Romance Notes

Abstract:

Rosalía is an expert at borrowing and mixing elements from various time periods and places, resulting in a fusion of aesthetic styles, along with literary and cultural references. While her work is sometimes criticized for cultural appropriation, we might take another look at it to reframe Rosalía's ethos as one that is part and parcel of a generation that embraces multimedia. This note asks, then, what can we, as scholars and professors, adopt from her work for teaching purposes? The creative synergies she exemplifies as well as her own star persona encourage us to think more expansively about how to enlarge our pedagogical repertoire. Rosalía's creative output may be utilized to enhance our pedagogy by making literary texts more accessible to students, to make historical connections throughout different periods, and to teach about relevant topics, which is ultimately exemplified with an illustration of how I drew upon Rosalía's work in a 2021 undergraduate seminar I designed about fashioning women in modern Spain.