Post/Imperial Encounters: Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Relations (review)

In the introduction to Post/Imperial Encounters: Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Relations, the editors express their desire, in spite of the impact of the media and globalization, to overcome "language barriers" (9) between the world languages of Spanish and English. Beginning with the discovery of the "new world" and moving chronologically from the colonial period to contemporary times, the essays attempt to trace the origin and development of this long-lasting rift that has had a debilitating impact on the growth of English studies in Spain and outlines the difficulties that Spanish studies have faced in British institutions. The editors draw attention to the common competitive "imperial past of these languages in the Americas" (9) and to the subsequent estrangement between Spain and Britain as a result of their power struggles on the "new" continent. The eventual shift of power "to the axis Britain-France-Germany" in the eighteenth century marginalized Spain's presence in European affairs for many decades and resulted in "the relatively scarce crossing of these language boundaries in cultural analysis even today" (9). As such, this collection of essays on literature, history, film, and culture engages with the often constrained trans-cultural dialogue between the two major languages in the Americas where "the new Empire, the United States, has difficulty admitting to its ever-growing Hispanic component, or indeed, to being part of a larger continent: America in its widest sense" (9). In this sense this volume joins scholars like Debra A. Castillo, Earl E. Fitz, Djelal Kadir, Sophia A. McClennen, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, and Mario J. Valdés whose work has been largely devoted to the redefinition of the term "America" in its broadest sense, the comparative literary study of the Americas, and the reconfiguration of "Latin American" and "American Studies."

The first essay, by Francisco J. Borge, examines sixteenth-century English "literature of promotion" that aimed at taming, organizing and introducing New World reality to the Elizabethan imagination and writing history according to European cultural constructions. Borge demonstrates how, in the hands of the English, the genre also became an instrument of self-promotion and justification that presented the English as the only rightful alternative to the hated and cruel Spaniards, who had failed to govern the natives. In light of Hayden White's tropological theory of discourse, Borge depicts the transformation that English consciousness undergoes in relation to the perception of the new reality: as it moves from an inexperienced and providentialist approach to a more detached and self-conscious one that seeks "to justify and confer authority to enterprises" in the new found territories (31). The following two articles by Juan E. Tazón Salces and Jacqueline A. Hurtley link Britain, Ireland, and Spain. Tazón Salces's detective story, "The Menace of the Wanderer: Thomas Stukeley and the Anglo-Spanish Conflict in Ireland," accomplishes this transnational connection through the nomad Thomas Stukeley, an English Catholic exiled in Spain who was suspected to be collaborating with Catholic Spain in order to support the Irish cause against Elizabethan England. Moving into the twentieth century, Hurtley's essay, "Wandering between the Wars: Walter Starkie's Di/visions," likewise achieves its transnational link through yet another wanderer: Professor of Spanish Walter Fitzwilliam Starkie, who was a "Representative of the British Council in Spain" in the 1940s and 50s (53). Hurtley studies Starkie's life and achievements in the context of "the question of Irish identity and British hegemony, together with the growth of Neo-Fascist ideology in Europe" (52). Hurtley's analysis of Starkie portrays the impossibility of dealing with the haziness of a complex plural identity that is Irish, British, Anglo-Celt, professor, and "wandering mistrel" (56).

Crossing the Atlantic to reach the literary worlds of the Americas, the anthology presents three essays that focus on the intersection of gender and colonialism. Ana María Bringas López's essay analyes Micheline Dusseck's novel Eccos del Caribe along with Velma...