How death has been conceived of and represented in Spanish culture since the second half of the twentieth century

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.

Something is rotten in the state of Spain. The uninterred corpse of a patriarchal figure populates the visual landscapes of Iberian cinemas. He is chilled, drugged, perfumed, ventilated, presumed dead, speared in the cranium, and worse. Analyzing a series of Iberian cinematic dark comedies from the 1950s to the present day, Patriarchy’s Remains argues that the cinematic trope of the patriarchal death symbolizes the lingering remains of the Francisco Franco dictatorship in Spain (1939–75). These films, created as satirical responses to persisting economic, social, and political issues, demonstrate that Spain’s transition to democracy following the Francoist period is an incomplete and ongoing process. Within the theme of patriarchal decay, the significance of the figure differs across cinematic representations, from his indispensability to his obstructionism and exploitation. Erin Hogan traces the prevalence of patriarchal death by analyzing its relationship with the surrounding characters who must depend on the deceased. Hogan demonstrates how the patriarch’s persistence in film both reveals and challenges an array of discriminations and inequalities in the cinematic grotesque tradition, in Iberian cinemas more broadly, and in Iberian society as a whole. Despite Spain’s ongoing transition towards democratic pluralism, Patriarchy’s Remains serves as a reminder that the remnants of an entrenched although not interred patriarchal culture continue to haunt Iberian society.

Traditional histories of Black letters in Latin America have delimited their geographic scope to the Caribbean while also omitting intertwined Afro-Indigenous discourses. Inspired by the legacy of Amefrican thinker Lélia Gonzalez, Améfrica in Letters highlights the Black poets, songwriters, novelists, essayists, and bloggers who have created a counter-multiculturalist literary history on the Latin American mainland. To capture a sense of the variety of their contributions, this book spans Mexico, Central America, the Andes, and the Southern Cone—highlighting the transcontinental nature of the legacy of Black writing and its impact beyond national boundaries. The writers examined in the volume engage with regional intellectual frameworks while putting into circulation a demand for a recalibration of the Hispanophone and Lusophone contexts in which they and other Afrodescendants reside.

Religion and politics have historically clashed in modern Spain but the complexity of the controversial and sometimes violent relationships between Catholic values and modern political regimes continue to ride a precarious line of spiritual accommodation versus public policy. Leading experts on religious Spanish tradition and recent historiographic findings set out to define and interrogate grey areas in the last two centuries beyond the reductive conventional notion of an ever-warring "Two Spains." The Soul of the Nation unravels the role of religion in the country's public life following the imperial crisis of 1808 when the Catholic Monarchy put the role of the Church at heart of political and cultural debates.

In Faking Death Penny Cousineau-Levine examines the work of over 120 Canadian photographers, revealing important aspects of Canadian identity and imagination. Contrasting Canadian photography with American and European traditions, she shows that Canadian photographers are often preoccupied with a place that is "elsewhere," a doubling and duality that also occurs in Canadian literature, film, and political life. Subverting the documentary tradition and other stylistic idioms for their own distinctive ends, Canadian photographers exhibit an ambivalent preoccupation with death and dying, bondage, and entrapment. Cousineau-Levine argues that this is characteristically a 'faked' death that expresses a collective Canadian wish for a symbolic passage to national maturity. Faking Death includes 16 colour reproductions and 150 duotones by artists such as Raymonde April, Jeff Wall, Lynne Cohen, Charles Gagnon, Evergon, Michel Lambeth, Thaddeus Holownia, Geoffrey James, Geneviève Cadieux, Shelley Niro, Diana Thorneycroft, Jin-me Yoon, Ian Wallace, and Ken Lum. By bringing together this many Canadian works Faking Death provides a compelling visual introduction to one of Canada's most vibrant and internationally recognized artistic media. It is an invaluable tool for curators, artists, teachers, students, and scholars in art history, fine arts, Canadian studies, film, communications, literature, and cultural studies.

Scholars of Vedic religion have long recognized the centrality of ritual categories to Indian thought. There have been few successful attempts, however, to bring the same systematic rigor of Vedic Scholarship to bear on later "Hindu" ritual. Excavating the deep history of a prominent ritual category in "classical" Hindu texts, Geslani traces the emergence of a class of rituals known as santi, or appeasement. This ritual, intended to counteract ominous omens, developed from the intersection of the fourth Veda - the oft-neglected Atharvaveda - and the emergent tradition of astral science (Jyotisastra) sometime in the early first millennium, CE. Its development would come to have far-reaching consequences on the ideal ritual life of the king in early-medieval Brahmanical society. The mantric transformations involved in the history of santi led to the emergence of a politicized ritual culture that could encompass both traditional Vedic and newer Hindu performers and practices. From astrological appeasement to gift-giving, coronation, and image worship, Rites of the God-King chronicles the multiple lives and afterlives of a single ritual mode, unveiling the always-inventive work of the priesthood to imagine and enrich royal power. Along the way, Geslani reveals the surprising role of astrologers in Hindu history, elaborates conceptions of sin and misfortune, and forges new connections between medieval texts and modern practices. In a work that details ritual forms that were dispersed widely across Asia, he concludes with a reflection on the nature of orthopraxy, ritual change, and the problem of presence in the Hindu tradition.