Contemporary Galician Culture in a Global Context. Movable Identities by Eugenia R. Romero (review)

Galician Studies are becoming increasingly visible in North American universities. Continuing the pioneering work of Xoán González Millán (who coordinated the Research Center for Galician Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center in the 1990s) and Kathleen March (founder of the International Association of Galician Studies in 1985), the discipline has been recently boosted thanks to Kirsty Hooper and Manuel Puga Moruxa, editors of Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies. Between the Local and the Global (2011) (the first volume devoted to Galician Studies by the Modern Language Association) and the organization of events such as the symposium “Presente e Futuro dos Estudos Galegos nos EE.UU.” held at the Graduate Center, CUNY (April 26, 2014) and “(Re)Mapping Galician Studies in North America: A Breakthrough Symposium” (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, May 2 and 3, 2014). In this regard, Eugenia R. Romero is part of group of academics working in North American universities (such as John Thompson, Danny Barreto, Silvia Bermúdez and Gabriel Rei-Doval, amongst others) who are following González Millán and March’s footsteps. Her Contemporary Galician Culture in a Global Context. Movable Identities (2012) has no doubt also played an important role in making the study of Galician culture more accessible outside the Iberian Peninsula.

Romero’s book provides a both thorough and ground-breaking examination of contemporary Galician culture, by reassessing some of its myths of national identity in the context of globalization. Romero suggests the need to re-think some of the Galician markers of practical identity (a term that she borrows from Patrick Colm Hogan), especially those which have constricted the nation to “a delimited territory,” and have made of national identity a “fixable and unmovable (or homogenized)” concept (xii). In tune with recent studies by José Colmeiro (“Peripheral visions, Global Positions: Remapping Galician Culture,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 86(2), 2009) and Kirsty Hooper (Writing Galicia Into the World: New Cartographies, New Poetics, 2011), Romero goes beyond the identification between Galicia and its geographical territory, and understands Galician identity “as an ellipse or a circumference with two points of reference or foci: Galicia’s territory and any other place (country or city) where Galician emigration has settled” (97). Following a Cultural Studies approach, Romero’s study takes on a wide range of case studies, including novels and short stories, films, folk and pop songs, museums and a late nineteenth-century “thematic garden.” Through a close reading and examination of these manifestations of Galician culture, the author provides an innovative look into Galicia as a “movable” identity that supersedes dichotomies such as home/away and rural/urban that have marked its recent history.

The first chapter, “Mapping Galicia: Revised Perspectives of Galician Identity,” explores the tensions generated by emigration and the rural space in Galician culture. By comparing the short films O pai de Migueliño (Miguel Castelo, 1984) and Mamasunción (Chano Piñeiro) to Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao’s short stories “O pai de Migueliño” (which inspired the aforementioned adaptation) and “Chegou das Americas” (1927), and Andrés Dobarro’s hit song “O tren” (1969), Romero examines the representation of emigration in Galician culture, its discourses and archetypes (such as the “indiano” or successful returned emigrant), and highlights the importance of movement for understanding contemporary Galician culture. The opposition between rural and urban Galicia is analyzed by looking at the film Pradolongo (Ignacio Vilar, 2008) and the promotion of tourism by the Galician government in recent years. Leaving behind restrictive and essentialist views of Galician identity, the author argues that “there is a need to re-evaluate and reconsider the role of all aspects of Galician culture” (27).

In the second chapter, “Localizing Galicia through History: Past, Present and Future,” Romero explores the role played by memory in both literary and spatial representations of Galician history. To begin with, the scholar analyzes the parodic view of history provided in Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s novel La safa/fuga de...