Professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison B.A. in Latin American Studies from Wesleyan University M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Yale University Author of La imprenta enterrada: Baroja, Arlt y el imaginario anarquista (2000) and Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction: A Transatlantic Discourse on Urban Violence (2008) Translator of Josefina Ludmer's The Corpus Delicti: A Manual of Argentine Fictions (2004) Address: Madison, WI
A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, Jan 17, 2023
In 2006 the U.K.-based Animal Studies Group implicated global factory farming in “a holocaust of ... more In 2006 the U.K.-based Animal Studies Group implicated global factory farming in “a holocaust of immense proportions.” Global meat production increased eightfold in the half-century to 2010, and in 2018 more than 72 billion animals were slaughtered for food. Spain is one of the world’s largest meat producers, holding Europe’s largest livestock population and largest population of caged animals, many of whom spend their entire lives tightly confined. It is Europe’s second largest producer of meat from pigs, veal calves and sheep and goats, and fourth in poultry. Due to the consolidation, corporatization and industrialization of meat production, farmed animals have become nearly invisible to European citizens even as they have been subjected to increasingly extreme deprivation, suffering and pain. In this context, photographic and videographic documentation of the excruciatingly miserable lives of industrially farmed and slaughtered animals emerges as a crucial tool in the cultural struggle for a humane biopolitics. Spanish activist organizations have displayed great ingenuity and courage in covertly obtaining graphic evidence of widespread abuses. I examine contemporary initiatives to counteract the invisibility of intensive industrial livestock farming and slaughter, including current campaigns to institute permanent video monitoring in slaughterhouses. I devote special attention to the work of Aitor Garmendia, a trenchantly abolitionist photographer and video documentarian whose images of slaughterhouses and factory farms have achieved unprecedented international recognition, including Picture of the Year International photojournalism prizes in each of the last three years, due to their shockingly brutal content and extraordinarily high visual quality.
This article operates on two premises: 1) that contemporary practices of intensive industrial liv... more This article operates on two premises: 1) that contemporary practices of intensive industrial livestock farming are producing catastrophic ecological effects, and 2) that, in the capitalist drive for maximum productive efficiency and the absence of effectively enforced animal-welfare legislation, industrial meat producers currently inflict atrocious abuses on animals on a historically unprecedented scale. Taking a cue from Michael Pollan’s proposal of glass-walled slaughterhouses as a remedy for the presently unchecked brutality, I examine a text that would appear to offer extraordinary insight into a highly secretive operation: a contemporary documentary film shot primarily in a Mexican cattle slaughterhouse yet circulated internationally, screened for the Mexican Senate, and nominated for a U.S. Academy Award. My argument is that, like the makers of previous slaughterhouse documentaries, La Parka director Gabriel Serra overcame the taboo against showing real animal slaughter in la...
... so, but I invoke it cautiously here on the basis of the definitions offered by Roberto Gonzál... more ... so, but I invoke it cautiously here on the basis of the definitions offered by Roberto González Echevarría (1987), Gustavo Pellón (1996) and ... will comment on a series of scenes from both a novela negra by Santiago Gamboa, and from non-genre works by Gabriel García Márquez ...
This article considers corpse photography in novels by Bolaño (1996) and Rivera Garza (1999) and ... more This article considers corpse photography in novels by Bolaño (1996) and Rivera Garza (1999) and argues, following the ideas of Elizabeth Bronfen, that it serves male characters as a technique for the disavowal of two enigmas that permanently threaten the male subject: death and femininity. Parallels are drawn with necropornographic precedents in the novela negra and with contemporary Post-Boom novels by Diamela Eltit and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Artistic practice in the novels is related to the photographic theories of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, affirming a profound association between the photographic medium and death, as well as to the Surrealist doll photographs of Hans Bellmer and the work of contemporary corpse photographers Joel-Peter Witkin and Andrés Serrano. Corpse photography is considered as an exemplary manifestation of major trends in twentieth-century art and mass-media culture, as described by theorists such as Néstor García Canclini (‘morbid spectacularity’), Alain Badiou (‘passion for the real’), Hal Foster (‘return of the real’) and Paul Virilio (‘pitiless art’). Corpse photographs are shown to set up a dynamic of approximation and distancing termed ‘t(h)an(a)talization’. The article concludes by arguing both photographic and literary representation, converging at the textual site of the corpse photograph, fail incessantly in their aspiration to apprehend the real.
