Awards

• Commended for NACS Award 2024 Awarded by the North American Catalan Society 2024 (United States)

Overview

Barcelona, City of Margins considers the impact of narrative and photography in the construction of urban space and social movements in Francoist Spain. Barcelona, City of Margins studies the creation of a space of dissent in the 1950s and 1960s that became the pillar of the protest movements during the final years of the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy. This space of dissent took shape in the margins of what is considered the official space of the city of Barcelona, revealing the interconnection of urbanism, literature, and photography in the formation of the political, social, and cultural movements to come in the 1970s. Olga Sendra Ferrer draws from theoretical readings on built environments, neighbourhoods, housing projects and developments, and everyday life within Spanish urban spaces. Literature and photography demonstrate the political value of cultural production and forms of cultural representation that occur from peripheral zones those pushed aside by exclusionary politics, fascist forms of control, surveillance, and homogenisation. In search of the origins of the protest movements and counter culture that would come in the final years of the Franco regime, Barcelona, City of Margins asserts the value of urban movement and cultural practice as a challenge to the spatial and urbanistic regime of Francoism.

Full Product Details

9781487508487

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Reviews

"""Sendra Ferrer sees her work as a recovery project, and the findings are illuminating and intriguing. The book is not an easy read, but it includes extremely valuable information and arguments."" -- E. H. Friedman, Vanderbilt University * <em>CHOICE Connect</em> * ""Barcelona, City of Margins is an impressive piece of scholarship, uncovering the dialogic interaction between centre and margins, to provide new important insights into Barcelona’s urban and sociocultural history."" -- John McCulloch, The Bulletin of Spanish Studies Trust * <em>Bulletin of Spanish Studies</em> *"

Barcelona, City of Margins looks at the radically innovative art forms of 1950s and 1960s Barcelona - the writing of Francisco Candel and the photography of Joan Colom and Colita in particular - that noisily interrupted the attempts of the Franco regime to impose a harmonious, static structure of absolute space. Olga Sendra Ferrer has written a startlingly powerful book of urban cultural criticism that lays the groundwork for us to get beyond our oftentimes limited appreciation of dissident art in the decades after the Civil War. - Susan Larson, Qualia Professor of Spanish, Texas Tech University A superb piece of scholarship that balances theory, close visual reading, and cultural analysis, Barcelona, City of Margins makes an important and original contribution to the growing literature on one of the world's most influential cities. - Bob Davidson, Professor of Spanish and Catalan Studies, University of Toronto Olga Sendra Ferrer's eagerly awaited book serves to understand Barcelona's urban history: it shows how democracy is about reading centres from the margins using culture as a map. - German Labrador Mendez, Professor of Iberian Studies, Princeton University Through careful analyses of the photographic, narrative, and even poetic margins of dictatorial Barcelona, Olga Sendra Ferrer revels in the subtle murmurs echoing from a river of dissent. This book is a wonderful and panoramic chronicle of the clashes between urbanistic planning and urban everyday life that unfolded from the 1950s through the 1970s. - Benjamin Fraser, Professor of Iberian and Latin American Studies, University of Arizona

Author Information

Olga Sendra Ferrer is an associate professor of Spanish at Wesleyan University.

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