Academia.eduAcademia.edu

Outline

Title
Abstract
Key Takeaways
References
All Topics
Geography

Back to the Future: Towards a Cultural Archive of la Movida

Profile image of William J NicholsWilliam J Nichols

2014

Abstract
sparkles

AI

This paper explores la Movida, an underground cultural phenomenon in post-Franco Spain during the late 1970s and 1980s, examining its significance in shaping cultural identity and the urban landscape of Madrid. By analyzing various cultural references and peripheral movements across Spain, the works highlight the interplay between cultural production, youth experience, and urban politics, while addressing the lingering impacts of drug culture and media representations. Through a collection of essays, the research underscores the complex relationships between political change, cultural expression, and the evolving identity of modern Spain.

Key takeaways
sparkles

AI

  1. La Movida symbolizes Spain's cultural transformation post-Franco, representing a complex narrative of change and modernity.
  2. Debate continues regarding the cultural significance and legacy of la Movida amidst political and social transformations.
  3. The phenomenon reflects the intersection of youth culture, urban space, and the ongoing struggle with Spain's dictatorial past.
  4. Cultural production from this period, including music and film, highlights the tensions of social inequality and drug culture.
  5. The collection aims to redefine la Movida through varied perspectives, challenging established narratives and addressing historical complexities.

Related papers

Representations of Madrid in the (post-)transition to democracy
Vicente Rodríguez Ortega

NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, 2014

this essay focuses on a group of films of the late transition and beginning of the Post-transition to analyse how they interrelate with the substantial political and social changes occurring in spain during this key period of its recent history. specifically, it examines diverse representations of Madrid as a crucial space to account for these transformations. the essay centers on the representational strategies of the filmmakers Pedro almodóvar, fernando trueba, and José luis garci to study clashing approaches to the evolving Madrid cityscape: the attempt to move forward through the depiction of transgressive social and cultural behaviours, and the need to hold on to a disappearing past to deal with the drastic changes in spanish society.

View PDFchevron_right
A Century in the Life of Spain: A Review Article of J. Fernández Sebastián and J. F. Fuentes, eds., Diccionario político y social del siglo XX español
José María Rosales

2010

eds.) 2008. Diccionario político y social del siglo XX español. Madrid: Alianza, 1395 pp.

View PDFchevron_right
Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism by Louie Dean Valencia-García
Alejandro Quiroga

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2020

View PDFchevron_right
Review of RUBÉN PÉREZ HIDALGO, Performing Populism: Visions of Spanish Politics from 15-M to Podemos. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. 2023. 259 pp., Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies
Julia Ramírez-Blanco

Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, 2024

Who is "the people" and how is it embodied? This is the question that seems to run through the pages of "Performing Populism: Visions of Spanish Politics from 15-M to Podemos". In a chronology that goes from 2011 to the present, the book gives an answer in three phases: the first, in the Acampadas that took over the main Spanish cities during May-June 2011; the second in the years following the Acampadas, during the climate of growing tension that accompanied the years of cuts and repression during the government of the Popular Party; and the third during the period of the rise and subsequent fall of Podemos. The volume also offers an epilogue on the growth of the far-right Vox party.

View PDFchevron_right
Twentieth-Century Spain. Politics and Society in Spain, 1898-1998
jose guadalupe sanchez

Hispania, 2001

This volume -the latest addition to Jeremy Black's edited series European History in Perspective -is a laudable attempt by Francisco Romero to produce a synthetic account of Spain's tortuous twentieth-century history for an undergraduate readership. The complexity of the subject matter is quite apparent, as is the difficulty involved in rendering Spanish history accessible to English-speaking undergraduates more familiar with the gentler story of constitutional developments in Britain or the United States. Spain, for so long dismissed as 'different', is often unfamiliar to students, except as a holiday destination. The longevity of the Franco regime did, of course, mark Spain out from Atlantic Europe and, while there are striking parallels with the twentieth-century development of Portugal and Greece, these histories too are seldom part of the undergraduate repertoire and receive scant attention even in research circles.

View PDFchevron_right
Spanish 2005 Tracing the Past : An Introduction H
H Rosi Song, Eloy E . Merino

2015

View PDFchevron_right
Youth Agency and Ideology: La Movida and the Demise of the Francoist Regime
Julia L Thompson, Ph.D.

