Forensic science provides information and data behind the circumstances of a particular death, but it is culture that provides death with meaning. With this in mind,
Rite, Flesh, and Stone proposes cultural matters of death as its structuring principle, operating as frames of the expression of mortality within a distinct set of coordinates. The chapters offer original approaches to how human remains are handled in the embodied rituals and social performances of contemporary funeral rites of all kinds; furthermore, they explore how dying flesh and corpses are processed by means of biopolitical technologies and the ethics of (self-)care, and how the vibrant and breathing materiality of the living is transformed into stone and analogous kinds of tangible, empirical presence that engender new cartographies of memory. Each coming from a specific disciplinary perspective, authors in this volume problematize conventional ideas about the place of death in contemporary Western societies and cultures using Spain as a case study.
Materials analyzed here—ranging from cinematic and literary fictions, to historical archives and anthropological and ethnographic sources—make explicit a dynamic scenario where actors embody a variety of positions toward death and dying, the political production of mortality, and the commemoration of the dead. Ultimately, the goal of this volume is to chart the complex network in which the disenchantment of death and its reenchantment coexist, and biopolitical control over secularized bodies overlaps with new avatars of the religious and non-theistic desires for memorialization and transcendence.
İçerik tablosu
Introduction: Materiality, Culture, and Death in Contemporary Spain, 1959–2020
Antonio Córdoba and Daniel García-Donoso
Part I: Rite
1. Executioners and Cultures of Capital Punishment in Franco’s Spain (1959–1975)
Ana Fernández-Cebrián
2. State of Crucifixion: Tourism, Holy Week, and the Sacred Politics of the Cold War
Eugenia Afinoguénova
3. Carlos Saura: Death, Orphanhood, and the Commoners’ Transitions
Angel Loureiro
4. Martyrs and Saints of the Spanish Civil War Era: Enshrinement of the Right and Historical Memory
Elizabeth Scarlett
5. The Future of the Dead: Reconciliation in Post-ETA Euskadi
Annabel Martín
Part II: Flesh
6. Capturing Death: Photography, Performance, and Bearing Witness
Patty Keller
7. Death, Afterlife, and the Question of Autobiography (Biutiful, 2010)
Cristina Moreiras-Menor
8. What Do We Do with the Dead? The Posthumous in Fernando León’s Amador
Daniel García-Donoso
9. On Dying Colonialisms and Postcolonial Phantasies in Recent Spanish Cinema
N. Michelle Murray
Part III: Stone
10. A Stone That Makes Them Stumble: Mining the Lithic in Manuel Rivas’s O lapis do carpinteiro
William Viestenz
11. Encounters between Memories and the Present: The Muslim Cemeteries in Contemporary Spain
Jordi Moreras and Sol Tarrés
12. The Forensic Eulogy: Science and Invented Traditions in the Commemoration of Republican Dead from the Spanish Civil War
Layla Renshaw
13. De-metaphorization of ‘the Other’ in the Wake of Modern Biopolitics: A Reading of Jesús Carrasco’s La tierra que pisamos
Pedro Aguilera-Mellado
Afterword: Politics, Arts, and Disrupted Death Rituals
Luis Martín-Estudillo and Nicholas Spadaccini
Contributors
Index
Yazar hakkında
Born in Spain, Angel G. Loureiro is professor of Spanish at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is the author of a book on Torrente Ballester and the editor of a collection of feminist studies of autobiography, both published in Spain.
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