The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain: Beyond the Secular City

by Antonio Cordoba (Editor), Daniel García-Donoso (Editor)

Overview

This book explores how modernity, the urban, and the sacred overlap in fundamental ways in contemporary Spain. Urban spaces have traditionally been seen as the original sites of modernity, history, progress, and a Weberian systematic disenchantment of the world, while the sacred has been linked to the natural, the rural, mythical past origins, and exemption from historical change. This collection problematizes such clear-cut distinctions as overlaps between the modern urban and the sacred in Spanish culture are explored throughout the volume. Placed in the periphery of Europe, Spain has had a complex relationship with the concept of modernity and commonly understood processes of modernization and secularization, thus offering a unique case-study of the interaction between the modern and the sacred in the city.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137600202
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	11/17/2016
Series:	Hispanic Urban Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	211
File size:	658 KB

About the Author

Antonio Cordoba is Assistant Professor at Manhattan College, USA. His research focuses on the interaction between modernity, wonder, and the sacred in Latin American culture.
Daniel García-Donoso is Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America, USA. His work explores the relationship between religion and culture in modern and contemporary Spain.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION; Antonio Cordoba and Daniel García-Donoso.- CHAPTER 1. The Sacred in Madrid’s Soundscape: Towards an Aural Hygiene, 1856-1907; Samuel Llano.- CHAPTER 2. Sacred, Sublime, and Supernatural: Religion and the Spanish Capital in Nineteenth-Century Fantastic Narratives; Wan Sonya Tang.- CHAPTER 3. The Modern Usurer Consecrates the City: Circulation and Displacements in the Torquemada Series; Sara Muñoz-Muriana.- CHAPTER 4. Spirituality and Publicity in Barcelona, 1929: Performing Citizenship between Tradition and Avant-Garde; Alberto Medina.- CHAPTER 5. The Places of the Subject: Abjection and the Transcendent City in Nada and La plaça del Diamant; Sarah Thomas.- CHAPTER 6. Living Off the Exception: Biopolitical Modernity and Sacratio in Francoist Spain; William Viestenz.- CHAPTER 7. Urban Avatars of “El Maligno”: Sacredness in Álex de la Iglesia’s El día de la bestia and Manuel Martín Cuenca’s Caníbal; Antonio Cordoba.- CHAPTER 8. Searching the Soul of the City in Rafael Chirbes’s Crematorio; Daniel García-Donoso.- CHAPTER 9. A New Heaven for a New Earth: Religion in the Contemporary Spanish Novel; Nathan Richardson.- CHAPTER 10. Media Landscapes of a Well-Dressed Multitude: The City and the Individual in Velvet and El tiempo entre costuras; Esteve Sanz and Tatiana Alekseeva.- AFTERWORD. The Temple and the City: Contaminations of the Sacred in Modernista Barcelona; Joan Ramon Resina.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Religious studies are a critical but rarely explored area in Spanish cultural studies. At a time when secularity is in crisis, and religious ideas crop up in unexpected places, this volume is a timely, much-needed contribution that should pave the way for further explorations of the interplay between the secular and the religious in contemporary Spanish culture.” (Angel Loureiro, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, Princeton University, USA)

“The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain offers, through innovative research and critical thinking, an in-depth analysis of the persistence of the sacred in a secular society. Engaging in excellent dialogue with some of the most important thinkers and cultural historians of religion, urban studies, political theory, and modernity, the essays in this collection open up new areas of cultural and theoretical inquiry about Spanish society and culture. This is a major contribution.” (Cristina Moreiras-Menor, Professorof Spanish and Women's Studies, University of Michigan, USA)

“This collection on representations of cities in Spain is new and engaging. Each essay interrogates the conventional wisdom of ‘the sacred’ as exclusive to pre-modern urban space . . . these essays have encouraged me to re-think the very notion of modernity and pre-modernity.” (Michael Ugarte, Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri, USA)