Fraser on Bermúdez and Geist

H-Urban Fraser on Bermúdez and Geist, 'Cartographies of Madrid: Contesting Urban Space at the Crossroads of the Global South and Global North'

Review published on Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Silvia Bermúdez, Anthony L. Geist, eds. Cartographies of Madrid: Contesting Urban Space at the Crossroads of the Global South and Global North. Hispanic Issues Series. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2019. 232 pp. $39.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8265-2215-3.

Reviewed by Benjamin Fraser (The University of Arizona) Published on H-Urban (November, 2019) Commissioned by Alexander Vari (Marywood University)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54389

Published as number 43 in the Hispanic Issues series—edited by Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Spadaccini, with Managing Editor Luis Martín-Estudillo and Associate Managing Editor Ana Forcinito—this book’s contributions to Iberian cultural studies cover the late 1960s through 2017, the period during which “internal and external migrations transformed Madrid into one of the capitals of the Global South” (p. x). It is tempting to read Cartographies of Madrid as a contribution positioned within a disciplinary trajectory whose origins lie inMadrid, de Fortunana a la M-40: Un siglo de cultura urbana (2003), edited by two of the present book’s contributors, Edward Baker and Malcolm Alan Compitello. Indeed, in their introduction, co-editors Silvia Bermúdez and Anthony L. Geist explicitly state that their edited volume “constitutes a natural continuation of [that] groundbreaking study” (p. xiii). While it may be difficult to disagree with that statement outright, this is a much more expansive and eclectic collection than that characterization would allow.

From the outset, Bermúdez and Geist state the volume’s ambitious contribution concisely: to examine the deployment and resistance to political, cultural, and economic capital in Spain’s capital city. They are able to integrate a wide array of necessary historical information and cover much theoretical ground in a brief and readable introduction. As a result, this paperback should be of interest not merely to specialists who have read Nathan Richardson’s Constructing Spain: The Re-imagination of Space and Place in Fiction and Film, 1953-2003 (2011)—which is cited in the introduction—Justin Crumbaugh’s Destination Dictatorship: The Spectacle of Spain's Tourist Boom and the Reinvention of Difference (2009), Tatjana Pavlovič’s The Mobile Nation: España Cambia de Piel (1954-1964) (2012), and Bermúdez’s own Rocking the Boat: Migration and Race in Contemporary Spanish Music (2018) but also to students in both panoramic and specialized courses.

The global cardinal directions in the book’s title point to the way individual chapters explore Madrid’s contradictory role as both a site of dispossession and a site of wealth creation. The same contradiction exists in other cities on and off the Iberian Peninsula, of course, as analyses of the spatialized nature of globalized neoliberal capitalist expansion by theorists David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre would support. One notes that references to their writings figure in a number of the volume’s essays, some of which are authored by pioneers in the spatial turn within Iberian studies. In addition to professors housed in departments of Spanish language and literature or producing

There are five essays grouped together in part 1, titled “Capitalizing on Visual and Literary Cultures, and Challenging Urban Exclusion.” Geist exploresMadriz , a magazine “sponsored by the Youth Council of the Madrid city government under the leadership of El Viejo Profesor ... Mayor Enrique Tierno Galván” that “gave expression to the Movida intebeos , or comics” (p. 5). His analysis of selected images and entries in the publication’s thirty-three issues unpacks Madrid’s urban cartography as a site of transformation and contestation. The chapter by Compitello uses the work of Harvey and Manuel Castells, among others, to explore the engagement of activism with urban space from the Culture of the Transition, to the okupas of the 1990s, and through the indignados. Blending Madrid’s urban planning and scholarship critical of Madrilenian urbanism, it “underscores the acutely important role of cultural creation in acts of resistance to capital’s attempts to remake space, and by extension social relationships, in its own image” (p. 21). Jonathan Snyder’s chapter complements the analyses of his recent book, Poetics of Opposition in Contemporary Spain: Politics and the Work of Urban Culture (2015), by developing the concept of “practices of oppositional literacy” in relation to 15-M. Examining Madrid’s Sol encampment, he asserts that, for the indignadxs, “the oppositional practices and readings of the crisis by protestors are part and parcel of the urban transformations in the public square” (p. 53). Eli Evans explores the prize-winning novel El mundo (2007) by Juan José Millás from the perspective of neoliberal urbanism and its attendant forms of economic scarcity. The narrative rupture and “‘future-perfect’ utopianism rehearsed in El mundo” prompt Evans to assess Tierno Galván’s legacy and also to consider Madrid’s future (p. 79). Susan Larson’s chapter takes on Elvira Navarro’s La trabajadora (2014) as a novel that “is a direct response to the material conditions of the city and serves as a prime example of art that envisions the reuse and repurposing of refuse within urban space” (p. 87). Her convincing analysis of Navarro’s literary critique integrates aesthetics, trash, austerity, indignation, and precarity against the background of “Madrid’s crumbling infrastructure” (p. 103).