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2020

reflects on the role of Spanish youth during Spain's transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic state following the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. With a specific focus on Madrid, Valencia-García's work demonstrates how young Spaniards growing up during the dictatorship of Franco (1939-75) had nonetheless contributed to the development of an antiauthoritarian and carnivalesque culture during the last two decades of the regime. By the early 1980s, this antiauthoritarian youth culture culminated in La Movida Madrileña (the "Madrid Scene"), or simply the Movida. The Madrid Scene was primarily a cultural movement, or rather, a countercultural movement that clashed with the fascist culture promoted during the Francoist regime and, at the same time, accelerated the nation's transition to democracy. The development of this antiauthoritarian youth culture, as Valencia-García suggests, was largely related to young Spaniards' capacity to create and adopt what Michel De Certeau calls "tactics" to subvert the regime's authority in spaces where the regime's power seemed weaker. Tactics, according to De Certeau, are those calculated actions undertaken by the powerless in their everyday life to undermine the power of the oppressor; they form "an art of the weak" that, "blow by blow," chips away at and creates "cracks" in an existing system of power (37). To illustrate how young Spaniards managed to identify and make use of such spaces to subvert the authority of the Francoist regime in their daily life, Valencia-García incorporates an impressively vast range of sources. These include official censorship Valencia-García, Louie Dean.

View PDFchevron_right
Democracy and Populist Reason in Spain Valdivielso - Colloquium at the Institute of Philosophy Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, 2016.
Joaquin M Valdivielso Navarro

I would like to present some elements of the intense relationship established between the democratic-radical theory of hegemony by Laclau and Mouffe, and the core group of Podemos. In fact, both authors are equally influential among Podemos leaders. To do this, I will assume that both have worked in tandem and that their work is complementary. Moreover, Podemos represents an original case of entanglement between theory and practice, between political philosophy and democratic radicalism. Podemos " core group " is mostly composed of young scholars coming from the Complutense University in Madrid: All of them have PhDs and a sound knowledge in political theory and philosophy, and Iñigo Errejón, Podemos number 2, is clearly under the hegemony of the theory of the hegemony. The emergence of Podemos has to be framed, on the one hand, in the wake of a cycle of political radicalism that had its most shining and influential moment, inside and outside Spain, with the Indignant movement. On the other hand, Podemos appears in the context of a deep institutional crisis: the financial and economic crisis quickly translated in Spain into a fiscal crisis of the state, a debt crisis typical of dependent countries, and a deep social and political crisis. To these, we must also add the 'disconnection movement' in Catalonia, which is no longer explainable as a claim for fiscal redistribution or identity recognition: it is clearly a break with the national-Spanish political framework. Summing up, there's a perfect legitimation crisis. In this context, the theory of radical democracy has channeled the need for a practical-political road map, and has had an unexpected success as strategic stimulus. Thus, it is obvious that there is a very pronounced theory effect, unlike what happened among participants in the 15M. In this presentation I propose a hypothetical movement of feedback between the theory of Laclau and Mouffe and their use by Podemos-that is, I understand 'dialectics' in a non technical sense. I deal with two different aspects of the problem: a) how the theory is used to explain and influence the process of political change in Spain; b) how the theory clashes with this particular use. Obviously, I cannot go into the many controversial issues that this movement raises, and, basically, I will focus on the problem of the political or popular subject, where I suspect that the theory has major limitations. 1. Building the popular subject: from the Indignant to Podemos I will distinguish two different angles of this process of construction of the subject. Let's consider, first, the theoretical framework, and then the explanation it provides of the historical political change that leads to Podemos. For the emergence of a popular subject two conditions must be met: 1) an accumulation of unsatisfied demands-that is to say, unserved demands, in a disaggregate or "differential" way, for the institutions-; and 2) a moment of nomination that simplifies the political community around two confronted poles. The nomination has a condensation effect around one of the demands that will become central and groups the "shared pain" of the subaltern classes in a popular identity, as opposed to the status quo. At this point, the moment of a populist rupture, the political field is restructured in two poles, whose names vary according to context: the underdog, the people, those

View PDFchevron_right
CHALLENGING LEGITIMACY: THE 15-M AS CATALYZER OF THE CRISIS OF HEGEMONY OF THE SPANISH REGIME. (co-author)
Ivan Molina Allende
View PDFchevron_right
Contesting the Nation’s Imaginary: A genealogy of Spain is different
Jorge Villaverde

