The Pedagogy and Politics of 21st-Century Luso-Hispanic Urban Cultural Studies

Since the 1980s Anglo-American scholars in the field of Luso-Hispanic Studies have had plenty of time to think through the so-called “spatial turn” that built disciplinary bridges between the Humanities and the Social Sciences. It took approximately 20 years for key texts written in French (those of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, for example) to be translated into English and work their way into the field. One example of such a text is “Of Other Spaces,” (a 1967 lecture of Foucault’s that was not published in English until 1984) on the everyday experience of space, where he explains that [t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side- by-side, of the dispersed. (22) Foucault’s ideas about space had such an impact on academics in many disciplines because he explained that space was neither a mere empty container nor a backdrop