In This Issue

Adam Cooper

In March 2020, the day before students were to leave the campus of The University of Arizona for Spring Break, I told both of my classes that they should probably check out the directions for using Zoom in the unlikely event we might have to use that course delivery platform in the second half of the Spring semester. That was the last time I saw those students in person. Little did I suspect at that moment in time that my offhanded suggestion would become a way of life for educators as the pandemic threw our professional and personal lives into a state of chaos. Given what has transpired since January 2020 in general and March 2020 in academia, I find it miraculous that you are now able to read this volume of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies.

The hard work and dedication of many hands and sets of eyes went into the herculean effort of producing these pages at a time of intense turmoil and crisis. I want to take a moment to thank all of those—from authors to external evaluators and everybody on the editorial team—whose dedication and diligence allowed us to get this volume finished. I need to especially thank our Assistant Editor, Romy Cerón Canché, who handled the production and the day to day for the journal with enormous grace and skill. Equal thanks are due to our unflappable Managing Editor, Agustín Cuadrado. Without his organizational skills, professional intuition, and levelheaded leadership, it would have been impossible for the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies to make it through 2020.

The main section of the journal features five articles. They are indicative of the diversity of approaches that scholars of cultural studies engage to scrutinize cultural creation. Maribel Rams’ essay opens the issue. It offers a reinterpretation of recent Spanish postmemorial documentary through an analysis of Inma Jiménez Neira’s La mare que els va parir (2008). Aldana Bialowas Villareal’s contribution examines how a Mexican sex scandal that dominated the headlines and political discourse in that country mediates important visual and written narratives by Felipe Cazals and Jorge Ibargüengoitia. It furthermore argues that these works of offer a much more nuanced assessment of the scandal that helps refocus the issues the scandal laid bare. Daniel Calleros Villareal argues for a reassessment of the importance of video gaming as a form of cultural creation. To do so his essay offers a multi-faceted reading of recontextualization of Mexican author Ruy Xoconostle’s Pixie en los suburbios. The Andalusian feminist graphic artist Annie Knock’s Amor del barrio (2019) is the subject of Miguel Angel Blanco Martínez’s essay. It scrutinizes this work as a focus of feminist, political, and urban resistance to issues such as the resurgence of ultra-right-wing political influence and gentrification. An analysis of Cadalso’s Cartas marruecas and Galdos’s Aita Tettaun offers Caroline B. Colquhoun the opportunity to see how the portrayal of the moor functions as what the author describes as a cultural burlesque. This performance, as the author states, “points to a transhistorical Spanish discursive tendency to domesticate and/or colonize the Maghribian Moor in the service of soothing internal and international ills.” The main section of the journal concludes with a fascinating interview with the contemporary Spanish dramatist Ignacio García May by Esther Fernández and Andrés Pérez-Simón.

Guest Editors Irene Domingo and Almudena Marín Cobos have assembled this issue’s special section titled “Renacimiento en tiempos de crisis.” The essays they have assembled look at cultural responses produced around the Hispanic world to recent political and economic crises and, as the editors write, “imagine possible alternative futures both inside and outside of it.”

Two of our regular sections round Volume 24. Our Arts Editor, Eva Romero, presents this volume’s featured artist in her regular “About the Artist” section. Our Book Review Editor, Nuria Morgado, has curated a set of reviews of recent publications that demonstrate the expansive...