The Political Imagination in Spanish Graphic Narrative

In a spirit of community and collective action, this volume offers insights into the complexity of the political imagination and its cultural scope within Spanish graphic narrative through the lens of global political and social movements. Developed during the critical years of the COVID-19 pandemic and global lockdown, the volume and its chapters reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the comic. They employ a cultural studies approach with different theoretical frameworks ranging from debates within comics studies, film and media theory, postcolonialism, feminism, economics, multimodality, aging, aesthetics, memory studies, food studies, and sound studies, among others. Scholars and students working in these areas will find the book to be an insightful and impactful resource.

Xavier Dapena joined Iowa State's faculty as an Assistant Professor in Spanish and World Film Studies in 2021, after receiving his Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Based on his first book project "Nobody expects the Spanish Revolution": the Radical Imagination in Graphic Narrative in Contemporary Spain, he received the Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation Research Award from the University of Pennsylvania for the project Gendering Spanish Comics: a Digital Archive of Women's Graphic Narratives, and the international grant, the Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award, from The Ohio State University. His publications on Spanish graphic narrative have appeared in scholarly journals, such as Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos and edited volumes, such as Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain (2019) and Spanish Graphic Narratives: Recent Developments in Sequential Art (2020). Joanne Britland is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Framingham State University (Framingham, MA) after receiving her Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from the University of Virginia. She specializes in 20th- and 21st- century Iberian literary, cultural, and visual studies. Joanne's publications on comics, novels, theater, television, and film appear in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Hispanic Studies Review, and Chasqui, with two forthcoming chapters in books published by Renacimiento and SUNY Press. Her current book project analyzes cultural responses to social, political, and economic crises in Spain from the financial crash of 2008 to the COVID-19 pandemic.

INTRODUCTION Xavier Dapena and Joanne Britland CHAPTER 1: La burbuja del alquiler en el cómic: Mass Tourism, Gentrification, and Spain's Housing Crisis in Todo bajo el sol (2021), Soy de Pueblo: Manual Para Sobrevivir en la Ciudad (2011), and Coqueto, mejor ver (2019) Joanne Britland CHAPTER 2: Drawing Upon Silence: Decolonial Political Protest in the Comics of Ramón Esono Ebalé Caroline B. Colquhoun CHAPTER 3: Dystopia and Multimodality in Spanish Comics. Hoy es un buen día para morir (2016) by Jesús Colomina Orgaz (Colo) Jorge Catalá CHAPTER 4: M21 Magazine and the Construction of a Critical Memory of Madrid Pedro Pérez del Solar CHAPTER 5: Memories of the Material Body: Virtual Visibility and the Rise of Cyber Zines in Contemporary Spain Lauren Benjamin Mushro CHAPTER 6: Estamos todas bien as craftivism: Your war or our Struggles? Esther Claudio CHAPTER 7: From Barcelona's Underground to Madrid's Movida: Queer Interventions through Comics in the Spanish Transition Carla Suárez Vega CHAPTER 8: Hungry for Identity: Graphic Narratives and Food in Spain Rosi Song CHAPTER 9: Listening to the Sounds: Acoustic Trauma, Silences, Subaltern Words and Songs as a Source of Memory and Political Imagination in the Spanish Graphic Novel of the 21st Century Isabelle Touton CHAPTER 10: The Art of Aging in Contemporary Spanish Graphic Narratives Rhiannon McGlade CHAPTER 11: The Four Walls of Oblivion: Mediating Female History in Kim and Antonio Altarriba's El ala rota (2016) Jesús Játiva Fernández CHAPTER 12: Bringing Migration into Perspective(s): Javier de Isusi's As-lum as a Call to Solidarity through Multidirectional Memory Jasmin Wrobel