Studies on National Movements, 2025

This article reconstructs the genealogy of the slogan Spain is different, widely associated with Francoist tourism but rooted in Republican Spain's 1932-1933 tourism campaign. Based on archival and visual sources, as well as national and foreign press, it examines how the slogan emerged within broader debates over national identity, exoticism, and modernity. Designed by Rafael Calleja, a Republican civil servant with conservative views, the campaign mobilized early branding strategies to market Spain's distinctiveness while navigating deep ideological tensions within the Second Republic. Landscapes, monumental architecture, and folkloric imagery were employed to craft a unified national image for foreign audiences, even as the Republic faced domestic conflicts over secularism, gender roles, and modern reforms. The analysis situates Spain is different within long-standing cultural narratives that framed Spain's difference both as backwardness (Leyenda Negra) and as an exotic attraction for tourism. It highlights how the slogan circulated internationally during the Spanish Civil War, often reframed in the Anglophone press as a trope to explain Spain's perceived violence, orientalism, and otherness. Calleja's role extended beyond the Republic: he remained at the helm of Spanish tourism until 1957, adapting the same imagery across regimes. His later works further codified Spanish uniqueness through nostalgic, orientalist, and imperial themes. By tracing the continuity of symbols, images, and narratives across the Republic and the Franco regime, this study challenges sharp divisions in Spain's historiography. It shows how the Republican-era national imaginary laid groundwork that the dictatorship would appropriate, reshaping it into a more explicit discourse of national exceptionalism. Spain is different thus operated both as a marketing slogan and as a durable framework for representing and contesting Spanish identity across ideological shifts and political regimes.

View PDFchevron_right

References (74)

