We Were All on Those Trains: Poetry and the March 2004 Madrid Train Bombing

FAIN: FA-232527-16

Jill Robbins
University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX 78712-0100)

Completion of a book-length study of the poetry written in response to the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid, Spain.

We Were All on Those Trains: The Poetry of 11-M examines the poetic texts that responded to the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid, Spain, that were left at the spontaneous shrines erected at the bombing sites, published in books, newspapers and anthologies, incorporated into monuments, stored in the Archive of Mourning and/or posted on blogs and other electronic forums. There are literally thousands of these poetic texts, including original poems and books written by well-known and anonymous Iberian and Latin American poets; a novel by a US poet; poems by mourners; songs and prayers; and texts by children. These texts reveal competing notions about the nature and functions of poetry in Spain today, and they serve as a prism to make visible conflicting narratives about identities, technology, genres, and modernity dating back to the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, which lay just below the city’s gleaming surface in 2004.
 

Associated Products

Poetry and Crisis: Cultural Politics and Citizenship in the Wake of the Madrid Bombings (Book)
Title: Poetry and Crisis: Cultural Politics and Citizenship in the Wake of the Madrid Bombings
Author: Jill Robbins
Abstract: On Thursday, March 11, 2004, Islamist terrorists carried out a massive bombing on Madrid's working-class commuter trains that left 191 people dead and more than 1500 others wounded. This event occurred days before national elections in Spain, and it exposed the contradictory cultural forces that underlay notions of national identity, violence, economic transformation, the role of the media, and the social contract in Spain. As individuals affected by the attacks, and Spanish society as a whole, struggled to make sense of the events and voice their emotions, poetry placed numerous roles in grassroots memorials, and interactive electronic sites. Some were later inscribed in memory sites in the city and on the web, or collected, along with others composed by major Spanish poets, into anthologies, ambiguously positioned as memorials, social action, archives and monuments. This book makes an argument about the unique uses of poetry to reflect a broader and extremely palpable social impulse to make sense of the violence, to grieve, to memorialize the victims, to expose social rifts, to evoke the sacred, and to encourage social change. It engages with a broad concept of 'poetic or lyric response,' one that includes, not only the texts written and published by accomplished and recognized poets, but also the following: 1) the performance and performativity of lyric texts in grassroots memorials, monuments, and archives; 2) popular song; 3) poems written by non-poets; and 4) the institutions that contribute to the constitution and transmission of cultural memory in the poetic field. In this sense, this book is also an investigation into the functions of lyric in construing, contesting, and unravelling the rhetoric of public memory sites and their narratives about the meaning of culture and violent events in the context of contested nationalisms and identities.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/poetry-and-crisis-cultural-politics-and-citizenship-in-the-wake-of-the-madrid-bombings/oclc/1196143044&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: The book has not yet been published.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781487504731
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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