Ryan Prout

Cryptic Triptych: (Re)Reading Disabilility in Spanish Film 1960-2003: El cochecito, El jardín de las delicias, and Planta cuarta

Ryan Prout is a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Cardiff University where he teaches courses on film and writing from Mexico, Cubay and Spain. He was a research student at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and a research lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. His book on Juan Goytisolo was published by Peter Lang in 2001. His study ofAsha Miros memoir of transnational adoption is forthcoming in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies. Prologue: Disabling Disabled Metaphors

Fortress Europe in Recent Spanish Film

Taylor and Francis Ltd CTTE_A_207216.sgm 10.1080/09528820601072809 hird Text 0952822 (pri t)/1475-5297 (online) Or ginal Article 2 06 & Francis 6 000November 2 06 RyanProu Proutr@cf.ac.uk Writing ten years ago, Neal Ascherson predicted an imminent future for the European Union when, as fast its walls went up and could be fortified around a closed territory, those left outside its borders would be testing and challenging the perimeter. The European Union, he suggested, would be the site of new channels of traffic for the age-old cultural symbiosis between the monopolis and the plural edge; the wanderers of Deleuze and Guattari’s Traité de nomadalogie (1980) would extend their pastures from the squares, parks and railway stations of the United States to the new Europe; the centralisation of European identity would see the gaining of currency in the old continent for Edward Said’s vision of a movement of cultural energy shifting to the ‘unhoused, decentred, exilic... whose incarnation is the migrant’.1 Ascherson predicted that ‘Tomorrow it will be the turn of the customs officials and frontier guards of the European Union to be outwitted and ‘hunted’ by ten million, illegal, inaccessible fast-moving aporoi immigrants’ in a process that has throughout history seen ‘the weak become stronger than their oppressors... by scattering, by becoming centreless, by moving fast across space, by all that is nomadism’.2 His assertion seems to have been farsighted and never less than when tested against Spain, where, in the intervening ten years, the country’s demographic composition has changed dramatically. Much of the advertising space in cities like Madrid, which was used ten years ago to direct the consumption of goods, is now given over to directing the outflow of money to Romania and Morocco. Integration of the European Union has brought ever more prominence for the services of Western Union’s holes in the wall. While newspapers in Spanish debate the subtleties of linguistic identity in Valencia and Catalonia, new titles published in languages like Bulgarian, with which the existing Iberian languages do not even share an alphabet, clamour for space on the racks. Like its impervious outer border, Fortress Europe’s soft inner boundaries have also been changing Spain’s demography. For 1 Edward Said quoted in Neil Ascherson, Black Sea, London, Vintage, 1996, p 55

Cradling the nation: Asha Miró's autoethnographies, discourses of international adoption, and the construction of Spanishness

Just as record numbers of migrants to Spain have been changing the country’s demographic face in the last decade, so too has another phenomenon, that of international adoption, a movement of infants and children across international borders which Peter Selman has called a ‘quiet migration’. Like immigration, transnational adoption creates a hierarchy of nations which divides the world into sending states and receiving states. And, like immigration, transnational adoption divides the world into a wealthy North with a perceived shortage of children and a poor South with a perceived surplus. Just as Spain’s role as a destination for economic migrants situates the country in the prosperous North, so its increasing prominence as a receiving country for internationally adopted children locates it in the roster of nations with wealthy homes to spare for the South’s putative excess of orphans. While Spain’s prominence as a receiving nation for international adoptees is a relatively recent development, there is already an interest group forming around adoptees who were brought to the country from overseas in the 1960s and 1970s. Hija del Ganges and Las dos caras de la luna, the autoethnographic memoirs of Asha Miró, who was adopted from India at the tail end of the Franco regime, form the primary focus of this article. It begins, however, by considering the current context and profile in Spain of an issue which literally makes of childhood a global geography. Similar booms in transnational adoption have previously been experienced in

Exploding Anonymity: The Romance and Risk of Derailment

This article examines resonances in popular culture of the location where Derailment is shot. It situates the use of close-ups within surrealist and other aesthetics. It asks how we reread the text in the knowledge of recent terrorist atrocities. By comparing Derailment with other short films, it also queries the sexuality of the glance.

Documenta: Entrevista con la Escritora Mexicana Rosamaría Roffiel, Ciudad de México, agosto 1996

Rosamaría Roffiel nació en Veracruz (México) en 1945. Trabajó más de diez años en Excélsior—un periódico de ámbito nacional—y también colaboró en las revistas Proceso y fem. También es autora de una novela, Amora (1989), y de varios guiones cinematográficos. En 1986 se publicó Corramos libres ahora, que recoge sus poemas escritos hasta aquel momento. En el curso de esta entrevista habla de sus escritos—entonces de próxima aparición—El para siempre dura una noche, una antología de sus cuentos, y Amorcito corazón, un guión cinematográfico. Cuenta el desarrollo de su obra de creación y habla de sus propósitos como escritora y de la recepción en México de una literatura como la suya en la que se explora la experiencia desde el lesbianismo. Roffiel señala su postura en cuanto a la política de la identidad, o si se quiere, de las identidades, y replica a los que en México pretenden que la homosexualidad es un invento estadounidense. Lleva la contraria también a aquellos escritores según los cuales es imposible la intimidad entre las mujeres. Roffiel comenta sobre el contenido autobiográfico de su ficción y habla de su anterior compromiso político y sus actividades actuales con grupos feministas. Narra desde su parecer personal la génesis del movimiento feminista en México y reflexiona sobre las relaciones entre sexualidad, raza, y clase en su país, así como sobre el proceso de alfabetización llevado a cabo. En sus respuestas explica también cuales han sido sus gustos e influencias literarios. Esta entrevista ha permanecido encerrada en un cajón durante ocho años y las razones de tan tardía publicación son básicamente dos: la primera es que una revista académica británica dio carpetazo al texto durante mucho tiempo por razones sobre las cuales prefiero no especular, y la segunda es que su autor trabajó fuera del ámbito universitario hasta hace poco.