Transnational Cervantes (review)

This engaging study traces the ways in which Miguel de Cervantes's works successfully move across a variety of temporal, spatial, and ideological boundaries. The trans- of the title reflects a vision of Cervantes as one who blurs the fixity of borders by visiting both the ins and the outs that define a given category. While the work considers the impact of Cervantes's writings in several contexts beyond his native Spain, Childers continually returns to what he sees as Cervantes's unique ability to navigate the various identities within the Spanish imaginary in such a way that allows him to promote alternative views of national identity.

Transnational Cervantes consists of three sections, each with two chapters. The first, "Decolonizing Cervantes," takes the author beyond the context of national literature. In chapter 1, "The Colonized Imagination," Childers details the formation of national identities, discusses cultural practices that resisted these identities, and presents La Mancha as a laboratory of inquiry wherein these formations and resistances can be identified and interrogated. A key concept from this chapter is the author's description of internal colonialism, which he offers as a way to approach coloniality in general, and Spanish Golden Age cultural history in particular. This phenomenon functions as a "double bind" wherein the colonized subject is acknowledged but not included. After discussing a number of internal colonies within early modern Spain and describing the "communities of resistance" that appeared in opposition to Spanish hegemony, the chapter ends with Childers's borderland theory of La Mancha, a space that simultaneously functions as an every-man and no-man's land of the empire. Chapter 2, "Cervantes and lo real maravilloso," captures the problematic encounter of the church-sponsored "miraculous" with the "marvelous." Childers argues that unofficial representations of the supernatural helped early modern Spanish writers confront coloniality of power. According to Childers, the "ambivalent marvelous" (i.e., ontological ambiguity, generic hybridity, and transculturation) in Cervantes's works exemplifies how the marvelous can function as a contested site in European culture.

Part 2 of Childers's work makes a case for Persiles y Segismunda as a "Transnational Romance." The author begins by taking on Cervantes's text from the perspective of "Pilgrimage and Social Change," the title of chapter 3. Similar to his discussion of the marvelous, the author argues that Cervantes's unique depiction of pilgrimage functions as a dismissal of religious control over cultural practices. In this way, the wandering pilgrim acts as a counterweight to the absolutism of ecclesiastical authority. As examples of this phenomenon, Childers analyzes two characters from the novel: Antonio de Villaseñor and Feliciana de la Voz. In chapter 4, "Turning Spain Inside Out," Childers exposes the alternative view of Spain that emerges within the larger contexts of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic world present in Persiles y Segismunda. Moving freely within and beyond Spain has a decentering effect on the nation, revealing, as a result, "the problematic representation of Spain." Cervantes's "ideological open-endedness" is on display throughout the novel as he regularly destabilizes categories (e.g., gender and genre), underscores the importance of transitions, and provides a failed model of the nation.

In the final section, "Cervantes Now," Childers offers two examples of the type of criticism he believes sections one and two make possible. "Remembering the Future" examines the common ground shared by the Muslims expelled from Spain four centuries ago and the emerging Islamic presence in post-Franco Spain. His emphasis here is on promoting the social restructuring modeled in Cervantes's work and demonstrating the unevenness of Cervantes's own view of Muslims as evidenced in the Sancho/ Ricote episode, among others. In addition to weaving the past and present of Islam in Spain in chapter 5, Childers dedicates chapter 6, "Chicanoizing Don Quixote," to those Chicano authors who find in the knight errant a "symbol of resistance to Anglo-American culture." Childers argues that, like Cervantes, who produced his work under the pressures of internal colonialism, Chicano writers are up against their own wave of cultural homogeneity. Childers supports this stance by...