Papers by Cecilia Enjuto Rangel
Studies in Spanish & Latin-American Cinemas, 2021
Since the 1960s, Latin American and Iberian filmmakers have embraced the child’s gaze as a cinema... more Since the 1960s, Latin American and Iberian filmmakers have embraced the child’s gaze as a cinematic tool to mediate and understand the historical and political memory of war and dictatorial violence. During the transitions to democracy in the 1990s and the twenty-first century, cinematic representations of children became key in the cultural politics of memory. Pa negre/Black Bread (Villaronga 2010) is one of the films that problematize the past. Through its queer aesthetics, the film depicts a vision of the war and the dictatorship that rejects dogmatic, formulaic readings and shows how the pervasive effects of political injustice nurture social and gender violence. Villaronga’s film challenges the spectators and their expectations by questioning who the real monsters are and how lies fabricate a particular vision of history and the demonization of the other. In this article, I argue that through the spectres of the past, and the monsters in the present, Pa negre evokes a moral an...
Transatlantic Studies, 2019
Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of area studies. Within... more Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of area studies. Within departments of Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American Studies, and Iberian Studies, the Transatlantic approach critically engages the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies in the Americas and Africa. Like its objects of study, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries instead of assuming the nation-state as a sort of epistemic building-block. But it attempts to do so without dehistoricizing the texts and other cultural products it brings under analysis. The thirty-five essays comprised in this volume are geared toward an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty colleagues who teach transatlantically oriented courses. They encompass nearly every decade in the last two centuries: from the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in the spring of 1808 and the subsequent movements of ...
How Far is America From Here?, 2005
Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 2015
A Contracorriente, Jan 9, 2010
How can we explain that at the center of the project of modernity lies a pile of ruins? Modernity... more How can we explain that at the center of the project of modernity lies a pile of ruins? Modernity, with its wars, its mechanized visions of progress, its consumption, is nurtured by destruction, the constant demand to keep constructing, to keep looking ahead, propelled by its storm. Ruins invite us to remember, and that ethical imperative becomes a political standpoint in Latin America. From the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu and the Aztec ruins swallowed by the modern landscape as in el Templo Mayor and Tlatelolco, to commemorative sites such as Chile's Villa Grimaldi and its hidden bodies in ruins, that remind us of the many desaparecidos in Latin America, ruins have always a story to tell. Enjuto Rangel 398 Jean Franco suggests that contemporary Latin American reality challenges us to reconsider our notions of community, identity and subjectivity "from fragments and ruins" (The Decline and Fall 190). In response to this quote, Michael Lazzara and Vicky Unruh present their collection of essays, Telling Ruins in Latin America, as one that "forcefully argue(s) that ruins are dynamic sites… palimpsests on which memories and histories are fashioned and refashioned. Ruins, for these authors, do not invite backward looking nostalgia, but a politically and ethically motivated 'reflective excavation' (Unruh, "It's a Sin" 146) that can lead to a historical revision and the creation of alternative futures" (Lazzara and Unruh 3). The ruin as a palimpsest of sorts reveals the multiple cultural connections and intertextual allusions prevalent in most of the texts, films, performances, architectural and archeological projects, and cultural debates discussed here. The contributors' analysis and critique of progress reside in how "ruins challenge modernity's imposed narratives" (8), and one of the central premises of the book is that the ruin as "a merger of past, present, and future, and as a material embodiment of change-offers a fertile locale for competing cultural stories about historical events, political projects and the constitution of communities." (1) Lazzara's and Unruh's introduction serves as an excellent theoretical backbone for the volume, and it clearly sets the tone for the central questions and issues that connect the multiple, diverse chapters of Telling Ruins. The book is structured into four parts. The first one, "What Are We Doing Here? Ruins, Performance, Meditation," intelligently incorporates and tackles the ethical dilemmas posed by cultural products that ruminate on ruins, like Telling Ruins itself. The authors of these essays distance themselves from an aesthetics of ruins that aims at a restorative project and its preservationist agenda, in dialogue with Svetlana Boym's definitions of a restorative versus a reflective nostalgia. Diana Taylor's "Performing Ruins" is a superb way of initiating the reader, almost taking you by the hand, into this journey through various ruined sites, from the glorious ruins of Mexico's el Templo Mayor and the dark ruins of Chile's Villa Grimaldi to the renovation ruins of Colombia's art group Mapa Teatro and their performance Testigo de las ruinas on the destruction of El Cartucho, an
... Contents Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Telling Ruins 1 Michael J. Lazzara and ... more ... Contents Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Telling Ruins 1 Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh Part One What Are We Doing Here?: Ruins, Performance, Meditation 1 Performing Ruins 13 Diana Taylor 2 Scribbling on the Wreck 27 Francine Masiello 3 "Oh tiempo ...
