"In Beyond the Prado, Selma Reuben Holo argues that Spanish state and regional leaders consciously used the power of museums to foster democratic identity in the country's citizens. In case studies such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Sephardic Museum in Toledo, and IVAM, the modern and contemporary art museum in Valencia, she tells how museums and their exhibitions have touched off vigorous debates around such issues as Basque autonomy, the relationship of art museums and politics, Catalan identity, and the opposing pull of local and global cultures. Holo chronicles how neglect of the Prado and government acquisition of the renowned Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection have affected Spain's public image and describes the controversies surrounding Picasso's Guernica."--BOOK JACKET.

Funeral for Flaca is an exploration of things lost and found-love, identity, family-and the traumas that transcend bodies, borders, cultures, and generations. Emilly Prado retraces her experience coming of age as a prep-turned-chola-turned-punk in this collection that is one-part memoir-in-essays, and one-part playlist, zigzagging across genres and decades, much like the rapidly changing and varied tastes of her youth. Emilly spends the late 90's and early aughts looking for acceptance as a young Chicana growing up in the mostly-white suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Portland, Oregon in 2008. Ni de aquí, ni de allá, she tries to find her place in the in between. Growing up, the boys reject her, her father cheats on her mother, then the boys cheat on her and she cheats on them. At 21-years-old, Emilly checks herself into a psychiatric ward after a mental breakdown. One year later, she becomes a survivor of sexual assault. A few years after that, she survives another attempted assault. She searches for the antidote that will cure her, cycling through love, heartbreak, sex, an eating disorder, alcohol, an ever-evolving style, and, of course, music. She captures the painful reality of what it means to lose and find your identity, many times over again. For anyone who has ever lost their way as a child or as an adult, Funeral for Flaca unravels the complex layers of an unpredictable life, inviting us into an intimate and honest journey profoundly told with humor and heart by Emilly Prado. "I felt these essays deep in my heart. Funeral for Flaca is like a Chicana punk rock ballad in prose. Soulful and brave, these essays of Prado's life made me feel less lonely, less outcasted, and more seen-and isn't that why we come to books in the first place?" -Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina "Once I started reading Funeral for Flaca, I could not stop. The series of essays traverses Prado's life and weaves a narrative that is gripping and beautifully told. Each essay is a finely crafted tribute to periods in Prado's labyrinthine path, intersecting trauma, pathology, loss and, ultimately, perseverance and healing." -Lisa Congdon, artist and author of Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic "This book is brilliant. It tells the unique stories of what it means to grow up Latina in the U.S. and the universal experiences of love, coming of age and finding your own voice and self. Prado weaves personal stories that make you laugh, cry and give you hope for the future." -Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, author and co-editor of Presente! "Emilly Prado's Funeral For Flaca is fierce, funny, intelligent, and vulnerable. This memoir-in-essays speaks with ease and honesty about the ferociously hard, isolating moments of youth, and Prado's matter-of-fact tone reads like a friend's voice talking us through the worst of it. Funeral for Flaca is here to remind us: there is a woman lying dormant inside every girl." -Margaret Malone, author of People Like You

"Author Javier Sierra embarks on a grand tour of the Prado museum in this historical novel that illuminates the fascinating mysteries behind some of the greatest paintings in the world--complete with gorgeous, full-color inserts of artwork by Raphael, Boticelli, and other masters"--

Religion is undergoing a transformation in current Western society. In addition to organized religions, there is a notable movement towards spirituality that is not associated with any institutions but in which experiences and notions of transcendence are still important. Transcendence can be described as God, the absolute, Mystery, the Other, the other as alterity, depending on one’s worldview. In this book, these shifts in the views of transcendence in various areas of culture such as philosophy, theology, art, and politics are explored on the basis of a fourfold heuristic model (proposed by Wessel Stoker). In conversation with this model, various authors, established scholars in their fields, explain the meaning and role, or the critique, of transcendence in the thought of contemporary thinkers, fields of discourse, or cultural domains. Looking Beyond? will stimulate further research on the theme of transcendence in contemporary culture, but can also serve as a textbook for courses in various disciplines, ranging from philosophy to theology, cultural studies, literature, art, and politics.

These personal letters illuminate the author and the history of New Mexico as don Diego experienced it.

