate J.C.Nichols, who was responsible for the construction of the first non-centrally located shopping mall in the United States in Kansas City in the 1920s. Specifically, this study focuses on why and how Nichols resorted to a pastiche of “Spanish” historicist architectural styles to create this new space of consumerism.
Mediodía. Revista hispánica de rescate, 2018
RESUMEN : El cuento «Vísceras de la ciudad» (1935) de Rosa Arciniega es un ejemplo de la literatu... more RESUMEN : El cuento «Vísceras de la ciudad» (1935) de Rosa Arciniega es un ejemplo de la literatura comprometida que cuestiona los límites entre la cultura de masas y la cultura vanguardista de élite. Las ideas de Arciniega sobre la estética y la política se formaron en Lima en los años veinte, influidas por el filósofo marxista José Carlos Mariátegui,y forman la base de su escritura idiosincrática en y sobre Madrid de la década siguiente. A través del uso de técnicas narrativas experimentales y cinematográficas, «Vísce- ras de la ciudad» trastoca la relación sujeto-masculino/objeto-femenino tan característica de la narrativa moderna y emplea un modo flexible de escribir que se presta fácilmente a la revisión para publicaciones futuras.
ABSTRACT : Rosa Arciniega’s short story “Vísceras del la ciudad” (1935) is an example of socially-committed literature that blurred the boundaries between popular culture and the avant-garde. Arciniega’s ideas about aesthetics and politics, shaped in Lima in the 1920s by her contact with the Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui, are the foundation of her idiosyncratic writing in and about Madrid between 1930 and 1936. Through recourse to experimental and cinematographic narrative techniques, “Vísceras del la ciudad” reverses the masculine subject / feminine-object relationship commonly found in modern literature and employs a flexible mode of writing that lends itself to revision and reuse in future publications.
Mannequins, Machines and Mutilations: The Avant-Garde Body in Spain and Italy, 2016
A study of gender and sexuality in a Spanish avant-garde novel from 1934.
Although the encampments of 15-M in Madrid in the early summer of 2011 might have been merely one... more Although the encampments of 15-M in Madrid in the early summer of 2011 might have been merely one skirmish in the ongoing war over who controls the city, the activities of the indignados in the Puerta del Sol spatially embodied a set of radically new political possibilities. In our contribution to the volume, Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates, we examine two of these spaces in contemporary Madrid: Ésta es una plaza and the Campo de Cebada. The activities at these two locations in the city center demonstrate how urban space continues to be of great political importance in the shifting patterns of socio-spatial organization that have blossomed in the wake of the economic crisis. More specifically, we argue that the 2008 economic crisis in Spain, coupled with the aggressive privatization of public space, has not only produced highly visible reactions, such as the 15-M movement, but also resulted in a proliferation of small-scale grassroots endeavors that work toward creating new ways of living, moving, and theorizing the city. The emergence of these new cultural forms not only reflect upon, respond to, and shape urban politics, but these community-based projects also emphasize what can be called a 'new ecology of urban space,' both individually and collectively. The notion of ecology being used here should not be confused with what is typically considered Urban Ecology, a sub-discipline of Ecology that focuses on the biological processes of the urban by studying the presence of non-human habitats within urban environments (e.g. peregrine falcons in New York City); nor is this working concept of an 'ecology of urban space' reducible to Cultural Ecology, a field dedicated to studying how human culture responds to and adapts to its physical geography and climate (i.e. habitat). Rather, in an attempt to rework our understandings of both ecology and the urban, this essay looks at some recent directions in Urban Studies that question Urban/Nature binaries and encourage us to think of the city as an ecosystem of cultural, political, and material relationships.
ADFL Bulletin 43.1 (2014): 77-90.
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BOOKS by Susan Larson
This edited volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of film, architecture, and urban studies scholars as they explore the reciprocal relationship between the seventh art and the built environment. The contributors explore a wide range of topics, including the role of film in the shifting relationship between private and public; the ways cinema as a new technology reshaped how cities and buildings are built and inhabited; the question of the mobile gaze; film and everyday life; monumentality and the construction of historical memory for a variety of viewing publics; and the effects of the digital and the virtual on filmmaking and spectatorship.
CONTRIBUTORS: Benjamin Fraser; Jorge Gorostiza; Nuria Rodríguez-Martín; David Foshee; Tom Whittaker; Juli Highfill; Patricia Keller; Josefina González-Cubero; Alba Zarza-Arribas; Emeterio Diez Puertas; María de Arana Aroca; Carlos Sambricio; Vicente Sánchez-Biosca; Samuel Amago; Leigh Mercer; Stephen. Luis Vilaseca
Intellect Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press |
ISBN: 9781789384895
Publisher URL: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo123638318.html
ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS by Susan Larson
Palabras clave: vivienda, espacio doméstico, confort, novela social española, Carmen Martín Gaite, Antonio Ferres
_______________________________
Si respondemos afirmativamente a la invitación de Maria Kaika y Erik Swyngedouw de pensar más allá de la “fetichización de la ciudad moderna” como cúspide del progreso y del logro centrados en lo humano para considerar lo urbano a un mismo tiempo como proceso de naturaleza transformada y como transformación social y metabólica de la naturaleza a través del trabajo humano, la ciudad se convierte en un “híbrido de lo natural y lo cultural, lo medioambiental y lo social” (Kaika y Swyngedouw, 122). Este ensayo sostiene que desde la crisis económica de 2008 en España han surgido modos notablemente diferentes de imaginar los espacios públicos monumentales y la relación entre naturaleza y ciudad. Las culturas urbanas crean oportunidades de imaginar estas nuevas transformaciones sociales, materiales y simbólicas y las películas documentales de Víctor Moreno Edificio España (2012) y La ciudad oculta (2018) son un ejemplo de ello. Consideradas en su conjunto, las dos películas captan la escala, profundidad y tridimensionalidad de espacios que están hechos de flujos materiales orgánicos y no orgánicos de un modo que nos insta a cuestionar algunos de nuestras premisas básicas sobre lo urbano.
ABSTRACT : Rosa Arciniega’s short story “Vísceras del la ciudad” (1935) is an example of socially-committed literature that blurred the boundaries between popular culture and the avant-garde. Arciniega’s ideas about aesthetics and politics, shaped in Lima in the 1920s by her contact with the Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui, are the foundation of her idiosyncratic writing in and about Madrid between 1930 and 1936. Through recourse to experimental and cinematographic narrative techniques, “Vísceras del la ciudad” reverses the masculine subject / feminine-object relationship commonly found in modern literature and employs a flexible mode of writing that lends itself to revision and reuse in future publications.