Comparative Literature, 2007
I N CONTRAST TO THE ENDURING ANCIENT RUINS of baroque and romantic poetry, the ruins of modern ur... more I N CONTRAST TO THE ENDURING ANCIENT RUINS of baroque and romantic poetry, the ruins of modern urban poetry tend to be short-lived-the remains of the destruction and reconstruction of a city's streets, houses, public buildings, and factories rather than broken monuments and statues, abandoned churches, fragments of temples, or other remnants of a distant past. In these poems nature ceases to be the principal force that slowly "overcomes" the works of "civilization": progress and war take over the role of ivy and time; spleen and ennui replace awe and nostalgia. As Georg Simmel has argued, in the modernand often traumatic-experience of the metropolis, "The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains. .. its latest transformation" (409). In the city, people survive traffic, crowds, and advertisements, not tigers and serpents. Modern poems on ruins also differ from their baroque and romantic counterparts both in their reading of history and in their representation of the poetic self. The speakers in these poems are not fixed or stable; they can be both melancholic and nostalgic, humorous and ironic. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), and Octavio Paz (1914-1998) all use poetic representations of the city in ruins to conceptualize and criticize modernity. In a space that is always redefining itself, always in reconstruction, ruins can easily be treated as merely waste. However, these poets see in ruins the emblems of the city's historical process, and in their poems they intend to rescue the remains of the past from the bulldozers of the future. Baudelaire's work, with its powerful review of the failures of urban progress, expresses the melancholy of Parisians who feel that their city is becoming unrecognizable; yet it also manifests a fascination with the bizarre new versions of modern beauty. In turn, both Cernuda and Paz explore Baudelaire's contradictory definitions of the modern city in their poetry, but without Baudelaire's nostalgia. Their disillusioned, pessimistic vision of the modern city is charged with social and political indignation. There are very few studies that examine in depth the connections among Baudelaire, Cernuda, and Paz, and I do not want to confine this essay to the appar-Comparative Literature
Copyright ©2010 by Purdue University. All rights reserved. The paper used in this book meets the ... more Copyright ©2010 by Purdue University. All rights reserved. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of ...
Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies, 2004
Rubbish bothers us. Ruins overwhelm us. Ruined cities have the bizarre capability of moving even ... more Rubbish bothers us. Ruins overwhelm us. Ruined cities have the bizarre capability of moving even the most emotion-ally petrified spectator. They remind us of our own vulnerabil-ity, and the fugitive nature of everything we consider perma-nent, like the buildings we live in. ...
Vanderbilt E Journal of Luso Hispanic Studies, Apr 9, 2009
Cuando el poeta falangista Agustín de Foxá en su El almendro y la espada condena la ciencia mater... more Cuando el poeta falangista Agustín de Foxá en su El almendro y la espada condena la ciencia materialista de los republicanos, está también bendiciendo el atraso, la anti-modernidad y el anti-intelectualismo. En su verso No queremos tu ciencia, que nos quema las hadas, ...
This essay examines two contemporary films whose child protagonists end up in exile due to the vi... more This essay examines two contemporary films whose child protagonists end up in exile due to the violent military regimes in their respective native countries: Paisito (Small country, 2008), a Spanish-Uruguayan-Argentine coproduction that attempts to construct a Transatlantic poetics of exile and memory, and yet fails; and a Brazilian film, O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, 2006), which places exiles at the center of a nostalgic, nationalist discourse in which Brazil appears as a multiethnic, multicultural and multiracial ideal space threatened by the military dictatorship. Both Paisitoand The Year represent the 1970s in Uruguay and Brazil, countries torn by a military coup and a military dictatorship. In both films, soccer is presented as a central space, although it is at times questioned as a force for national cohesion; and in both films the child protagonists face exile when their fathers are killed by the military regimes. Both expose...
... Entre ruinas y escombros de Itálica a Madrid: la poética transatlántica de Neruda. Autores: C... more ... Entre ruinas y escombros de Itálica a Madrid: la poética transatlántica de Neruda. Autores: Cecilia Enjuto Rangel; Localización: Alma América: in honorem Victorino Polo / coord. por Vicente Cervera Salinas, María Dolores Adsuar Fernández, Vol. ...
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Papers by Cecilia Enjuto Rangel
the field of Iberian and Latin American Transatlantic Studies with three
goals in mind: to discuss its function within our pedagogical practices, to lay out its research methodologies, and to explain its theoretical underpinnings. One central aim of Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa is to make the case for an understanding of transatlantic cultural history over the last two centuries that transcends national and linguistic boundaries, as well as traditional academic configurations, focusing instead on the continuities and fractures between Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Africa.
Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa emerges from, and performs, an ongoing debate concerning the role of transatlantic approaches in the fields of Iberian, Latin American, African, and Luso-Brazilian studies. The innovative research and discussions contained in this volume’s 35 essays by leading scholars in the field reframe the intertwined cultural histories of the diverse transnational spaces encompassed by the former Spanish and Portuguese empires. An emerging field, Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of the traditional academic notions of area studies, while critically engaging the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. Crucially, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries without dehistoricizing or decontextualizing the texts it seeks to incorporate within this new framework.