Writing Galicia in/to the World: New Cartographies, New Poetics (review)

Kirsty Hooper’s scholarly work in the area of modern Galician cultural studies is already well known to anybody familiar with this growing research field. Her accomplishments in the last decade have been impressive in terms of both their spread and prolific output, the groundbreaking nature of their contribution, and their capacity to influence and redefine an entire field of enquiry. Her remarkable work as individual researcher and author, editor of collaborative volumes, and organizer of major international conferences has already placed her at the leading edge of modern Galician and Iberian cultural studies internationally, with innovative contributions in literary poetics, transatlantic relations, and gender studies.

Writing Galicia in/to the World: New Cartographies, New Poetics represents a very significant and exciting contribution to the steadily growing field of Galician cultural studies in recent years, as recognition of the boom in Galician cultural production, literary, and visual arts since the restoration of democracy in Spain, the process of political and cultural devolution with the nation-estate, and Galicia’s repositioning in the global map. As the author acknowledges in her study, geographical and cultural mobility was, and still is, one of the most important aspects of modern Galician identity, founded on the collective experiences of mass migration. The author examines the ways that those experiences have defined and redefined Galician identity in relation to other cultures and languages, and how Galicia has been written beyond the confines of the nation. The project thus aims for a radical redefinition of the traditional tenets of what constitutes Galician writing.

The author skillfully grounds the project on the theoretical formulations of Édouard Glissand’s poetics of relation, Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic,” Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization, and current postnational critical discourses. The book strives for the remapping of traditional time-space limitations of cartographies that have defined modern Galician culture, and the conflation of language-territory-cultural identity triad of Galician nationalist discourses that has seemed to exclude those marginalized voices that don’t quite fit the essentialist paradigm, because of the language, the point of enunciation or other markers of difference, such as gender, ethnicity or sexuality.

This study proposes a new cartography and a new reading of Galician writing that exceeds the geographical and political configuration of the nation, by focusing on the transnational and transcultural experience of migration. While the Latin American Galician diaspora of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been the subject of considerable critical attention, the more recent European Galician migration of the 1960s and 1970s, and Galician mobility after Spain’s European Union entry, have received minimal attention to date. Hooper’s volume is an important correction to this situation, focusing on Galicians writing the experience of migration in the Anglophone world, particularly in the United Kingdom, and the new poetics and deterritorialized practices that have emerged as a result.

The book engages in a rich and enriching dialogue with the most current critical literature in contemporary Galician cultural studies produced on both sides of the Atlantic in English, Galician, and Spanish. This lively intellectual engagement and the author’s thorough knowledge of Galician literary tradition produce brilliant insights and advance new roads of enquiry for other future scholars. The book is also exemplarily presented and very well organized, with a general theoretical introduction of the project, a chapter on the cultural context of contemporary Galician migration, and three main chapters devoted to individual authors, and followed by a conclusion, a comprehensive bibliography, and notes.

Writing Galicia in/to the World is fresh and original in conception, for nobody has produced anything comparable to date. The author does explore a new territory, since the authors included, with the exception of Manuel Rivas, the most translated and studied among living Galician authors, and perhaps of Erin Moure, one of the leading contemporary Canadian poets, have not received much critical attention from academics until now. Its publication will make a very significant impact in the field of contemporary Galician...