Performing convivencia: female ritual and Jewish belonging in Violeta Salama's Alegría (2021).

Violeta Salama's debut film Alegría (2021) explores Jewish life in Melilla as a unique site of convivencia in contemporary Spain. This essay interprets the characters' enactments of female-centered rituals as expressions of a Jewish feminist praxis that has developed since the 1970s. The rituals ana...

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Publicado en:Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 26; no. 4; pp. 413 - 430
Autor principal: Cohn, Adam
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Taylor & Francis Ltd Dec2025
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: Dec2025
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      pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd
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        10.1080/14636204.2025.2582910
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        atl: Performing convivencia: female ritual and Jewish belonging in Violeta Salama's Alegría (2021).
      aug:
        au: Cohn, Adam
        affil: Department of Romance Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
      su:
        Jews
        Emigration & immigration
        Rites & ceremonies
        Jewish way of life
        Jewish feminism
      sug:
        subj:
          Jews
          Emigration & immigration
          Rites & ceremonies
          Jewish way of life
          Jewish feminism
      keyword:
        Convivencia
        migration
        ritual
        Sephardi Jews
        Convivencia
        migration
        ritual
        Sephardi Jews
      ab: Violeta Salama's debut film Alegría (2021) explores Jewish life in Melilla as a unique site of convivencia in contemporary Spain. This essay interprets the characters' enactments of female-centered rituals as expressions of a Jewish feminist praxis that has developed since the 1970s. The rituals analyzed center reconciliation and interreligious continuities as correctives to the Spanish State's restrictive policies towards Moroccan migration. In the film, Melilla's strategic position as a Spanish autonomous city on the North African coast acutely punctuates this problem and also offers solutions through its ethnoreligious diversity. In presenting convivencia to a contemporary audience, Alegría resignifies a variety of colonial and neoliberal cultural imaginaries of Sephardi Jews and al-Andalus. Foregrounding music as a means of affirming Jewish and, to a lesser degree, Muslim sonic indigeneity, the ritual improvisations analyzed herein repurpose these ideas to affirm Jewish belonging in a national landscape that otherwise effaces the experiences of religious minorities. Ultimately, a sororal convivencia emerges as central to articulating Sephardi and Spanish Jewish identities.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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