Movement, Security and Media. ZEI Discussion Paper C233 2016

From the Introduction. Migration and the movement of people have characterized humankind for centuries, and will continue to be so as long as there is life in our planet. The current shape and structure of our societies would not be possible without the desire and the need to go further to explore what is beyond the horizon. The decision of leaving behind the motherland can be motivated by several reasons which have been changing and evolving through history. From tribes and groups to individual journeys, migration is essentially the movement towards a better life, “an exercise in hope”.

The Line and the Limit of Britishness: The Construction of Gibraltarian Identity in M. G. Sanchez’s Writing

From Anthony Burgess’s musings during the Second World War to recent scholarly assessments, Gibraltar has been considered a no man’s literary land. However, the Rock has produced a steady body of literature written in English throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the present. Apparently situated in the midst of two identitary deficits, Gibraltarian literature occupies a narrative space that is neither British nor Spanish but something else. M. G. Sanchez’s novels and memoir situate themselves in this liminal space of multiple cultural traditions and linguistic contami-nation. The writer anatomizes this space crossed and partitioned by multiple and fluid borders and boundaries. What appears as deficient or lacking from the British and the Spanish points of view, the curse of the periphery, the curse of inhabiting a no man’s land, is repossessed in Sanchez’s writing in order to flesh out a border culture with very specific linguistic and cultural traits

Hosting the Crosser: Janette Turner Hospital’s Borderline

[ES]The article analyses Turner Hospital's novel from the perspective of border theory. It argues that Canada is gradually taking a central stage in border literature, as the country situates itself at the crossroads of myriads of borders that are by definition mobile, fungible (Brady, “Fungibility”), unpredictable (Braidotti), and divisible (Derrida, Aporias). This repositioning of the border from marginal to central, to go back to Saldívar’s words, has contributed to the “worlding” of Canadian literature, and has instilled a new transnational literacy in Canadian criticism. The shift, I argue, is manifest in Hospital’s Borderline.Research funds for this article were provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through the research project "Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach" (ref. FFI 2015-64137P), directed by Prof. Jesús Benito Sánchez, by the Regional Government of Castilla y León through the research Project "The Frontiers of Hospitality in Spanish and American Cultural Studies" (ref. SA342U14), and by the European Project "Hospitality and European Film 2017-1-ES01-KA203-038181

Assessment of model drifts in seasonal forecasting: sensitivity to ensemble size and implications for bias correction

Despite its systematic presence in state‐of‐the‐art seasonal forecasts, the model drift (leadtime‐dependent bias) has been seldom studied to date. To fill this gap, this work analyzes its spatiotemporal distribution, and its sensitivity to the ensemble size in temperature and precipitation forecasts. Our results indicate that model continues to drift well beyond the first month after initialization, leading to significant, highly space‐ and time‐varying drifts over vast regions of the world. Nevertheless, small ensembles (less than 10 members) are enough to robustly estimate the mean model drift and its year‐to‐year fluctuations in skillful regions. Differently, in regions of low model skill, larger ensembles are required to appropriately characterize this interannual variability, which is often larger than the drift itself. This points out a necessity to develop new strategies that allow for efficiently dealing with model drift, especially when bias correcting seasonal forecasts—most of the techniques used to this aim rely on the assumption of stationary model errors. We demonstrate here that the use of moving windows can help to remove not only the mean forecast bias but also the unwanted effects coming out from the drift, which can lead to important intraseasonal biases if it is not properly taken into account. The results from this work can help to identify the nature and causes of some of the systematic errors in current coupled models and can have large implications for a wide community of users who need long, continuous unbiased seasonal forecasts to run their impact models.This study was supported by the EU projects EUPORIAS (EUropean Provision Of Regional Impact Assessment on a Seasonal‐to‐decadal timescales) and SPECS (Seasonal‐to‐decadal climate Prediction for the improvement of the European Climate Services), funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Research Programme through Grant Agreements 308291 and 308378, respectively

Junot Díaz’s “Otravida, Otravez” and Hospitalia: The Workings of Hostile Hospitality

[EN]The language of hospitality and its intimate opposite, hostility, reverberates insistently in the current political climate, as countries worry about fortifying their borders against waves of migration. This framework has paved the way for the language of hospitality to return as an apt lens for anatomizing current encounters with the Other. This article argues that the hospitality at the heart of Junot Díaz’s story “Otravida, Otravez” (2012) is one that has turned against itself in a manner reminiscent of Derrida’s concept of “hostipitality.” I analyze the two locations of this hostile hospitality in the story, the hospital and the house, arguing that the hospital is its true locus and represents the guarded health of the American Dream.Research funds for this article were provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through the research project “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach” (ref. FFI 2012–31250), directed by Prof. Jesús Benito Sánchez

Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film.Ana Ma Manzanas and Jesús Benito, Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture: Static Heroes, Social Movements and Empowerment (Reseña)

As the titles of the two books suggest, Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intrercultural American Literature and Film and Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture: Static Heroes, Social Movements and Empowerment analyze the trajectories of the spatial turn taking place from mid-20th century onwards which has resulted in the appearance of new ways of assessing spatiality as well as new definitions of spatial concepts. Even though the two volumes are not a continuation per se, both books are co-authored by Ana Ma Manzanas and Jesús Benito and the more recent Occupying Space complements and completes the issues discussed in Cities, Borders, and Spaces, which suggests continuity between the publications and encourages to read them as complementary. In Cities, Borders, and Spaces Manzanas and Benito argue that the “alleged new spatial turn of American exceptionalism has always been there” (2) but due to the redefinitions of spatial concepts allowed by post- prefixed theories, new spatial definitions do away with dichotomous oppositions and thus lend themselves to “plurality and openness” (6) as well as reflect the shift from stasis to mobility, activity, and heterogeneity

Redrawing the Boundary: From Carlos Fuentes’s La frontera de cristal (1995) to Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (2009)*

This article traces the workings of the border in Carlos Fuentes’ La frontera de cristal, Alejandro Morales’ The Rag Doll Plagues, Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer, and Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2140. All the narratives can be considered borderland texts that illustrate the dialogue between literature and issues such as globalization, technology and colonial relations of power. While the border is still a place of detention and interdiction in Fuentes’ novel, it mutates into virtual crossings in The Rag Doll Plagues and Sleep Dealer, to return to barbed wire in Sánchez and Pita’s novella. From the logic of the border as a mechanism that may open or close, the article moves on to address the liminal situation of those who, although situated within the new versions of the nation-state, are considered permanent outsiders. This redrawing of boundaries allows us to revisit traditional categories of distinction such as the inside and the outside, and is evidence of the way colonial models of subjugation boomerang to the present

Biometeorología en el Grupo de Meteorología de Santander

Trabajo presentado al Primer Workshop en Biometeorología Ciudad de Santander celebrado en octubre de 2011.Peer reviewe