New Spain, New Literatures (review)

How has the post-Francoist political landscape, redefined and restructured as a “plural state,” changed the very notion of “Spanish Literature?” This is the central question behind the collection of essays assembled in New Spain, New Literatures. Since the transition to democracy, the literary field has become diversified, as power shifted from center to periphery, as minority languages and literatures have reemerged, and as waves of immigrants have arrived from Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. To account for this complexity, Martín-Estudillo and Spadaccini have grouped the essays into three broad categories: “New Mappings / New Cartographies,” “Institutions and Literatures,” and “Challenging Identities.” The progression thus moves from surveying a newly diversified literary landscape, to examining the institutional impact of this diversification, and then questioning the identitarian notions that have emerged in a multi-linguistic and multi-cultural field.

An essay by Enric Bou, “On Rivers and Maps,” opens the first section, which surveys literary production in minoritized languages. For Bou, the tropes of rivers and maps provide a “symbolic geography” that serves his non-hierarchical, comparatist project (5). The river expresses both national identity and progress; it establishes a “lived” space that is material and symbolic, infused with associated images, meanings, and emotional bonds (14). The map, whether conceived as smooth or as striated space, represents national consciousness. Bou suggests that we read literary works in both tropic modes: on the one hand, as rivers—as catalysts for building bridges across diverse communities; and on the other hand, as maps—as clearings, as smooth, heterotopic spaces. Together, rivers and maps point towards a capacious mode of reading based on dialogue and diversity.

Bou’s conception of a fluid, heterotopic literary cartography leads the way to a series of essays, each focusing on the literary production of a given autonomous community. Mari Jose Olaziregi offers an overview of Basque literary history as well as a discussion of the Basque literary system, which has emerged since autonomy to promote, subsidize, and legitimize publication in Euskara. Olaziregi cites recent efforts to question the identification of Basque literature with nationalism, and points to a future in which Basques might embrace a hybrid identity and acknowledge that “multiple languages could dwell in us” (34). Similarly, Kirsty Hooper, in an essay on Galician literary production, calls for a new critical vocabulary that might destabilize the boundaries among national languages and literatures. Hooper finds in the poetry of Rosalía de Castro and Ramiro Fonte an attempt to redraw the coordinates of Galician cultural identity. In the essay that follows, Jennifer Duprey examines memory and urban landscapes in Catalan theater since the Transition. She provides close readings of two plays, Josep Maria Benet’s Olors (2000) and Jordi Coca’s Antgíona (2002), both of which reflect on the erasure and recovery of Catalan cultural memory. To conclude this section on literary landscapes, Maarten Steenmeijer considers Spain’s position within international literary space. He observes that Spanish literature, historically marginalized within the European sphere and overshadowed by the Latin-American boom, has in recent years experienced its own boom, as works by contemporary authors are increasingly translated and marketed abroad. Steenmeijer’s essay aptly concludes the first block of essays, which together offer diverse perspectives on the shifting literary cartography of Spain.

The second group of essays, “Institutions and Literature,” opens with a humorous essay by Randolph Pope, who presents a Hispanist’s view of institutional change. Pope starts with a quote from Balzac that likens professors to “insects on a tree,” who eventually “become an integral part of it, taking their worth from their subject” (99). Now that the tree (Spanish literature) has branched out, diversified, and grown to immense proportions, literary scholars can no longer perceive the relations of parts to the whole, and institutional curricula can no longer encompass Spanish literary production. Balzac’s metaphor no longer pertains, Pope concludes, for our object of teaching and study now resembles a “frantic, rhizomatic vine” (112). He admits to feeling, not like an insect on...