Spanish Lullaby…

Two brand new books on Madonna are coming out next spring.

The first one will be available in April 2004 for limited time and it’s called “Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations“.

The second one has a similar title; “Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Subcultural Transformations, 1983-2003” and will be published by Ashgate Popular & Folk Music S. on 5th April 2004.

Click on full article to read a part of a long chapter on Madonna’s take on Hispanic culture that will be included in the book.

“Madonna´s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations 1983-2003” is edited by Santiago Fouz Hernández and Freya Jarman-Ivens, forthcoming in Ashgate (2004).

Thanks to our staff member Medardo

Much has been written about Madonna’s subversion, deconstruction and inversion of gender. With a few exceptions (hooks, 1992 and 1993; Nakayama and Peñaloza, 1993; Scott, 1993), critics have paid far less attention to her deconstruction of ethnic identities and very little has been written about her take on the Hispanic, which is perhaps the most influential and re-visited “ethnic” style in her work.

Almost every year since 1984 and up to 2003, Madonna has presented either a song, video, photo shoot or live performance displaying a Hispanic influence and she has recorded and performed in Spanish some of her hit singles. It has become common place both in academic and journalistic criticism on Madonna to describe her subcultural practices as “an appropriation of style rather than a substantive politics” (Robertson, 1996).

Yet most of this criticism, although apparently aware of the obvious implications of commerciality and longevity, seems to bypass the fact that Madonna herself, often hailed as the All-American girl, is in fact half Italian, half French-Canadian and the mother of a half-Hispanic girl. This paper analyses two of Madonna’s Hispanic-themed videos (“Borderline” 1984 and “La Isla Bonita” 1986), the context of the film Evita (Parker, 1996) and some of Madonna’s live performances in an attempt to explore her take on the Hispanic and to argue that, despite the plethora of stereotypical images used in these videos, Madonna’s appropriations of Hispanic cultures and her own ethnic malleability could be read as a subversive reminder of the multi-racial and multi-cultural make up of the USA.

Santiago Fouz-Hernández

“Spanish Lullaby: Madonna’s Exploration of Hispanic Cultures“.

University of Northumbria at Newcastle. 24 September 2003