Sarah Wright

Shakespeare in Catalan: Translating Imperialism

materialise: Ailsa McPherson outlines the nation’s latent preoccupation with overcoming the ‘convict stain’ (p. 235, original emphasis) in its determination to produce the successful International Exhibition in Sydney in 1879. Some of the papers appear to be reading modernism into unusual contexts (including Turkish baths and swimming pools), but most are grounded theoretically, historically, and contextually to sway even a sceptical reader. The book is generously illustrated, and several of the images are in colour. Their captions are descriptive enough that the images are given an opportunity to communicate fully. Some of the papers are inevitably stronger than others and a few curious editing decisions jar, but this impressive volume is a must for researchers interested in all aspects of modernism and modernity, from an Australian perspective and beyond.

Gregorio Marañón and "The cult of sex": effeminacy and intersexuality in "The psychopathology of Don Juan" (1924)

A bawdy vaudeville farce, La plasmatoria, by Pedro Muñoz Seca, was staged in Madrid in 1935. At the end of the first act, during the play’s estreno at the Teatro María Isabel, Rafael Somoza, playing the lead-role, stepped forward beyond the proscenium arch, drew his sword from its sheath, and peered menacingly into the Madrid audience. ‘¡¡A ver!!’ he threatened, ‘¿Dónde vive Marañón?’1 Gregorio Marañón, clinician and celebrated member of the medical establishment, had entered the popular imaginary. La plasmatoria dramatizes a polemic concerning contemporary paradigms of masculinity which was played out over the body and figure of Don Juan. This controversy raged at the local and popular level as well as in the written texts of intellectuals and physicians. At the locus between the popular and the medical, the literary and the scientific discourses framing the debate, stood the figure of Gregorio Marañón. It was largely through Marañón’s writings that Don Juan became emblematic of an interrogation of Spanish masculinity, anxiety about the hyper-erotics of the age, and the perceived threat of a universal bisexuality.2 The Don Juan myth attracted Marañón’s attention repeatedly from 1924 to 1959. His first incursion, ‘Notas para una biología de Don Juan’, was published in the Revista de Occidente in 1924 and the same work was presented under the title, ‘Psicopatología del donjuanismo’ as a lecture at

Zombie-nation: Haunting, ‘Doubling’ and the ‘Unmaking’ of Francoist aesthetics in Albert Boadella's ¡ Buen viaje, Excelencia!

A Spanish joke circulated on the Internet in 2003. Franco’s ghost comes back to life and has a conversation with a night-watchman on guard at his tomb, the Valley of the Fallen. ‘Who’s in power now?’ the deceased general asks the stupefied guard. In response to each of the names in a list of ministers from José Marı́a Aznar’s right-of-centre Partido Popular government, he inquires, ‘Ah, my loyal friend?’ ‘No’, the guard responds to each in turn, ‘His grandson’, ‘His son’, ‘His nephew’. Finally, Franco inquires about Manuel Fraga Iribarne, who in the 1960s served as Franco’s Minister of Information and under Aznar was in charge of the region of Galicia. ‘His grandson?’ asks the Generalı́simo. ‘No’, goes the punch-line, ‘Your loyal friend’. With the general elections in sight, the joke was anti-Aznar propaganda. It implied that Franco’s spirit lived on in the corridors of power almost thirty years after his death. At the same time, it tapped into an atmosphere of questioning the legacies of Francoism which has gained prevalence in the twenty-first century in Spain. According to recent theories, the success of the Spanish Transition to Democracy was achieved only on the basis of historical amnesia, in what has come to be known as the ‘Pact of Silence’. This culture of ‘olvido’ (forgetting) has arguably gone hand in hand with a recent blunting of the harsher aspects of Francoism – a ‘visión retro’ (retro view) in which ‘la dureza del franquismo es sustituida por una distancia tenuemente crı́tica pero siempre amable, incluso tierna’ (the harsh aspects of Francoism are substituted by a distance which is faintly critical but always pleasant, even tender). There is, then, a nostalgic desire to consume the past 1. I would like to thank the following people for their help with this article: Albert Boadella, Marı́a M. Delgado, Chris Small, Cristina Ferrández, Jack Goody, Juliet Mitchell, Lourdes Orozco, David Bradby and the anonymous reader.

The Muteness of Dogs: Pablo Larraín's El club (2015)

Abstract This paper reflects on films from the recent boom in Chilean filmmaking in which animals, specifically, dogs, are called upon to articulate what is unsayable or ungrievable. In films such as Fernando Guzzonis Carne de perro (2012), Sebastián Sepúlvedas Las niñas Quispe (2013) and Pablo Larraíns El Club (2015), the death of a dog articulates biopolitical regimes, human rights abuses and child abuse. This paper will focus on Larraíns El Club, a film which deals with the silences and cover-ups of the Catholic Church in Chile over human rights and child abuses. With recourse to Alice Kuzniars moving portrait of human-canine relations in her book Melancholias Dog, I will explore the fleeting projections and shifting inter-subjective embodiments occasioned by the dog in this film as well as the extent to which the dog gestures towards a state of melancholia which captures the psychic pain at large in the Chilean panorama. I will turn to Jacques Derrida (in particular, his relationship with his cat) on the relationship between human and non-human animals, in order to explore further the ways in which the nonhuman animal in this film (a greyhound), functions as allegory, projection or anthropomorphization of human concerns as well as the extent to which the dogs suffering can be seen on its own terms.

The ethics of wrongdoing in José María Forqué's Amanecer en puerta oscura (1957)

Abstract Amanecer en puerta oscura (José María Forqué, 1957) is a Spanish Western starring Francisco Rabal which depicts banditry from the nineteenth century and which won the Berlin Silver Bear. In the climactic scenes of the film, the statue of Jesús el Rico (a crucifix carried on high by encapuchados during the Easter celebrations) raises its hand to choose which one of three prisoners to pardon in a re-enactment of the Parable of the Good Thief. This article will examine documents from the censorship files under the Franco dictatorship and reviews of the film to explore the representations of wrongdoing in the film and the intersections of spectatorial relations with ethics.

Noli me tangere: Memory, embodiment and affect in Silvio Caiozzi's Fernando ha vuelto (2005)

Silvio Caiozzis 2005 documentary Fernando ha vuelto bears filmic witness to the forensic identification of the remains of Fernando Olivares Mori, an MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) activist under Allende who was disappeared during the Pinochet regime in Chile and whose corpse was deposited in an unmarked grave in the infamous Patio 29 of Santiago General Cemetery. In the film we witness the encounter between Agave Díaz and her dead husbands skeleton, laid out in the laboratories of the Servicio Médico Legal, as scientists explain the injuries inflicted during torture. Taking heed of Nelly Richards (2004) call for Chilean art-work which employs ‘figurative language (symbols, metaphors, allegories) sufficiently moving so that they enter into a relationship of solidarity with the emotions unleashed by memory’, this article proposes a reading of affect as a way to work through memory and explores the ways that embodiment allows for a spectatorship which permits the viewer to engage with the experiences of Chiles disappeared and their loved ones. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancys definitions of touch, the article argues that Caiozzis film articulates a failed restitution for the families of Chiles disappeared.

A review of Spanish Plays: New Spanish and Catalan Drama, edited by Elyse Dodgson and Mary Peate and Modern Catalan Plays, edited by John London and David George

A Review of Spanish Plays: New Spanish and Catalan Drama, edited by Elyse Dodgson and Mary Peate Nick Heen Books, 2000, 238 pp, ISBN: 1–85459–418–4 Modern Catalan Plays, edited by John London and David George Methuen, 1999, 288 pp, ISBN: 0–413–74440‐X