'Wall to Wall: Law as Culture in Latin America and Spain' comprises
interventions from a wide array of scholars based in the US, Spain, and
Latin America, exploring the encounter of Hispanophone cultures and the
law. Its contributors delineate a fraught relationship of complicity,
negotiation, and outright confrontation covering five centuries and a
truly global landscape, from Inquisitorial processes at the onset of the
Spanish Empire to last-ditch plans to preserve it in the 19th century
Philippines, to the challenges to contemporary articulations of the
nation-state in Catalonia.
Beyond single, specialized time-period and national cultures, 'Wall to
Wall' embraces and showcases the heterogeneity of the field, covering
both well-known territory (Argentina, Mexico, Spain) and often-neglected
cultures (Venezuela, Philippines, and indigenous communities in the
Yucatan area), as well as problems that cannot be narrowed down to the
nation-state (exile, independence processes, non-state laws, translation
of foreign cultures). Contributors include: Aurélie Vialette, Daniel
Aguirre-Oteiza, Daniela Dorfman, María Fernanda Lander, Gloria Elizabeth
Chacón, Iván Trujillo, Benjamin Easton, Pauline de Tholozany, Lauren
G.J. Reynolds, Ignasi Gozalo-Salellas, and Gabriela Balcarce.
The chapters included foreground the conceptual diversity of the field,
in dialogue with issues in literary and visual culture,
(post-)colonialism, race, nationalism, gender, and class. Not only do
they place vernacular objects in dialogue with current international
concepts and methods, but these essays also aim to advance an autonomous
conceptual and theoretical work-based approach. Its chapters aspire to
enter a global discussion around the state-centered aspiration to shape
culture and the many literary and cultural practices that escape it;
researchers of those issues and Latin American and Iberian studies will
find new venues to rethink their global archive.
