Digitizing Divas: Pedagogical Approaches to Contemporary Spanish Visual Culture

Abstract:

The ubiquity of multimodal advertisements, digital platforms, and social media has increasingly exposed twenty-first-century students to different elements of visual culture, thus facilitating their familiarity with interpretations of visual signs and iconography. It is my contention that instructors of Spanish can utilize elements of Spanish visual culture in their classroom to provide increased opportunities for deep cultural analysis and the development of students' overall communicative competence. Engaging with authentic materials relating to the popular Spanish singer Rosalía Vila Tobella is one way to achieve such competencies. The artist's global popularity and visual embodiment of Spanish culture in her music videos and social media posts offers students useful opportunities to reflect on issues of visuality relating to gender, race, and Spain's unique geographic and symbolic position as a southern European nation with linkages to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Drawing on the work of visual theorists such as Roland Barthes and Stuart Hall, I suggest students can reflect on Rosalía's visual oeuvre both through the identity-based tensions and within a larger genealogy of Spanish iconography. By creating their own multimodal publications about the artist through digital platforms such as Flipsnack, Google Sites, or Canva, students can study the politics of representation within the context of Spanish culture in a manner that facilitates visual learning beyond the confines of the traditional written assignment. Analyzing the visuality of Rosalía and her representation of Spanish culture teaches students practical linguistic skills related to their established online presence as "digital natives."