Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain
Thursday, February 16, 2017
12 – 2 PM
Pardee School of Global Studies
152 Bay State Road
RSVP by email to edamrien@bu.edu
Join us for a lunch discussion with Raquel Vega-Durán, Associate Professor of Spanish at Claremont McKenna College. Vega-Durán will be discussing the recently published Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain.
Raquel Vega-Durán offers a new approach to the cultural history of contemporary Spain, examining the ways in which Spain’s own self- conceptions are changing and multiplying in response to migrants from Latin America and Africa. She proposes that Spain is evolving into a new space of the imagination, one that can no longer be defined without the migrant—a space in which there is no unified identity, but rather a new self-understanding is being born. She introduces the reader to a wide range of recent films, journals, novels, photography, paintings, and music to reconsider the complexity of contemporary Spanish identity through its varied encounters with migrants. Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders both places Spain in a larger European context and draws attention to some of the features that, from a comparative perspective, make the Spanish case interesting and often unique.
This event is co-organized by the Center for the Study of Europe and the Inititiave on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking.