Chronicling sixteenth-century Spain to the present day, Beyond Human aims to decentre the human and acknowledge the material historicity of more-than-human nature. The book explores key questions relating to ecological equity, justice, and responsibility within and beyond Spain in the Anthropocene. Examining relations between Iberian cultural practices, historical developments, and ecological processes, Maryanne L. Leone, Shanna Lino, and the contributors to this volume reveal the structures that uphold and dismantle the non-human–human dichotomy and nature-culture divide. The book critiques works from the Golden Age to the twenty-first century in a wide range of genres, including comedia, royal treatises, agricultural reports, paintings, satirical essays, horror fiction and film, young adult and speculative literature, poetry, graphic novels, and television series. The authors contend that Spanish cultural studies must expose the material historicity that entangles today’s ecological crises and ecosocial injustices with previous, future, and contemporary entities. The book argues that this will require the simultaneous decentring of the human and of the Anthropocene as an ecocritical framework. By standardizing ecosocial analysis and widening avenues for ecopedagogical approaches, Beyond Human participates in the ecocentric transformation of Hispanic cultural studies.

This volume is an innovative exploration of cultural heritage through museum studies, metacriticism and literary criticism. This is an innovative exploration of cultural heritage and the literary traditions that shape the contemporary literary scene in Spain. Through a coalescence of museum studies, metacriticism and traditional literary criticism thestudy interweaves discussion of museum spaces with literary analysis, exploring them as agents of memorialisation and a means for preserving and conveying heritage. Following introductory explorations of the development of museums and the literary canon, each chapter begins with a "visit" to a Spanish museum, establishing the framework for the subsequent discussion of critical practices and texts. Case studies include examination of the palimpsest andunconscious influence of canonical cores; the response to masculine traditions of poetry and art; counter-culture of the 1990s; and the ethical concerns of postmemory writing. STUART DAVIS is a Lecturer in Spanish, Girton College, and Newton Trust Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge.

This handbook of values will help museums of every kind and size articulate their value to their community at a time when economic woes cause even supporters to question their importance.

The Explosive National Bestseller A memoir by the highest-ranking covert warrior to lift the veil of secrecy and offer a glimpse into the shadow wars that America has fought since the Vietnam Era. Enrique Prado found himself in his first firefight at age seven. The son of a middle-class Cuban family caught in the midst of the Castro Revolution, his family fled their war-torn home for the hope of a better life in America. Fifty years later, the Cuban refugee retired from the Central Intelligence Agency as the CIA equivalent of a two-star general. Black Ops is the story of Ric’s legendary career that spanned two eras, the Cold War and the Age of Terrorism. Operating in the shadows, Ric and his fellow CIA officers fought a little-seen and virtually unknown war to keep USA safe from those who would do it harm. After duty stations in Central, South America, and the Philippines, Black Ops follows Ric into the highest echelons of the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia. In late 1995, he became Deputy Chief of Station and co-founding member of the Bin Laden Task Force. Three years later, after serving as head of Korean Operations, Ric took on one of the most dangerous missions of his career: to re-establish a once-abandoned CIA station inside a hostile nation long since considered a front line of the fight against Islamic terrorism. He and his team carried out covert operations and developed assets that proved pivotal in the coming War on Terror. A harrowing memoir of life in the shadowy world of assassins, terrorists, spies and revolutionaries, Black Ops is a testament to the courage, creativity and dedication of the Agency’s Special Activities Group and its elite shadow warriors.

Revolution Beyond the Event brings together leading international anthropologists alongside emerging scholars to examine revolutionary legacies from the MENA region, Latin America and the Caribbean. It explores the idea that revolutions have varied afterlives that complicate the assumptions about their duration, pace and progression, and argues that a renewed focus on the temporality of radical politics is essential to our understanding of revolution. Approaching revolution through its relationship to time, the book is a critical intervention into attempts to define revolutions as bounded events that act as sequential transitions from one political system to another. It pursues an ethnographically driven rethinking of the temporal horizons that are at stake in revolutionary processes, arguing that linear views of revolution are inextricably tied to notions of progress and modernity. Through a careful selection of case studies, the book provides a critical perspective on the lived realities of revolutionary afterlives, challenging the liberal humanist assumptions implicit in the ‘modern’ idea of revolution, and reappraising the political agency of people caught up in revolutionary situations across a variety of ethnographic contexts.