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we accept that Campo challenges his readers to imagine any possible intervention of the heteropresumptive and “patrimonial process of cultural reproduction in Cuban America” (235). The final message is clear: the exploration of the “erotics” is a strategic and critical practice among writers, artists, and performers situated in a “far-flung diaspora.” The analysis of this literary and cultural phenomenon may not necessarily change any existing situation, but it can certainly open the possibility of a future where queer practices may be free from the oppressive boundaries of nation-states, history, and language. GRAHAM IGNIZIO University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Cate-Arries, Francie. Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939-1945. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell UP, 2004. 347 pp. Surprisingly, given the sudden halt in activity that the Spanish Civil War meant for many intellectuals, until recently the creative work of the Republican refugees who fled to France has attracted little critical attention. Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French Concentration Camps, 1939-1945 (2004) by Francie Cate-Arries corrects this situation . In this book, she chronicles the copious cultural body of works (memoirs , poetry, drama, fiction, drawings, diaries, etcetera) produced by the survivors of the French concentration camps. Many of these texts were first published in Mexico, where a large number of survivors went after their release . The book consists of four parts, each divided into three sections. In Part I, Cate-Arries explains the way in which, in spite of being deprived of their identity and constantly mistreated by both man and nature (the camps where located on Collioure, Saint Cyprien and Argelès-sur-Mer, on the French coast), prisoners were able to construct what they called the “memory of the dead” (72) that preserved their collective memories and fought against the alienating experience of confinement. For many refugees, Antonio Machado came to represent the Republican struggle for democratic ideals. Inspired by the poet’s death in 1939, Joaquín Xirau fictionalized Machado’s own life in exile and transformed it into “an emblem of humanity, solidarity, and continuity” (38). Similarly, Narcís Molins i Fábrega and Josep Bartolí created Campos de concentraci ón, 1939-194… (1944), a composite of drawings and texts that paid tribute to their fellow Republican prisoners. Cate-Arries dedicates the second part of her book to the exiles who used 138 Reseñas their work to denounce the situation of neglect endured by Spanish exiles in France and to the French authorities that turned a blind eye to their needs. Two of the texts she discusses are Max Aub’s Morir por cerrar los ojos (1944), which condemned the passivity of the French and asked them to take an active role in the liberation of the Spanish exiles crowded in the camps, and Luis Suárez’s autobiographical España comienza en los Pirineos (1944), which Cate-Arries describes as “a two-hundred-page treatise on the folly of the French government’s policy of nonintervention during Spain’s recent civil war” (133-34). The recovery of identity and the notion of displacement that the camp represents for refugees are the main concerns of Part III of Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire. In this part, Cate-Arrie’s analysis is centered on the idea that the “loss of place” contributes to the “loss of self” (168) – and vice versa – due to the intrinsic nature of identity, which requires a physical location to fully develop. In order to avoid this sense of loss, Republican exiles transformed their barracks into improvised schools called “barracones de cultura” (169), where they taught everything from languages to history and furniture, and tools were crafted using the scarce materials scattered on the beaches. According to Cate-Arries, Manuel Andujar’s St. Cyprien, plage. . . Campo de concentración (1942), Celso Amieva’s La almohada de arena (1960), and Agustí Bartra’s Cristo de 200.000 brazos (campo de ángeles) (1943) also served this purpose as they encode the concentration camp a “a place of subversion , resistance, and agency” (148). These texts chronicle the refugees’ various efforts to construct a sense of belonging and identity through literature...

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