Vanderbilt University Press

May 2022

250 pages History/Europe/Spain & Portugal Rights: World

July 2022

376 pages Art/History/General Rights: World

Books against Tyranny

Catalan Publishers under Franco

LAURA VILARDELL

Catalan-language publishers were under constant threat during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–75). Both the Catalan language and the introduction of foreign ideas were banned by the regime, preoccupied as it was with creating a “one, great, and free Spain.” Books against Tyranny compiles, for the first time, the strategies Catalan publishers used to resist the censorship imposed by Franco’s regime. Author Laura Vilardell examines documents including firsthand witness accounts, correspondence, memoirs, censorship files, newspapers, original interviews, and unpublished material housed in various Spanish archives. As such, Books against Tyranny opens up the field and serves as an informative tool for scholars of Franco’s Spain, Catalan social movements, and censorship more generally. .

Laura Vilardell is an assistant professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Northern Illinois University.

Transforming Saints

From Spain to New Spain

CHARLENE VILLASEÑOR BLACK

Transforming Saints explores the transformation and function of the images of holy females within wider religious, social, and political contexts of Old Spain and New Spain from the Spanish conquest to Mexican independence. The chapters here examine the rise of the cults of the lactating Madonna, St. Anne, St. Librada, St. Mary Magdalene, and the Suffering Virgin. Concerned with holy figures presented as feminine archetypes, images that came under Inquisition scrutiny, as well as cults suspected of concealing indigenous influences, Charlene Villaseñor Black argues that these images would come to reflect the empowerment and agency of women in viceregal Mexico. In this context Black also examines a number of important artists in depth, including El Greco, Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera, and Pedro de Mena in Spain and Naples and Baltasar de Echave Ibía, Juan Correa, Cristóbal de Villalpando, and Miguel Cabrera.

Charlene Villaseñor Black is a professor of art history and Chicana/o studies at UCLA. She is the author of Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire.

May 2022

300 pages, History/Latin America/Mexico Rights: World

June 2022

270 pages History/Latin America/General Rights: World Mexican Law and Cultural Production

REBECCA JANZEN

The abundance of laws and constitutional amendments that have cropped up in response are mirrored in Mexico’s fragmented cultural production of the same period. Contemporary Mexican literature grapples with this splintered reality through non-linear stories from multiple perspectives, often told through shifts in time. The novels, such as Jorge Volpi’s Una novela criminal [A Novel Crime] (2018) and Julián Herbert’s La casa del dolor ajeno [The House of the Pain of Others] (2015) take multiple perspectives and follow non-linear plotlines; other examples, such as the very short stories in ¡Basta! 100 mujeres contra la violencia de género [Enough! 100 Women against Gender-Based Violence] (2013), present perspectives from multiple authors. Few scholars compare cultural production and legal texts in situations like Mexico, where extreme violence coexists with a high number of human rights laws. Unlawful Violence measures fictional accounts of human rights against new laws that include constitutional amendments to reform legal proceedings, laws that protect children, laws that condemn violence against women, and laws that protect migrants and Indigenous peoples. It also explores debates about these laws in the Mexican house of representatives and senate, as well as interactions between the law and the Mexican public.

Rebecca Janzen is an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina.

Trajectories of Empire

Transhispanic Reflections on the African Diaspora JEROME C. BRANCHE, editor

Trajectories of Empire extends from the beginning of the Iberian expansion of the mid-fifteenth century, through colonialism and slavery, and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Latin American republics. Its point of departure is the question of empire and its aftermath, as reflected in the lives of contemporary Latin Americans of African descent, and of their ancestors caught up in the historical process of Iberian colonial expansion, colonization, and the Atlantic slave trade. The book’s chapters explore what it’s like to be Black today in the so-called racial democracies of Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba; the role of medical science in the objectification and nullification of Black female personhood during slavery in Brazil in the nineteenth century; the deployment of visual culture to support insurgency for a largely illiterate slave body again in the nineteenth century in Cuba; aspects of discourse that promoted the colonial project as evangelization, or alternately offered resistance to its racialized culture of dominance in the seventeenth century; and the experiences of the first generations of forced African migrants into Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the discursive template was created around their social roles as enslaved or formerly enslaved people.

Jerome C. Branche is professor of Latin American literature and cultural studies in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh.

January 2023

304 pages Urban Studies Rights: World

August 2022

204 pages Social Science Rights: World Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City

BEN GERLOFS

Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth century urbanization and political revolution. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.

Ben Gerlofs is an assistant professor in the department of geography at the University of Hong Kong.

