This volume was born and developed during the critical years of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent global lockdown. In a spirit of community and collective action, it offers insights into the complexity of the political imagination and its cultural scope within Spanish graphic narrative through the lens of global political and social movements.
The chapters reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the comic within the overarching methodology focusing on political and social intervention. They employ a cultural studies approach with different theoretical frameworks ranging from debates within comics studies, film and media theory, postcolonialism, gender studies, economics, multimodality, aging aesthetics, memory studies, food studies, and sound studies, among others.
This truly interdisciplinary volume will interest scholars and students of comics studies, Iberian and Latin American Studies, sociology, politics, and history.
About the Author: Xavier Dapena joined Iowa State's faculty as an Assistant Professor in Spanish and World Film Studies in 2021, after receiving his Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Based on first book project "Nobody expects the Spanish Revolution" the Radical Imagination in Graphic Narrative in Contemporary Spain, he received the Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation Research Award from the University of Pennsylvania for the project Gendering Spanish Comics: a Digital Archive of Women's Graphic Narratives, and the international grant, the Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award, from The Ohio State University. His publications on Spanish graphic narrative have appeared in scholarly journals, such as Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos and edited volumes, such as Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain (2019) and Spanish Graphic Narratives: Recent Developments in Sequential Art (2020).
Joanne Britland is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Framingham State University (Framingham, MA) after receiving her Ph.D. in Spanish Literature at the University of Virginia. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century Iberian literary, cultural, and visual studies. Joanne's publications on comics, novels, theater, television, and film appear in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Hispanic Studies Review, and Chasqui, with two forthcoming chapters in books published by Renacimiento and SUNY Press. Her current book project analyzes cultural responses to social, political, and economic crises in Spain from the financial crash of 2008 to the COVID-19 pandemic.