... In these decades the Frenchman Gaboriau read the American Poe; the American Anna Katharine Gr... more ... In these decades the Frenchman Gaboriau read the American Poe; the American Anna Katharine Green read Poe and Gaboriau; the Englishman ... detective novel during the period of its broad popular assimilation is the profes-sional pulp writer Guillermo Lopez Hipkiss (1902-57 ...
A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, Jan 17, 2023
In 2006 the U.K.-based Animal Studies Group implicated global factory farming in “a holocaust of ... more In 2006 the U.K.-based Animal Studies Group implicated global factory farming in “a holocaust of immense proportions.” Global meat production increased eightfold in the half-century to 2010, and in 2018 more than 72 billion animals were slaughtered for food. Spain is one of the world’s largest meat producers, holding Europe’s largest livestock population and largest population of caged animals, many of whom spend their entire lives tightly confined. It is Europe’s second largest producer of meat from pigs, veal calves and sheep and goats, and fourth in poultry. Due to the consolidation, corporatization and industrialization of meat production, farmed animals have become nearly invisible to European citizens even as they have been subjected to increasingly extreme deprivation, suffering and pain. In this context, photographic and videographic documentation of the excruciatingly miserable lives of industrially farmed and slaughtered animals emerges as a crucial tool in the cultural struggle for a humane biopolitics. Spanish activist organizations have displayed great ingenuity and courage in covertly obtaining graphic evidence of widespread abuses. I examine contemporary initiatives to counteract the invisibility of intensive industrial livestock farming and slaughter, including current campaigns to institute permanent video monitoring in slaughterhouses. I devote special attention to the work of Aitor Garmendia, a trenchantly abolitionist photographer and video documentarian whose images of slaughterhouses and factory farms have achieved unprecedented international recognition, including Picture of the Year International photojournalism prizes in each of the last three years, due to their shockingly brutal content and extraordinarily high visual quality.
This article operates on two premises: 1) that contemporary practices of intensive industrial liv... more This article operates on two premises: 1) that contemporary practices of intensive industrial livestock farming are producing catastrophic ecological effects, and 2) that, in the capitalist drive for maximum productive efficiency and the absence of effectively enforced animal-welfare legislation, industrial meat producers currently inflict atrocious abuses on animals on a historically unprecedented scale. Taking a cue from Michael Pollan’s proposal of glass-walled slaughterhouses as a remedy for the presently unchecked brutality, I examine a text that would appear to offer extraordinary insight into a highly secretive operation: a contemporary documentary film shot primarily in a Mexican cattle slaughterhouse yet circulated internationally, screened for the Mexican Senate, and nominated for a U.S. Academy Award. My argument is that, like the makers of previous slaughterhouse documentaries, La Parka director Gabriel Serra overcame the taboo against showing real animal slaughter in la...
... so, but I invoke it cautiously here on the basis of the definitions offered by Roberto Gonzál... more ... so, but I invoke it cautiously here on the basis of the definitions offered by Roberto González Echevarría (1987), Gustavo Pellón (1996) and ... will comment on a series of scenes from both a novela negra by Santiago Gamboa, and from non-genre works by Gabriel García Márquez ...
This article considers corpse photography in novels by Bolaño (1996) and Rivera Garza (1999) and ... more This article considers corpse photography in novels by Bolaño (1996) and Rivera Garza (1999) and argues, following the ideas of Elizabeth Bronfen, that it serves male characters as a technique for the disavowal of two enigmas that permanently threaten the male subject: death and femininity. Parallels are drawn with necropornographic precedents in the novela negra and with contemporary Post-Boom novels by Diamela Eltit and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Artistic practice in the novels is related to the photographic theories of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, affirming a profound association between the photographic medium and death, as well as to the Surrealist doll photographs of Hans Bellmer and the work of contemporary corpse photographers Joel-Peter Witkin and Andrés Serrano. Corpse photography is considered as an exemplary manifestation of major trends in twentieth-century art and mass-media culture, as described by theorists such as Néstor García Canclini (‘morbid spectacularity’), Alain Badiou (‘passion for the real’), Hal Foster (‘return of the real’) and Paul Virilio (‘pitiless art’). Corpse photographs are shown to set up a dynamic of approximation and distancing termed ‘t(h)an(a)talization’. The article concludes by arguing both photographic and literary representation, converging at the textual site of the corpse photograph, fail incessantly in their aspiration to apprehend the real.
... In these decades the Frenchman Gaboriau read the American Poe; the American Anna Katharine Gr... more ... In these decades the Frenchman Gaboriau read the American Poe; the American Anna Katharine Green read Poe and Gaboriau; the Englishman ... detective novel during the period of its broad popular assimilation is the profes-sional pulp writer Guillermo Lopez Hipkiss (1902-57 ...
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