Affective Landscapes

“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