  1. Paul Julian Smith, Spanish Visual Culture. Cinema, Television, Internet (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2007).
  2. Teresa M. Vilarós, El mono del desencanto : una crítica cultural de la transición española, 1973-1993 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1998);
  3. Alberto Medina, Exorcismos de la memoria: políticas y poéticas de la melancolía en la España de la Transición (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2001)
  4. and Cristina Moreiras Menor, Cultura herida: literatura y cine en la España democrática (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2002).
  5. Smith, Spanish Visual Culture, 51.
  6. Eduardo Subirats, Después de la lluvia: sobre la ambigua modernidad española (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1993) and "De la transición al espectáculo," Quimera 188-189 (2000): 21-26.
  7. Joan Ramon Resina, Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000);
  8. Jo Labanyi, Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002) and "The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain," Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9 (2008): 119-25; Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, trans. Mark Oakley (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002, and Ricard Vinyes, ed. El Estado y la memoria. Gobiernos y ciudadanos frente a los traumas de la historia (Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2009).
  9. Smith, Spanish Visual Culture, 53.
  10. Germán Labrador Méndez, Letras arrebatadas: poesía y química en la transición española (Madrid: Devenir Ensayo, 2009) and Gema Pérez-Sánchez, Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to la Movida (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007).
  11. Hamilton M. Stapell, Remaking Madrid: Culture, Politics, and Identity After Franco (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Another recent publication on the topic of la Movida is Julia Nolte's Madrid bewegt: Die Revolution der Movida 1977-1985 (Frankfurt: Vervuert Verlag, 2009).
  12. José Manuel Lechado, La Movida: Una crónica de los 80 (Madrid: EDAF, 2005).
  13. Rafael Cervera Torres, Alaska y otras historias de la movida (Madrid: Plaza & Janes, 2012)
  14. and Joni D., Que pagui Pujol! Una crónica punk de la Barcelona de los 80 (Barcelona: La Ciutat Invisible, 2011). The latter is first published in Catalan in 2010 and quickly translated into Spanish.
  15. José Ribas, Los 70 a destajo: Ajoblanco y libertad (Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2007).
  16. José Luis Gallero, Sólo se vive una vez: esplendor y ruina de la movida madrileña (Madrid: Ediciones Ardora, 1991). Smith sees this work as a rare example of oral history (Spanish Visual Culture, 63).
  17. Smith argues that Sólo's contribution to the understanding of la Movida is that the movement, "like the city, was not a thing, but a process, which has always begun" (Spanish Visual Culture, 64).
  18. Luis Antonio de Villena, Madrid ha muerto (Barcelona: Planeta Nuevas Ediciones de Bolsillo, 2000).
  19. Diego A. Manrique, "Lo que hicimos con la movida," El País Semanal, May 1, 2005, 49.
  20. We have ourselves continued this discussion in a special section on la Movida prepared for the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies in 2009. See William J. Nichols and H. Rosi Song, "Introduction: 'El futuro ya estuvo aquí'," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 105-11. The five essays published in this issue and which we are now including in this collection are the works by Héctor Fouce Jorge Marí, Alberto Mira, William Nichols, and Silvia Bermúdez. See Héctor Fouce, "De la agitación a la Movida: Políticas culturales y música popular en la Transición española," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 143-54;
  21. Jorge Marí, "La Movida como debate," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 127-142;
  22. Alberto Mira, "The Dark Heart of the Movida: Vampire Fantasies in Iván Zulueta's Arrebato," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 155-70;
  23. William J. Nichols, "From Counter-Culture to National Heritage: 'La Movida' in the Museum and the Internationalization of Irrerverence," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 113-26;
  24. and Silvia Bermúdez, "Memoria y archivo, la Movida, Alaska y procesos de arqueología cultural," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 171-81.We thank the journal for the kind permission to reuse and reprint this material to be included in this book.
  25. Malcom Compitello and Susan Larson, "Todavía en La Luna," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 1 (1997): 154.
  26. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds., Spanish Cultural Studies. An Introduction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
  27. Graham and Labanyi, Spanish Cultural Studies, 423, vii.
  28. Barry Jordan, and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, eds., Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies. (London: Arnold, 2000).
  29. Oral intervention during q&a time for the morning session at the "II Conference on Historical Memory: ¿Memorias Históricas?" Organized by the Cañada Blanch Centre at the London School of Economics (June 7, 2012). Video of the conference is available in the website of the Centre.
  30. We resist the desire to label, categorize or otherwise "define" la Movida even if we did offer at the beginning a succinct description of this cultural phenomenon. Rather, this collection 38. Both Nichols's and Bermúdez's essays were originally part of the special section of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies. The latter has been translated into English for this collection.
  31. Smith, Spanish Visual Culture, 53.
  32. Dick Hebdige, Subculture. The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Methuen, 1979), 3. Bibliography
  33. Aguilar, Paloma. Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy. Trans. Mark Oakley. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002.
  34. Alonso, Gregorio, and Diego Muro. The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition: The Spanish Model. New York and London: Taylor & Francis, 2011.
  35. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin: New York, 2008.
  36. Bermúdez, Silvia. Memoria y archivo, la Movida, Alaska y procesos de arqueología cultural," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009):
  37. Cervera Torres, Rafael. Alaska y otras historias de la movida. Madrid: Plaza & Janes, 2012.
  38. Compitello, Malcom and Susan Larson. "Todavía en La Luna." Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 1 (1997): 153-68.
  39. Cueto, Juan. "La implosión cultural." In Cultura y ocio III. Memoria Gráfica de la historia y la sociedad españolas del siglo XX, 7-9. Madrid: Diario EL PAÍS. 2006.
  40. D. Joni. Que pagui Pujol! Una crónica punk de la Barcelona de los 80. Barcelona: La Ciutat Invisible, 2011.
  41. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
  42. Foster, David William. Review of Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to la Movida, by Gema Pérez-Sánchez. Hispania 91.3 (2008): 607-08.
  43. Héctor Fouce, "De la agitación a la Movida: Políticas culturales y música popular en la Transición española," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 143-54.
  44. Gallero, José Luis. Sólo se vive una vez: esplendor y ruina de la movida madrileña. Madrid: Ardora, 1991.
  45. García-Torvisco, Luis. "La Luna de Madrid: Movida, posmodernidad y capitalismo cultural en una revista feliz de los ochenta."MLN 127.2 (2012): 364-84.
  46. Graham, Helen and Jo Labanyi, eds. Spanish Cultural Studies. An Introduction. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  47. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture. The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Methuen, 1979.
  48. Jordan, Barry and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, eds. Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies. London: Arnold, 2000.
  49. La web sense nom. "Presentació." Accessed June 12, 2012. http://www.lwsn.net/presentacio.
  50. Labanyi, Jo. Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  51. ---. "The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain." Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9 (2008): 119-25.
  52. Labrador Méndez, Germán. Letras arrebatadas: poesía y química en la transición española. Madrid: Devenir Ensayo, 2009.
  53. Lechado, José Manuel. La Movida: Una crónica de los 80. Madrid: EDAF, 2005.
  54. Manresa, Laia. Morir de día. Documentary. Directed by Laia Manresa, 2010.
  55. Manrique, Diego A. "Estrellas anónimas." El País, August 7, 2011. Accessed February 2, 2012. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/Estrellas/anonimas/elpepusoceps/20110807elpeps por_9/Tes.
  56. ---. "Lo que hicimos con la movida." El País Semanal, May 1, 2005.
  57. Marí, Jorge. "La Movida como debate," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 127-142.
  58. Medina, Alberto. Exorcismos de la memoria: políticas y poéticas de la melancolía en la España de la Transición. Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2001.
  59. Mira, Alberto Mira. "The Dark Heart of the Movida: Vampire Fantasies in Iván Zulueta's Arrebato," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 155-70.
  60. Moreiras Menor, Cristina. Cultura herida: literatura y cine en la España democrática. Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2002.
  61. Nichols, William. "From Counter-Culture to National Heritage: 'La Movida' in the Museum and the Internationalization of Irrerverence." Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 113-26.
  62. Nichols, William J. and H. Rosi Song. "Introduction: 'El futuro ya estuvo aquí'." Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 13 (2009): 105-11.
  63. Nolte, Julia. Madrid bewegt: Die Revolution der Movida 1977-1985. Frankfurt: Vervuert Verlag, 2009.
  64. Pérez-Sánchez, Gema. Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to la Movida. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007.
  65. Resina, Joan Ramon. Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000.
  66. Ribas, José. Los 70 a destajo: Ajoblanco y libertad. Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2007. RTVE. "50 años de…" Accessed June 12, 2012. http://www.rtve.es/television/50-de-tve/.
  67. Smith, Paul Julian. Spanish Visual Culture. Cinema, Television, Internet. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2007.
  68. Spitz, Bob. "The New Spain." Rolling Stone, June 6, 1985.
  69. Stapell, Hamilton M. Remaking Madrid: Culture, Politics, and Identity After Franco. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
  70. Subirats, Eduardo. Después de la lluvia: sobre la ambigua modernidad española. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1993.
  71. ---."De la transición al espectáculo." Quimera 188-189 (2000): 21-26.
  72. Vilarós, Teresa M. El mono del desencanto: una crítica cultural de la transición española, 1973- 1993. 1. ed. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1998.
  73. Villena, Luis Antonio de. Madrid ha muerto. Barcelona: Planeta Nuevas Ediciones de Bolsillo, 2000.
  74. Vinyes, Ricard, ed. El Estado y la memoria. Gobiernos y ciudadanos frente a los traumas de la historia. Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2009.

