No musician did more to shape Iberian jazz than pianist Vicenç Montoliu i Massana (1933–1997), who was known simply as “Tete.” Reflecting his fascination with the modernist aesthetics of mid-century jazz, Tete Montoliu was known for his quick fingering, his carefully crafted mix of lyricism and dissonance, his penchant for discordant crashes, and his development of highly original compositions. He boasted some 100 recordings spanning Denmark, Germany, Holland, Spain, and the United States, and performed with the most notable jazz luminaries, including Lionel Hampton, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Dexter Gordon, and Archie Shepp. Acknowledging and drawing musical inspiration from the Black American jazz form, Tete fashioned an adjacent critical space shaped by his experiences as a Catalan and a person with congenital visual impairment living under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Beyond Sketches of Spain: Tete Montoliu and the Construction of Iberian Jazz explores the artist’s life, musical production, and international reception within a cultural studies framework. This book moves beyond mere sketches of Spanish nationhood to challenge conventional scholarly narratives and recover links between the United States, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, and Europe in the investigation of an impressive and often overlooked transnational modern jazz legacy. Eschewing Theodore Adorno’s denigration of Black American jazz, a more compelling model is found in Fumi Okiji’s notion of gathering in difference. In this work, Benjamin Fraser deftly mixes musical biography with urban history, spatial theory, and disability studies, fashioning a highly readable text for readers from all disciplines.

Although Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) publicly and consistently eschewed the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), his writings in effect made great use of the latter's key ideas and method. Like Bergson's philosophy, Lefebvre's urban criticism denounced the spatialization of time and gave priority to lived experience over the abstractions employed by static intellectual or traditionally analytical models of experience. Throughout The Urban Revolution, The Production of Space, The Critique of Everyday Life, Volumes 1–3, and the writings posthumously collected in Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre's urban philosophical project appropriated the ideas Bergson advanced in his three major works, Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution, through their application to the problems of social life—a de facto collaboration that Bergson never lived to appreciate and that Lefebvre would never recognize. This connection is important not only as a corrective to the scant attention paid to Lefebvre's work by philosophers, but also because it reinforces both thinkers' own emphases on interdisciplinarity and on reconciling theories of knowledge with theories of life. The combined work of the two philosophers suggests a philosophical basis for the current emphasis of theory in both cultural studies and human geography in that it stresses the importance of acknowledging movement, process, and mobilities in approaches to the problems of urban life. The composite of Bergson–Lefebvre provides the basis for articulating a philosophy of the urban.

Drawing on the Greek concept of mētis provides a way of highlighting the unique spatial epistemology of the video game and establishing connections between game theorists and scholars working on issues of space/place in other fields. Addressing ‘the antagonist[ic] relationship’ between the humanities and the social sciences with regard to video game studies (Wolf and Perron 2009: 14; citing a personal e-mail from critic Jesper Juul), this article emphasizes the priority of a mobile knowledge of space as enacted in video gameplay, and subsequently establishes important connections with key ideas on knowledge and space from Lefebvrian philosophy and from the interdisciplinary field of spatial theory.

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The scholarly focus on the production of space necessitates a thorough reassessment of the static categories employed in the analysis of spatial processes. Emphasizing space as a process, this essay calls attention to the recent implication of Madrid's Retiro Park in larger processes of capital accumulation. At the same time, it highlights the insufficiency of the tempting yet problematic distinction between public and private space that obtains in easy solutions to the struggles over city-space. As many critics have pointed out, there is design flaw in the idea of public space-it can never explain how a given space, such as a park, comes to be free of the 'private' (personal and structural) interests operating throughout its societal context. The story of the Retiro ultimately foregrounds the pivotal role of city-space in the drive for capitalist intercity-competition and suggests that the latter process is insufficiently confronted by idealized notions of the role truly 'public' spaces might play in radical democracy and citizenship.