Home Away from Home
Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture
N. Michelle Murray
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Romance Studies
Published: 12/2018
Pages: 232
Subject: Literary Criticism
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78147E+12
eBook ISBN: 9781469647470
DESCRIPTION
Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and
Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture examines
ideological, emotional, economic, and cultural phenomena brought
about by migration through readings of works of literature and film
featuring domestic workers. In the past thirty years, Spain has
experienced a massive increase in immigration. Since the 1990s,
immigrants have been increasingly female, as bilateral trade
agreements, migration quotas, and immigration policies between
Spain and its former colonies (including the Dominican Republic,
Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, and the Philippines) have created jobs
for foreign women in the domestic service sector. These migrations
reveal that colonial histories continue to be structuring elements
of Spanish national culture, even in a democratic era in which its
former colonies are now independent. Migration has also transformed
the demographic composition of Spain and has created complex new
social relations around the axes of gender, race, and nationality.
Representations of migrant domestic workers provide critical
responses to immigration and its feminization, alongside profound
engagements with how the Spanish nation has changed since the end
of the Franco era in 1975. Throughout Home Away from Home,
readings of works of literature and film show that texts concerning
the transnational nature of domestic work uniquely provide a
nuanced account of the cultural shifts occurring in late twentieth-
through twenty-first-century Spain.
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