In This Issue

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies In This Issue As a practice, Cultural Studies emerged from a literary critical tradition that saw popular culture as a threat to the cultural standards of modern civilization. The work of the founding members of Cultural Studies breaks with many of the assumptions of Literary Studies in order to examine the everyday and the ordinary: those aspects of our lives that exert such a powerful and unquestioned influence on our existence that we take them for granted. One of these hidden influences is the cultural marketplace, a literal and figurative space that has undergone dramatic changes in recent years. This volume features "Market Matters," a special collection of essays outlining the nature of the relationship between commerce and culture in Latin America and Spain since the beginning of the twentieth century. Guest Editors Christine Henseler and Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola have put together a series of articles in an effort to retheorize the position literature holds in a broader cultural marketplace where international mega-mergers give an ever-shrinking number of individuals control over what gets published and how new literary trends and canons are formed. In the Hispanic world, have publishers given in to the demands of the global marketplace instead of thinking of themselves as the guardians of critical, demanding but necessary national discourses? How do the publishing industries of Latin America and Spain play off of one another? What is the meaning of literary representations of the Spanish-language book trade? All of the authors participating in this collection attempt to answer these important questions which are becoming increasingly difficult to answer. The rest of our 2005 volume attests to the ever-widening theoretical, geographical and temporal range of Hispanic Cultural Studies, with essays on such topics as women's participation in Brazilian capoeira, the significance of Spanish poet Federico GarcÃ-a Lorca's assassination in the formation of present-day commemorations of the Spanish Civil War, evolving notions of masculinity in Argentine photography, Picasso's intellectual and visual relationship to La Cekstina and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's running critique on Spanish tourism and Leftist politics. The editors of the Arizona Journal continue to leave the doors of the publication as wide open as possible to invite the circulation of new and sometimes competing ideas about where the discipline of Hispanic Cultural Studies is going. In this way our contributors continue to define by example what it means to engage in the discipline . We look forward to where they take us next. Susan Larson Managing Editor University of Kentucky ...