"He is dead and he is going to die." So writes Roland Barthes with regard to a photograph of Lewis Payne by Alexander Gardner. Taken in 1865, the photograph depicts a young man - strong, beautiful, and shackled - who is to be executed for the attempted assassination of the Secretary of State of the United States of America. The photograph, like all old photographs, ostensibly "captures" a person long dead, but unlike many photographs it presumably captures something else: the expectant knowledge of death, its imminence. For Barthes, the upshot is a "defeat of Time" by way of a double recognition: "that is dead and that is going to die" (96, emphasis original). He slips into that, and as such he becomes a thing, an object of contemplation, our contemplation, we the living, here we the reading. Photography, with its lure of objectivity (it is not for anything that objectif objectiu, and objetivo also mean "lens" in French, Catalan, and Spanish), does indeed give the impression of capturing the dead and the dying, of suspending Cronus and his voracity even as it pays homage to them. But photography and other mechanical modes of reproduction are obviously not the only ways of depicting the dead, the condemned to death, and the dying - the dying who are also the living - and of offering them up to our ever so fragile contemplation. Long before photography was even a dream, painting, sketching, etching, carving, sculpting, and other more manual modes of reproduction took on the dead, the condemned to death, and the dying, and did so in ways that could not quite so easily dispense with the trace of the hand that, studiously or not, attempted to capture something passing or passed. In the modern age, however, both modes of reproduction coexist, one inflecting the other in ways that ensure that the representation of death is perpetually torn between the realities of perceptual subjectivity and the illusions of evidential objectivity. 1

This article examines the presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, of Africa from formulations of the trans-Atlantic focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. It critiques a long naturalised Ibero-American loop that tends to sidestep triangular and rhizomatic configurations and argues, amongst other things, that Spain’s colonization of the Americas finds in Africa both its prologue and its long, still ongoing, epilogue.

This chapter starts by connecting 1990s postcolonial film narratives to the ‘jumbled conflux of the exotic and the erotic’ in the three 1940s Spanish films set in Africa: ¡Harka! (dir. Carlos Arévalo, 1941), ¡A mí la legión!/Follow the Legion (dir. Juan de Orduña, 1942) and Misión blanca/White Mission (dir. Juan de Orduña, 1946). The author argues that the films use desiring subjects as a propagandistic vehicle of Spain’s imperial ventures that are put at the service of the Nationalist cause. While the decidedly homosocial colonial military setting has inspired a number of homoerotic readings focused on the strong male friendships celebrated by the films, the chapter critiques the misogynistic and racialised nature of those relationships. The very sublimation of desire implied in the ‘masculine mystique’ promoted in the narratives inspires in this case a different and innovative kind of queer reading.

This chapter juxtaposes the Spanish ‘comedia de mariquitas’ [‘poofter comedy’] No desearás al vecino de quinto (Ramón Fernández, 1970) with Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa (2004). By dissecting Alfredo Landa’s performance in No desearás al vecino de quinto, the chapter studies how the actor’s on-and off-screen persona as modern-day everyman and his flamboyant character highlight the split between actor and his craft. It also shows how this performance brings to fore a queer performance of identity that dovetails with the ‘queer sensibility’ of Martel’s directorial hand. While insisting on the multiple positions available to queerness, particularly in two films that seem to teeter on its edge, this chapter questions what it can mean to perform humanity through utterances, gestures and glances, through objects, positions, and gestures.

This article examines two works by Carmen de Burgos and Aurora Bertrana situated in Morocco En la guerra, from 1909, and El Marroc sensual i fanatic from 1936 in the light of three interrelated questions: gender, nationality and coloniality, the first two admirably studied by Roberta Johnson. It contends that the progressive feminist endeavours of both writers find themselves problematized by their ambivalent postures vis-a-vis a country considered to be at once close and distant and, more generally, that the study of questions of gender and nationality finds itself "shadowed" by questions of race and ethnicity. It also argues that while it is no doubt true that modernity and modernism in Spain can scarcely be understood without considering the innovative fervour that Ruben Dario encountered in Catalonia, colonialism, as Enrique Dussel and others rightly contend, plays an absolutely fundamental role in the configuration of both.

By means of two documentaries by Patricio Guzman, Chile, la memoria obstinada (1997) and Nostalgia de la luz (2010), we examine some of the relationships between neoliberal violence (both, during the dictatorship and after it), memory, knowledge, and emotive nature, in its double aspect, historical and personal. Along the actions, narrations, and experiences of a group of astronomers, archaeologists, and geologists who work in the Atacama Desert, and those of a group of women who look for the remains of their loved ones in the same place, it carries out some deep reflection about the possibilities and limitations of the cinematographic work related to photography and "celestial" and "terrestrial" writing.

A través de dos películas de Patricio Guzmán, Chile, la memoria obstinada; (1997) y Nostalgia de la luz (2010), se examinan algunas de las relaciones en Chile entre la violencia neoliberal (dictatorial y postdictorial), la memoria, el saber y la emotividad, en su doble vertiente histórica y personal. Junto a las historias y experiencias de un grupo de astrónomos, arqueólogos, geólogos y mujeres que buscan los restos de sus seres queridos en el desierto de Atacama, también se realiza una meditación sobre las posibilidades y limitaciones del quehacer cinematográfico en relación con la fotografía y la escritura “celeste” y “terrestre”.

Este articulo tiene como proposito ofrecer una reflexion ensayistica en torno a una posible etica de la promiscuidad en la vivencia del deseo homoerotico en la vida y la obra del poeta y escritor argentino, afincado en Brasil, Nestor Perlongher.

For Albert Pallares, in memoriam This article examines the force and function of medical and literary historical typologies in four Catalan novels in which illness figures prominently: Narcís Oller's La bogeria (1899), Miquel de Palol's Camí de llum. Narracions d'un crepuscle (1909), Blai Bonet's El mar (1958), and Maria-Antònia Oliver's Tallats de lluna (2000). Spanning a century, the four novels have been classified as naturalist, modernista, tremendista, and loosely postmodern, respectively, and focus on three maladies – mental illness, tuberculosis, and AIDS – that are shot through with morally charged questions of responsibility and guilt. For all their explanatory benefits, typological protocols, be they medical or literary historical, precede and exceed any given subject and any given text in ways that tend to elide specificities and to underestimate the entanglement of meaning.