Books about Iberian from Amazon.com

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This book takes a bold new look at both Spain's and Portugal's New World empires in a trans-Atlantic context. It argues that modern notions of sovereignty in the Atlantic world have been unstable, contested, and equivocal from the start. It shows how much contemporary notions of sovereignty emerged in the Americas as a response to European imperial crises in the age of revolutions. Jeremy Adelman reveals how many modern-day uncertainties about property, citizenship, and human rights were forged in an epic contest over the very nature of state power in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic offers a new understanding of Latin American and Atlantic history, one that blurs traditional distinctions between the "imperial" and the "colonial." It shows how the Spanish and Portuguese empires responded to the pressures of rival states and merchant capitalism in the eighteenth century. As empires adapted, the ties between colonies and mother countries transformed, recreating trans-Atlantic bonds of loyalty and interests. In the end, colonies repudiated their Iberian loyalties not so much because they sought independent nationhood. Rather, as European conflicts and revolutions swept across the Atlantic, empires were no longer viable models of sovereignty--and there was less to be loyal to. The Old Regimes collapsed before subjects began to imagine new ones in their place. The emergence of Latin American nations--indeed many of our contemporary notions of sovereignty--was the effect, and not the cause, of the breakdown of European empires.

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Price: $31.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Dialogue is action for me. I've often said it and it seems like a joke but it's not: in Europe we make films about people because it's cheaper to put two people in a living room talking than to make a film full of special effects.--Pedro Almodovar

The international success of his latest feature, All About my Mother, has finally granted Pedro Almodovar the recognition he deserves, as the most artistically ambitious and commercially consistent film-maker in Europe. Frequently comic, always visually glorious, his films range from the screwball comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown to the classically austere Live Flesh. And, while questions of gender, nationality and sexuality are always Almodovar's concern, new subjects have been addressed in his more recent work: the corrosive effects of a deregulated media, the transition from dictatorship and, in All About my Mother, an uncompromising exploration of mourning. This new edition includes four additional chapters and new illustrations. The only study of its kind in English, it argues that beneath Almodovar's genius for comedy and visual pleasure lies a film-maker who deserves to be taken very seriously..
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Price: $28.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A thorough examination of the history of the Templars in Spain and Portugal

• Explores the mysteries surrounding the location of Templar enclaves

• Examines the Templar connections to the Cathars and to the troubadour culture

• Looks at the Order’s influence in the kingdoms of Aragon and Catalonia and the Spanish monarchy itself

The rise and fall of the Templar Order constitutes a fundamental and decisive episode in medieval history, and the destruction of the Order constitutes a pivotal point that fundamentally altered the direction of society. While much is known about the history of the Templar Order in France, home of its chief commandery in Paris, and in the Latin States of the Middle East, their contribution to events on the Iberian peninsula has until now remained obscure and unexplored.

Renowned Templar scholar Juan García Atienza reveals here the important role the Templars played in the Reconquista that saw the Moors driven out of Spain and demonstrates the great influence they exerted in the kingdoms of Castille and Navarre and the territories of Catalonia and Aragon. He examines the mysterious connections between the Templars and the Cathars and troubadours as well as the mystery surrounding the location of all the Templar enclaves in the Iberian peninsula. He also unveils the important role the Templars had as teachers of the Spanish king James I, known as the Conqueror, whose attempt to establish a universal theocratic empire may have been a reflection of Templar ambitions, and explores the Order’s suppression in Spain and how it survived in Portugal by simply changing its name..
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Explore the foods of the Iberian table, from the paellas of Valencia to the salt cod fritters of Oporto to the tapers of Seville This book is part recipe collection, part history, and part travelogue There are more than 130 authentic recipes, all beautifully photographed..
Price: $19.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This volume surveys Iberian international trade from the tenth to the fifteenth century, with particular emphasis on commerce in the Muslim period and on changes brought by Christian conquest of much of Muslim Spain in the thirteenth century. From the tenth to the thirteenth century, markets in the Iberian peninsula were closely linked to markets elsewhere in the Islamic world, and a strong east-west Mediterranean trading network linked Cairo with Cordoba. Following routes along the North African coast, Muslim and Jewish merchants carried eastern goods to Muslim Spain, returning eastwards with Andalusi exports. Situated at the edge of the Islamic west, Andalusi markets were also emporia for the transfer of commodities between the Islamic world and Christian Europe. After the thirteenth century the Iberian peninsula became part of the European economic sphere, its commercial realignment aided by the opening of the Straits of Gibraltar to Christian trade, and by the contemporary demise of the Muslim trading network in the Mediterranean..
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Still the finest comprehensive analysis of the subject to have appeared in English, Magical Reels charts the development of Latin American film industries in a world increasingly dominated by the advanced technology and massive distribution budgets of the North American mainstream. John King sets up a historical framework to unfold the overlapping histories of cinema in the continent: the itinerant film-makers of the silent era who projected their films in cafes and village halls, the inventive use of vernacular music and local comedy in the early sound pictures, the 'golden age' of 1940s Mexican cinema, and the 'new cinema'--oppositional cinema made 'with an idea in the head and a camera in the hand'--of the late 1950s and beyond. A new chapter written for this edition examines Latin American cinema in the previous decade..
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The sense of the radical newness of Spanish America found in literary works from the chronicles of the conquest to the work of the criollistas has more recently given way to a stronger recognition of the transatlantic roots of much Spanish-American literature. This indebtedness does not imply subservience; rather, the New World's cultural and literary autonomy lies in the distinctive ways in which it assimilated its cultural inheritance. Professor Pérez Firmat explores this process of assimilation or transculturation in the case of Cuba, and proposes a new understanding of the issue of Cuban national identity through revisionary readings of both literary and non-literary works by Juan Marinello, Fernando Ortiz, Nicolds Guillén, Alejo Carpentier and others, dating from the early decades of the twentieth century, a time of intense self-reflection in the nation's history. Using a critical vocabulary derived from these works, he argues that Cuban identity is translational rather than foundational and that cubanía emerges from a nuanced, self-conscious recasting of foreign models..
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