Bringing together contributions from top specialists in Hispanic studies - both Peninsular and Latin American - this volume explores a variety of critical issues related to the historical, political, and ideological configuration of the field. Dealing with Hispanism in both Latin America and the United States, the book's multidisciplinary essays range from historical studies of the hegemonic status of Castillian language in Spain and America to the analysis of otherness and the uses of memory and oblivion in various nationalist discourses on both sides of the Atlantic.
In this book, Sephardism is defined not as an expression of Sephardic identity but as a politicized literary metaphor. Since the nineteenth century, this metaphor has occurred with extraordinary frequency in works by authors from a variety of ethnicities, religions, and nationalities in Europe, the Americas, North Africa, Israel, and even India. Sephardism asks why Gentile and Jewish writers and cultural figures have chosen to draw upon the medieval Sephardic experience to express their concerns about dissidents and minorities in modern nations? To what extent does their use of Sephardism overlap with other politicized discourses such as orientalism, hispanism, and medievalism, which also emerged from a clash between authoritarian, progressive, and romantic ideologies? This book brings a new approach to Sephardic Studies by situating it at a crossroads between Jewish Studies and Hispanic Studies in ways that enhance our appreciation of how historical fiction and political history have shaped, and were shaped by, historical attitudes toward Jews and their representation.
How and why did a country seen as remote, backwards, and barely European become a pivotal site for reinventing the continent after the Great War? Modernism and the New Spain argues that the "Spanish problem"-the nation's historically troubled relationship with Europe-provided an animating impulse for interwar literary modernism and for new conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Drawing on works in a variety of genres, Gayle Rogers reconstructs an archive of cross-cultural exchanges to reveal the mutual constitution of two modernist movements-one in Britain, the other in Spain, and stretching at key moments in between to Ireland and the Americas. Several sites of transnational collaboration form the core of Rogers's innovative literary history. The relationship between T. S. Eliot's Criterion and José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente shows how the two journals joined to promote a cosmopolitan agenda. A similar case of kindred spirits appears with the 1922 publication of Joyce's Ulysses. The novel's forward-thinking sentiments on race and nation resonated powerfully within Spain, where a generation of writers searched for non-statist forms through which they might express a new European Hispanicity. These cultural ties between the Anglo-Irish and Spanish-speaking worlds increased with the outbreak of civil war in 1936. Rogers explores the connections between fighting Spanish fascism and dismantling the English patriarchal system in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, along with the international, anti-fascist poetic community formed by Stephen Spender, Manuel Altolaguirre, and others as they sought to establish Federico García Lorca as an apolitical Spanish-European poet. Mining a rich array of sources that includes novels, periodicals, biographies, translations, and poetry in English and in Spanish, Modernism and the New Spain adds a vital new international perspective to modernist studies, revealing how writers created alliances that unified local and international reforms to reinvent Europe not in the London-Paris-Berlin nexus, but in Madrid.
This book emerges from, and performs, an ongoing debate about transatlantic approaches in the fields of Iberian, Latin American, African, and Luso-Brazilian studies. In thirty-five short essays, leading scholars reframe the intertwined cultural histories of the transnational spaces encompassed by the former Spanish and Portuguese empires.
New areas of intellectual endeavours including postcolonial, transatlantic, global, and cultural studies have facilitated conversations that cut across traditional academic boundaries. Indeed, aside from precipitating more stimulating intellectual dialogues, the advent of multi-disciplinarity has also enabled literary and cultural theorists, critics, students, and teachers to connect and to integrate diverse academic disciplines and schools of thought in the pursuit of a common task. Of the many areas that have benefited from this trend, it is perhaps in the realm of Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Brazilian, and Latin American studies that one notices a vibrant conversation that deals with the deep historical, social, economic, and political bonds that have connected and still connect Africa to the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian worlds. As these bonds acquire profound meanings in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, scholars from diverse academic backgrounds find new ways to explore these connections. It is in the spirit of this endeavour that the creative artists, scholars of cultural and literary theory and critics whose works are presented in this anthology, attempt to examine wide-ranging themes from colonization, slavery, imperialism, religion, music, and literature. Most of the essays in this collection address long-standing issues related to identity construction, linguistic legacies, religious and cultural beliefs and practices. Others confront questions of migration and immigration, configurations of female agency, and Hispanic pedagogy in Africa and elsewhere. What makes this volume unique and interesting is not only the idea of exploring, examining, and thinking the old in new ways and the new in old ways but also, advancing the conversation of the relationship between Africa and the Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Brazilian, and Latin American worlds through different intellectual and artistic prisms.
This book—aimed at both the general reader and the specialist—offers a transatlantic, transnational, and multidisciplinary cartography of the rapidly expanding intellectual field of Galician Studies. In the twenty-one essays that comprise the volume, leading scholars based in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand engage with this field from the perspectives of queer theory, Atlantic and diasporic thought, political ecology, hydropoetics, theories of space, trauma and memory studies, exile, national/postnational approaches, linguistic ideologies, ethnographic poetry and photography, Galician language in the US academic curriculum, the politics of children’s books, film and visual studies, the interrelation of painting and literature, and material culture. Structured around five organizational categories (Frames, Routes, Readings, Teachings, and Visualities), and adopting a pluricentric view of Galicia as an analytical subject of study, the book brings cutting-edge debates in Galician Studies to a broad international readership.
Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity is a collection of essays in modern Spanish literary and cultural studies by sixteen specialists from Spain, the United States, and Great Britain. The essays have a common point of origin: a major conference, entitled Espana fuera de Espana: Los espacios de la historia literaria, held in the spring of 2001 at Harvard University. The essays also have a common focus: the fate of literary history in the wake of theory and its attendant programs of inquiry, most notably cultural studies, post colonial studies, new historicism, women's studies, and transatlantic studies. Their points of arrival, however, vary significantly. What constitutes Spain and what counts as Spanish are primary concerns, subtending related questions of history, literature, nationality, and cultural production. Brad Epps is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of the Committee on Degrees in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. Luis Fernandez Cifuentes is Robert S. and Ilse Friend Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
Robert Patrick Newcomb's Iberianism and Crisis examines how prominent peninsular essay writers and public intellectuals who were active around the turn of the twentieth century looked to Iberianism to address a succession of political, economic, and social crises that shook the Spanish and Portuguese states to their foundations.
Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque from its origins in tales of lowborn adventurers to its importance for the modern novel, along with consideration of the debates that the picaresque has inspired.