Related papers

Review of William J. Nichols and Rosi H. Song, eds., Back to the Future: Toward a Cultural Archive of La Movida
Aitana Guia
View PDFchevron_right
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Anachronism and the militant image: temporal disturbances of the political imagination
Sara Nadal-Melsió
View PDFchevron_right
Reseña del libro: JULIÁ, Santos (coord.), Violencia política en la España del siglo XX. Madrid, Taurus, 2000. Revista Social History, Vol. 29, nº 3 (August 2004); pp. 415-418
Sofía Rodríguez López
View PDFchevron_right
“History Against the Grain: The State of Exception and Temporality in the Spanish Transition”.
Cristina Moreiras Menor
View PDFchevron_right
Song, H. Rosi (2016). Lost in Transition: Constructing Memory in Contemporary Spain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 212. Rassegna iberistica 39, 106 (Dicembre 2016): 375-377.
Enric Bou

The account of Spain's transition to democracy that emerges from the pages of Rosi Song's book Lost in Transition: Constructing Memory in Contemporary Spain is rather disturbing. The author, through selective yet wide-ranging readings of a variety of texts/media (fiction, TV series, films, manipulated pictures) stresses a puzzling version of that period. Moreover, she focuses on a very short time period, the years between the death of the dictator in 1975 and the remaking (or revamping or recreation) of a new democracy with the first PSOE government in 1982. The sexenio liberal came to an abrupt ending and major adjustments were imposed by force (nonetheless a coup d'état on February 23, 1981). Major adjustments were made in the way that nationality issues were to be dealt with in the brand new Spain (estado de las autonomías) under the umbrella of a new very restrictive law, the infamous LOAPA (Ley Orgánica de Armonización del Proceso Autonómico). Song's thesis is that there is an intimate connection and a clash between the celebratory memory of Spain's political shift (which can be read as a forgetting of the true nature of the transition to democracy) and the narratives of Spain's on-going financial and political crisis. She believes that «the narrative of Spain's political transformation has been under scrutiny since the 1980s», but «it is only now that the foundational pieces of this triumphant story are being challenged directly» (p. 2). In the book, the term 'project' refers to the nature of the undertaking of these memories. These are recollections that are carefully planned and broken down into details, with the goal of achieving a particular objective. The projects recreate conditions that facilitate the possibility of experiencing the past in the present through 'affect', intimate connection, or as an extension of one's self or one's current circumstances. The book examines several challenges to a triumphant narrative of the Transition through a close reading of recent films, television series, and novels that revisit the political period of Spain's transformation from a dictatorship into a democracy. Song relates the memories narrated and represented in these works from what she calls a 'memory project' in which a generation of writers, filmmakers, and TV producers born in the sixties and early

View PDFchevron_right

Related topics

  • Geography
    • 580 California St., Suite 400
    San Francisco, CA, 94104
    © 2025 Academia. All rights reserved