Introduction: Critical Approaches to the Nation in Galician Studies

Questions of identity, and especially national identity, have always been the driving force in Galician culture and the related discipline of Galician Studies. As we might expect in a stateless nation such as Galicia, the focus of Galician culture since the nineteenth century and of Galician Studies since the second half of the twentieth has been on national identity and the formation of a strong national culture and institutions. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this seems to be changing: some of the most dynamic cultural discussions in Galicia at the moment are happening on the margins of institutionalized forums and identities, perhaps most markedly in the case of gendered identities and sexualities, but also in the case of Galician identities whose national identification is inflected by other geo- and bio-political markers such as race, ethnicity, class, language and location. There is an increasingly tangible gap between how identities and critical standpoints are valorized within and by Galician institutions on the one hand, and how they are expressed by individuals and popular discourses on the other.

The essays included in this special issue of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies aim to provide a window on the dialogue that is beginning to take place between scholars and artists with an interest in these theoretical questions and how they have materialized into cultural action. The brief given to authors was to address – whether to historicize, contextualize, deliver a critique of, re-imagine or celebrate – the national as a conceptual framework for both generating and studying Galician cultural production. We asked authors to consider how individual writers, artists and thinkers, past and present, have revisited or subverted the national, and how they have explored discourses and identities other than the (purely) national in their works. How, we wondered, have writers and artists addressed the tensions between competing identities, such as allegiance to feminism and to nationalism, to Galicia and to Spain (or the myriad other countries where Galicians are settled), or to self and to community? What alternative conceptual frameworks might already exist, or be created, not only for generating but also for understanding cultural production in Galicia, past and present? The five essays included in the volume, by José F. Colmeiro, María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, Joseba Gabilondo, Helena Miguélez Carballeira and Eugenia Romero, address these questions in various ways and from various perspectives, and they come to various conclusions. Taken individually and as a body, these essays demonstrate some of the exciting and often challenging new currents coursing through Galician Studies today.

No longer unbroken: new readings of the nation

Our approach to studying the nation draws on developments in studies of other peninsular cultures, such as the notion of discontinuity, of a fragmented, disrupted narrative, that lies at the heart of Joan Ramon Resina's study of the so-called decadence of Catalan literature during the sixteenth century. Resina's argument for the need to turn to history, and to understand this period in the context of the deferred development of a Catalan national culture, speaks to a wider understanding of the historical development of the Iberian Peninsula. He begins with a reassessment of the fifteenth-century phenomena of the annexation of the Iberian kingdoms under the reign of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile and of the Reconquista. According to this reassessment, the Reconquista and the takeover of Spain's 'other' kingdoms are both considered historical processes based on the premise of an artificial cultural and territorial continuity. Resina then argues that it was precisely this act of forcible assimilation that brought about severe 'implications for those other cultures that, remaining in their "niche," found the integration or homogenization process decisively obstructive for their continuity' (Resina 1995: 284–85). While this fact, according to Resina, is part and parcel of the 'officious' history of nation-formation, his argument becomes more complex in that it foregrounds the consequences that such processes of 'disunification and breaking of identities' have in the realm of cultural production. The lack of a...