Tirana Modern

Biblio-Ethnography on the Margins of Europe

MATTHEW ROSEN

Guided by the thesis that literature can transform social reality, Tirana Modern draws on ethnographic and historical material to examine the public culture of reading in modern Albania. Formulated as a question, the topic of the book is: How has Albanian literature and literary translation shaped social action during the longue durée of Albanian modernity? Drawing on material from the independent Albanian publisher, Pika pa sipërfaqe (“Point without Surface”), Tirana Modern provides a tightly focused ethnography of literary culture in Albania that brings into relief the more general dialectic between social imagination and social reality as mediated by reading and literature.

Matthew Rosen is an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Ohio University.

October 2022

282 pages Social Science/Emigration & Immigration Rights: World

September 2022

260 pages, Women’s Studies/Spain Rights: World Migration from the Global South through the Americas ANDREW NELSON and ROB CURRAN

Based on five years of collaborative research between a journalist and an anthropologist, this book makes an engrossing, sometimes surreal, narrative-driven critique of how statelevel immigration policy fails extracontinental migrants. The book begins with Kidane, an Eritrean migrant who has left his pregnant wife behind to make the four-year trip to North America; it then picks up the natural disaster–riddled voyage of Roshan and Kamala Dhakal from Nepal to Ecuador; and it continues to the trials of Cameroonian exile Jane Mtebe, who becomes trapped in a bizarre beachside resort town on the edge of the Darién Gap—the gateway from South to Central America. Journey without End follows these migrants as their fitful voyages put them in a semi-permanent state of legal and existential liminality as mercurial policy creates profit opportunities that transform migration bottlenecks—Quito’s tourist district, a Colombian beachside resort, Panama’s Darién Gap, and a Mexican border town—into spontaneous migration-oriented spaces rife with race, gender, and class exploitation.

Andrew Nelson is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Texas. Rob Curran is a freelance journalist and frequent contributor to Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.

Women’s Work

How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain

REBECCA INGRAM

We are living a moment in which famous chefs, Michelin stars, culinary techniques, and gastronomical accolades attract moneyed tourists to Spain from all over the world. This has prompted the Spanish government to declare its cuisine as part of panish patrimony. Yet even with this widespread global attention, we know little about how Spanish cooking became a litmus test for demonstrating Spain’s modernity and, in relation, the roles ascribed to the modern Spanish women responsible for daily cooking. This book reveals the paradoxical messages women have navigated, even in texts about a daily practice that shaped their domestic and work lives. This argument is significant because of the degree to which domestic activities, including cooking, occupied women’s daily lives, even while issues like their fitness as citizens and participation in the public sphere were hotly debated. At the same time, progressive intellectuals from diverse backgrounds began to invoke Spanish cooking and eating as one measure of Spanish modernity. Women’s Work shows how culinary writing engaged these debates and reached women at the site of much of their daily labor—the kitchen—and, in this way, shaped their thinking about their roles in modernizing Spain.

Rebecca Ingram is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures at the University of San Diego.

November 2022

308 page Literary Criticism/Caribbean & Latin American Rights: World

December 2022

304 pages History/Europe/Spain & Portugal Rights: World Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, and Performance

IGNACIO LÓPEZ-CALVO

This book, a continuation of the author’s previous research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry, focuses mostly on texts, films, and artworks produced by Asian Mexicans, rather than on the Japanese or Chinese as mere objects of study. However, it will also be contrasted with the representation of Asians by Mexican authors with no Asian ancestry. With this interdisciplinary study, the author hopes to bring to the fore this silenced community’s voice and agency to historicize their own experience.In spite of the unquestionable influence of the Nikkei communities in Mexico’s history and culture, and the numerous historical studies recently published on these two communities, the study of their cultural production and, therefore, their self-definition and how they conceive themselves has been, for the most part, overlooked.

Ignacio López-Calvo is a professor and UC Merced Presidential Chair in the Humanities at UC Merced.

Masculine Figures

Fashioning Men and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain

NICHOLAS WOLTERS

Based on years of archival research in Madrid and Barcelona, this interdisciplinary study offers a fresh approach to understanding how men visualized themselves and their place in a nation that struggled to modernize after nearly a century of civil war, colonial entanglement, and imperial loss. Masculine Figures is the first study to provide a comprehensive overview of competing models of masculinity in nineteenth-century Spain, and is particularly novel in its treatment of Catalan texts and previously unstudied evidence (e.g., department store catalogs, commercial advertisements, fashion plates, and men’s tailoring journals). Through specific and recurring figures like the student, the priest, the businessman, and the heir, male novelists represent an increasingly middle-class world at odds with the values and virtues it inherited from an imperial Spanish past, and those it imported from more industrialized nations like England and France. The visual culture of the time and place marks the material turn in middle-class masculinity and sets the stage for discussions of race and sexuality.

Nicholas Wolters is an assistant professor of Spanish at Wake Forest University.