In This Issue

This issue goes to press at a moment of new beginnings and hope in the political arena that are necessary, if only because it is a time of lowered expectations at the national and local levels. At many universities across the country it has been a time of reevaluation and repositioning for those involved in cultural criticism rooted in a wider social context. A reading of the journal from cover to cover reveals many connections to these preoccupations as Hispanists keep reworking established notions of cross-cultural influences and negotiations and keep questioning and some of the most general of concepts.

Alejandro Mejías-López's essay "Modernismo's Inverted Conquest and the Ruins of Imperial Nostalgia" kicks off this volume of the Arizona Journal because it gets at the heart of the very issues the journal was created to confront. The author summarizes recent discussions of Spanish national identity that seek to remedy the critical vacuum in Anglo American circles when it comes to acknowledging the role played by American ex-colonies in the making of a Spanish national imaginary. To the delight of the editorial board, this article takes on some arguments made in the 2001 special volume of this journal devoted to the topic "The Hispanic Atlantic." Focusing on the watershed moment of nineteenth-century modernismo, Mejías-López demonstrates how Spanish American authors and intellectuals exerted an extensive and dynamic influence on the former metropolis that did nothing less than reverse the location of literary and cultural authority. In short, the essay takes a new look at Transatlantic Studies and comes to the conclusion that what has been missing is Spanish America itself. In a similar vein, Elizabeth Austin looks at Argentine author Juana Manuela Gorriti's late nineteenth-century work Cocina eléctica, a book of recipes collected from Hispanic communities across several continents. The book has been understood to be many things—a pedagogical measure to educate her sisters in letters, a demonstration of American cultural diversity, a way to make money, or a combination of all three. A close textual analysis reveals much about the complexities of nineteenth-century patriarchal expectations.

Drawing on some ideas about the multifaceted nature of modernity, Fátima Nogueira makes the case for a Brazilian-centered notion of modernism as played out in Oswaldo de Andrade's 1924 Memórias sentimentais de Joâo Miramar. The work deals with the balancing act between the desire on the part of early twentieth-century intellectuals to recover the supposedly idyllic or "innocent" past of pre-modern Brazil while imagining a modern and capitalist Brazilian society. Goretti Ramírez's is the first essay that has found its home in the pages of the journal to deal with sculpture. The subject of the piece is the work of Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias. The article demonstrates by example how the tools of cultural studies criticism allow one to talk about a wide variety of artistic forms because, like sculpture itself, it draws theoretical connections between photography, architecture, video and art installations in public spaces. Alicia Muñoz, on the other hand, uses the rhetoric of the 1960s media coverage of a well-publicized series of crimes in Mexico involving the three Valenzuela sisters known as "Las Poquianchis" and compares this to Jorge Ibargüengoitia's 1977 novel Las muertas with the purpose of showing that when the women's actions are couched in different discourses of domesticity, our perceptions of violence committed by women varies greatly.

The work and thought of Spanish philosopher María Zambrano has often been relegated to the back burner for several reasons: lack of appreciation for what some critics have called her mysticism, the lack of access to good translations of her works into other languages, and the gender politics of her time. Beatriz Caballero treats Zambrano's central concept of delirium as an important way to question the validity of Enlightenment reason and thus places the Spanish philosopher more squarely in the tradition of her European contemporaries of the Frankfurt School, for example, who were engaged in much of the same questioning. Catherine Simpson takes as...