Gazing at Ground Zero: Tourism, Voyeurism and Spectacle

This essay uses the temporary viewing platform at the site of the former World Trade Center to explore our fascination with violence, conflict and disaster. It illustrates how discourses of voyeurism and authenticity promote a desire for sites of horror, and examines how that desire both disrupts and reinforces our prevailing interpretations of global politics. The viewing platform at Ground Zero was initially constructed to manage the thousands of people who traveled to New York in response to the shocking media images of 11 September. However, their desire to escape mediation and touch "the real" had the opposite effect - it transformed Ground Zero into a tourist attraction. Using Ground Zero as a starting point, this essay theorizes discourses of voyeurism and authenticity through the work of Baudrillard, Debord and Bauman in an effort to position the tourist as a significant political subject.

Un episodio en la recepción cultural dieciochesca de lo exótico: la llegada del elefante a Madrid en 1773

At the end of 1773 an Indian elephant, brought for the royal ménagerie at Aranjuez, was shown in the streets of Madrid. The resulting public fascination provoked by the intrusion of this exotic animal can be traced through poems (Tomás de Iriarte), short plays (Ramón de la Cruz), articles in the periodical press, popular and scientific prints representing the animal, and even in the costumbrista pastels of Lorenzo Tiepolo. The mythic and premodern knowledge of animal nature collides in a debate with the new scientific observation. In the final decades of the 18th century, the image of the captive elephant acquired in Europe a new symbolic meaning linked with the political fight against slavery. All these very different elements converge in Goya's Disparate de bestia.