Introduction

The Hispanic Atlantic Guest Editor: Joseba Gabilondo Introduction Joseba Gabilondo has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California , San Diego. Currently he is at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has published several articles on Hollywood and globalization, Basque culture and postnationalism , Spanish literature, and queer theory. He is currently working on two books on Basque literature and Cultural Studies. The Hispanic Atlantic This selection of essays on the Hispanic Atlantic is prompted by the urgency to respond to changes in a specific cultural and geopolitical context. The Hispanic world (Latin America, Spain, and the Latino United States) is experiencing a very productive and critical reconsideration of its national and continental geopolitics and culture. As a result, the idea of Latin America and its academic discourse are being revised (Seed; Beverly, Oviedo, and Aronna; Castro Gómez and Mendieta; Moreiras). At the same time, Spain and Hispanism are undergoing a more beleaguered and not so critical revision (Millington and Smith; Graham and Labanyi; Resina ; Loureiro; Bermúdez, Cortijo, and McGovern). Yet, recent work in Latin American and Hispanic Studies overlooks certain key developments: Spain has become, after the United States, the second largest investor in Latin America (Relea) at a time when Latin American as well as African immigration to Spain has become an undeniable influence on Spanish society (Ruiz Olabuénagana; Tornos and Aparicio). This immigration has gained a quantitative and qualitative importance that has probably never been known before in modern Spain. It is also unique because this demographic shift is triggered by chiefly economic circumstances (poverty and decline of the middle class) and not dictatorial regimes, and thus those involved are immediately marked as subaltern, identified by race, gender and class. This is not the immigration of a very Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 5, 2001 92 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies select and small group of intellectuals or political cadres, as in the '60s and '70s. This two-way flow of capital and bodies across the Atlantic brings to the fore a host of political and historical problems that have not been fully addressed by neither Latin Americanists nor Hispanists . Is this new development an unprecedented and unexpected emergence of a "new" Spanish (neo) imperialism? Is it simply a distorted and anachronistic twist to a more global and less specifically Spanish economic reorganization? Or to put it otherwise, is it global capital disguised as Spanish? Are we about to face the resurgence of a Spanish imperialism that puts the Latin American history of the last two hundred or so years in historical parentheses ? Or rather, do the Latin American national histories since the wars of independence form an imaginary fold between British and North American/global imperialisms ? What are the effects of this global and imperialist geopolitical and economic reorganization for the Hispanic and Latin American formations of gender and sexuality? Does it point to a new, global , yet anachronistically conservative resurgence of a patriarchal Hispanicity or does it permit a new fluidity of sexes and genders across the Atlantic? Is the Hispanic Atlantic being feminized, masculinized , or just engulfed (McClintock)? What do we make of the national public and domestic spheres in a new Atlantic reorganization of social space? What is the new position of subalternity and race in this new geopolitical location? Is the Hispanic world being reorganized along more Anglo-American lines of race and ethnicity ? Is the Latino condition the new telos of the Hispanic world? Is race being mobilized to reorganize this new imperialist and postnational space? Are race, gender and sexuality the new and central organizers of this neoimperialist deployment, so that the nation no longer is the ultimate horizon of politics in Latin America and Spain? Is recent attention to race a sign that the Hispanic world is advancing towards recognizing subaltern subjects and communities, beginning with Chiapas? I, Guest Editor of volume 5 of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies , and the rest of the collaborators have taken up this host of questions in order to explore different lines of inquiry that we hope will help us to rethink the Latin American, Latino, and...