Affective Landscapes

Cristina Ortiz Ceberio (PhD, University of Cincinnati) is a Professor of Humanities and Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she coordinates the Spanish and Latin American Studies program. She was the recipient of the Patricia W. Baer Professorship in Education (2015-2019). Ortiz Ceberio has numerous articles published on issues of gender and nationalism in peer-reviewed journals in Europe and the United States. Among the most recent publications are "Relatos parciales: Visiones de Estados Unidos desde el nacionalismo vasco" in Resistiendo al Imperio: Nuevas aproximaciones al antiamericanismo desde el siglo XX hasta la actualidad (Misael Arturo Lopez Zapico and Irina A. Feldman, Eds., 2019) and Ellas cuentan: Representaciones artísticas de la violencia en el País Vasco desde la perspectiva de género (with Maria Pilar Rodriguez, 2020). María Pilar Rodríguez is a Professor in the Department of Communication of the University of Deusto (Spain) and Director of the PhD program in Leisure, Culture and Communication for Human Development. She holds a PhD from Harvard University. Until 2002 she taught at Columbia University in New York. She has published extensively on literature, film, culture, gender studies and Basque and Hispanic studies. She is the Principal Investigator of the Communication Research Team of Universidad de Deusto, recognized and funded by the Basque Government. She is regularly invited to teach in North American universities such as Dartmouth College, University of Chicago and Columbia University. She was one of the Jurors of the National Essay Prize (2018) awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. She has authored six books and has published 75 articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed European and North American journals.

Artistic Representations of Violence from a Gender Perspective: The Affective Turn – The Identity Question: A Journey Back and Forth – Gender and Political Violence: The First Literary Representations: Nerea eta biok (Nerea and I) and Koaderno Gorria (The Red Notebook) – Ander eta Yul (Ander and Yul) and Yoyes: Death and Affective Disruptions in a Fractured Community – El Ángulo ciego (The Blind Spot) and El Comensal (The Dinner Guest): Affective Ramifications in Literary Representations of Political Violence – Mejor la ausencia (Better the Absence): Violence and Affective Ruptures – Back to the Past: Explorations of Domestic, Social, and Political Conflicts: Los turistas desganados (Listless Tourists), La línea del frente (The Front Line), and Los niños de Lemóniz (The Children of Lemoniz) – Some Final Thoughts.

“This is a passionate and rigorous study that, through the lens of gender, expands the analysis of artistic representations of terrorist violence. This book fulfils an essential need to understand how terrorism in the Basque Country was embedded in daily life, in everyday gestures, and in the most intimate emotions. It is of that violent presence that colonized our daily lives that the works analyzed by María Pilar Rodriguez and Cristina Ortiz Ceberio speak.”—Luisa Etxenike, Writer

“This book is an indispensable contribution to the body of studies about the artistic representations of violence in Euskadi. It explores unprecedented aspects of that political context and provides an analysis centered on affects and emotions.”—Helena Taberna, Filmmaker

“Cinema and literature are spaces where the memory of the violence experienced in the Basque Country can be elaborated upon; works of art can open the collective debate about all the things that we still do not understand: the pain of the victims, our complacent silence as a society, the permeability of violence in every aspect of life. This study analyzes some of our attempts to grapple with that past and it does so by presenting a double theoretical gaze—affect and gender theories—that illuminates with perspicacity the issues. The authors position us in front of a new genealogy of female artists who have represented violence in their works.”—Edurne Portela, Writer and Critic

“Fierce, thorough and vital, these analyses of representations of violence in the Basque Country from a gender perspective deploy critical frameworks that combine visual and literary analysis with contemporary political theory in order to investigate and often overturn our understanding of the impact of violence on our memory and on our relationship with the past.”—Rob Stone, Professor of Film Studies, University of Birmingham, UK

“In a masterly fashion, this study brings to the reader the emotional cartography of decades of violence in the Basque Country. Using the cultural narratives of contemporary Basque artists, these scholars present an undoubtedly novel and necessary contribution to the history and critical interpretation of the emotions that the violence elicited. The analysis of emotions as cultural practices reveals their social function and the role they played in the socialization process in a convulsed Basque society.”—Mari Jose Olaziregi, Professor, University of Basque Country