SPANISH & PORTUGUESE RESEARCH (SPRG) FORUM

Michael Arnold
The Alpha and the Omega of Pony Bravo Imagery: A Case Study in Twenty-First Century Indie Neoflamenco.

This presentation represents an excerpt from my dissertation chapter on indie neoflamenco and neofado hybrid music. The bands that perform in these genres are exclusively composed of musicians who come from musical backgrounds that fall outside the realm of traditional flamenco and fado. Although many of these musicians grew up listening to a mixture of national traditional music and Anglophone rock, punk, pop, etc., all of them began creating and performing music related to the latter before musically engaging their respective national urban folk influences. I examine the use of national historical patrimony by such artists with respect to the musician's position as global postmodern artist, as glocal representative of social transformations occurring within the neighborhood and across the world, and as indie/electronic music practitioner struggling to balance conflicting demands for authenticity within the new hybrid genre while still trying to survive financially in an overly-saturated and poorly- remunerated medium. In this excerpt, I provide an example of the kind of hybrid cultural production created by such artists via a brief analysis of recent work produced by the Seville-based Pony Bravo. I have chosen to highlight Pony Bravo for this presentation due to their status as pioneers in the indie neoflamenco field, as well as for their artistic work which breaks with previously codified forms of sonic representations while rearticulating (both lyrically and visually) an array of national and international signifiers.

Molly Leonard
Relaciones geográficas: painting a distinct colonial cartography

Colonial cartography provides an exceptional avenue for understanding the way colonial subjects envision and relate to highly transformative cultural spaces and politically defined territories. The Relaciones Geográficas (compiled between 1579 and 1585) are a collection of written and visual responses to Spanish questionnaires seeking information about the landscape of New Spain colonies. There are contending theories, however, as to how these resulting pinturas should be used to view and map out the past.

This talk will attempt to distance the discussion from the binary categories of "Spanish" and "indigenous" and move towards a collaborate conceptualization of colonial cartography. In light of Homi Bhaba's theory on the incommensurability of in-between spaces that emerge in certain intercultural exchanges, we can also conceive of the colonial maps of New Spain as products of a distinct colonial "third space" that differs significantly from both "Spanish" and "indigenous" categorization. By analyzing these pinturas of the Relaciones Geográficas as their very own collection of oftentimes contradictory and diverse components we can move beyond the superficial dichotomy of "native" pinturas as humanistic and social and "European" maps as scientific and rational.