Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global ed. by Kirsty Hooper, Manuel Puga Moruxa (review)

Presented as the first English-language collection of analyses of Galician culture and identity in the context of the local, national, European, and global changes since 1975, Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global emphasizes the distinction between Galician literature and culture and the new plural Spanish canon. The editors, Kirsty Hooper and Manuel Puga Moruxa, provide an eloquent and effective argument for the persistence of Galician Studies as an academic field outside of Galicia or Spain. Published by the Modern Language Association in the series “World Literatures Reimagined,” this collection of essays has in mind the Anglophone academic readership and, especially, students and scholars in comparative cultural and literary studies. The contributors to this volume belong to the new academic generation of International Galicianists. Of the sixteen scholars featured in the volume, five hold tenured or tenure-track positions in US universities (including the late Timothy McGovern, Luso-Hispanist from UC Santa Barbara); two in UK Universities (including coeditor Kirsty Hooper); two in New Zealand Universities; and seven scholars in Galician Universities (including co-editor Manuel Puga Moruxa). The editors clearly underline this new international genealogy by dedicating the volume to the celebrated pioneers of Galician Cultural Studies, UK, and US Galician scholars, John Rutherford and the late Xoán González-Millán.

One of the overarching subjects in this volume, debated in several essays, is the ongoing social negotiation for the normalization and standardization of Galician language and culture by all social spheres within Galicia and the Spanish state. Normalization, as demonstrated in these essays, is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it is viewed as a necessary process of building consensus between differing linguistic, political, social, and literary forces, while, on the other hand, it is vilified as a manifestation of the hegemonic culture and political powers. The subtitle of the volume points to the anxiety still permeating contemporary debates and expressions of Galician identity and definitions of local Galician culture. Elements of local culture are analyzed in these essays as complex networks of creative individual expression, manufactured hegemonic discourse, and trauma. The cover illustrates this debate by depicting the most internationally identifiable symbol of Galician identity, the twelfth-century Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, in a projection of rainbow colors, suggesting a renewed perspective for a new generation on a cherished symbol of the past.

The contributors to this volume are particularly attentive to contemporary alternative and experimental discourses, and their essays demonstrate how peripheral and marginalized voices are reconfiguring canons and identities, both Galician and Spanish. The volume is divided into three thematic divisions: “Histories,” “Identities,” and “Cultural Practices,” each prefaced with good summary overviews of the essays. Readers who are knowledgeable of Galician Studies will find the critical updates on twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural practices most stimulating. Readers looking for an introduction to the historical, literary, and social Galician context will find comprehensive critical overviews and detailed analyses of most cultural and literary topics.

The first essay sets the tone to part one by presenting the necessity for twenty-first-century Galicians to investigate and understand the historical making of Galician collective memory. The author, Lourenzo Fernández Prieto, distinguishes two main trends of the historical discourse in Galicia, one traditional and the other revisionist, and points to the inherent shortcomings of both discourses as they reproduce equally dominant ideologies. The author challenges contemporary historians to fill multiple ancient and recent historical gaps and also to refute pervasive historical myths that have become ingrained in the historical discourse and in the collective consciousness, such as the myth of Galicia’s backwardness and the lingering emigration of its population. Fernández Prieto refers to historical economic data that contradicts the backwardness myth, and calls attention to the reverse phenomenon to emigration, the return of the migrant as an understudied...