In the first of the two essays that comprise part 2 of the volume, titled “Sites of Memory,” Jill Robbins interrogates the archives and the grassroots memorials associated with the Madrid train bombings perpetrated on March 11, 2004. She incorporates an assessment of transportation planning, the trains’ working-class neighborhood trajectories, and the cultural response to the bombing sites, including the most well-known commemorative site, where “the crystal cylindrical structure that pierces the roof of the Atocha station, channeling light to the interior space below ... can be seen from the street, a shimmering transparent tower of clear glass blocks jutting out of the station at an angle, visually recalling the explosions” (p. 117). The second essay of this section, by Scott Boehm, grapples with the application of the Law of Historical Memory to Madrid’s cityscape after the 2015 election of mayor Manuela Carmena. Charting progress, obstacles, and remaining challenges with a focus on important sites, such as the Victory Arch, the Valley of the Fallen, and Royal Palace of El Pardo, he states that “unless the emergent leftist political formations that exploded onto the Spanish political scene in 2014 and 2015 achieve national—or plurinational—hegemony, the politics of public memory related to Spanish fascism will remain highly contentious, particularly in Madrid” (p. 127).

Part 3, “Madrid as Lived Experience,” contains three compelling chapters to close the volume. Alicia Luna’s contribution evokes the power of cinema to inspire, document, and preserve opposition to an

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Fraser on Bermúdez and Geist, 'Cartographies of Madrid: Contesting Urban Space at the Crossroads of the Global South and Global North'. H-Urban. 11-13-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/22277/reviews/5352522/fraser-bermu%CC%81dez-and-geist-cartographies-madrid-contesting-urban Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Urban intended repeal of the Law of Abortion Rights. Her writerly approach, personal tone, and journalistic savvy are crucial to her indelible account of the route of the “Tren de la Libertad”—an act of collective resistance led by a group of women known as Las Comadres who traveled from Gijón to Madrid on Saturday, February 1, 2014, in order to assert the importance of reproductive rights. Other Freedom Trains were organized in Paris, Edinburgh, Buenos Aires, Brussels, and Rome, stemming from a working group of some eighty women filmmakers, with one result being the documentary Yo decido: El tren de la Libertad (2014) (p. 152). Luna reflects, “Now that nearly three years have passed, I can say that I have never before felt the power of solidarity so intensely” (p. 156). Rosa M. Tristán’s chapter documents and reflects on the Madrid municipal elections of 2015, whose victory by Carmena brought an end to decades of conservative party rule of the Spanish capital. Beyond providing for readers of English a detailed sketch of Carmena, who is “one of the few judges in Spain who had always worked to promote human rights and the defense of freedom, but was never lavish in her public appearances,” Tristán also delves into the political goals, controversies, and contradictions of urban politics (p. 164). In “Historical Perspectives: From Madrid as Villa y Corte to After Carmena, What?” Baker offers a comprehensive assessment, beginning in the sixteenth century when King Phillip II moved the royal court from Toledo to Madrid, retracing Sol’s political significance, and noting the role of citizen coalitions in contemporary elections. A brief afterword by Estrella de Diego and Luis Martín-Estudillo emphasizes Madrid as an “open, eclectic city” that makes possible “a never-ending conversation between apparently opposite poles” (p. 191).

The contributions to Cartographies of Madrid collectively represent a distillation of decades of urban scholarship. At the same time, however, their singular analyses introduce new aesthetic and political lines of inquiry that cannot be distinguished either from each other or from the designs of neoliberal capital. This volume by Bermúdez and Geist delivers a comprehensive assessment of Madrid’s urban culture for both specialist and general reader alike, relying in equal parts on the force of contemporary theory, the instructive value of the historical anecdote, and the aesthetics of capital politics.

Citation: Benjamin Fraser. Review of Bermúdez, Silvia; Geist, Anthony L., eds.,Cartographies of Madrid: Contesting Urban Space at the Crossroads of the Global South and Global North. H-Urban, H-Net Reviews. November, 2019. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54389

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.