The Family album. Histories, subjectivities, and immigration in contemporary Spanish culture.

From the "blurb":
"Considering the family album as a mode of questioning, Yeon-Soo Kim examines the ways in which contemporary Spanish culture explores the medium to represent sociocultural concerns. She analyzes a wide range of films, narratives, paintings, and a photographic exhibition, produced from the end of Franco's dictatorship to the present, to trace the changes in the understanding of the family album.
Kim demonstrates that immediately after the dictatorship, the family album was used predominantly as a critical instrument with which one constructed one's own version of the past. With the arrival of democracy and Spain's accession to the European Community, marginalized identities begin to infiltrate the nation's reflection on history. From the 1990s, the family album has been used often to generate nostalgia and to propagate the family as a savior from modem solitude. More recently, the medium has been employed to generate a compassionate discourse on immigrants.
The book is divided into three sections and organized around the themes of the evaluation of history, identity politics, and immigration. In part I, Kim shows that the dictatorial past is configured as a void in order to invalidate its historical vision, in Juan Goytisolo's Coto vedado, and Eduardo Mendicutti's Una mala noche, la tiene cualquiera. With Carlos Saura's Cria cuervos and Julio Llamazares' Escenas de cine mudo, Kim probes the underlying discontinuity in historical consciousness. The family albums in their texts fail to generate the sense of continuity that the medium demands. In contrast, in El jinete polaco, Antonio Muñoz Molina exploits the materiality of the family album to restore a sense of belonging through collective memory.
In part II, Kim discusses the family album as an excellent negotiator of difference between the dominant culture and marginalized identities. The family album advocates universality through its traditional tropes. In Montxo Armendariz's Secretos del corazón and Marta Balletbo-Coll's Costa Brava (Family Album), family photographs serve as the critical space where contentious issues can be projected while appealing to a broader audience. Audience participation is key to understanding Pedro Lopez Cañas' and Marti Llorens's Déjame que te cuente—a photographic exhibition of collective family albums. Kim interrogates how technological development showcased in this exhibition broadens the family's viewership.
Part III studies the potential of the family album to defy the divisive epistemological framework of "us" and "them," since it is founded on the predisposition to embrace unknown others as part of the family. In "Cailcedrat," Nieves Garcia Benito turns Ildefonso Sena's press photograph into a family photograph to provide an intimate perspective on immigration. In Pilar Rodiles' paintings, the artist proves the importance of affiliation by working with photographs of immigrants. Kim warns, by analyzing Rick Davila's portraits of immigrants and Icíar Bollain's Flores de otro mundo, that the visual consolidation of multiculturalism is dangerous because it presents the notion as an achieved state rather than a process that needs to be discussed. Such is the power and diversity of applications of the contemporary Spanish family album."