This book explores how we might understand and represent Galicia and Galician writing in the world at a time when it might be argued that all writing exceeds national boundaries, and yet national models, especially in non-state cultures such as Galicia, remain as compelling as ever.Writing Galiciatakes as its starting point Galicia’s paradoxical position with regard to the outside world. On the one hand, it is a minority culture within Spain, its relations with the wider world mediated by a state within which Galicians make up just 6 per cent of the population. On the other hand, its...

Maps play a decisive role in the definition and development of culture and identity. Ramón Otero Pedrayo’s classic Galician novelArredor de si(Around Himself, 1930) is essentially a novelized account of the emergence of a modern Galician consciousness. At its cathartic moment, the protagonist Adrián Solovio confronts a huge print of Domingo Fontán’s iconicCarta geométrica de Galicia‘Geometric Map of Galicia’ in the chamber of his uncle Don Bernaldo. When Don Bernaldo, from his deathbed, introduces his nephew to the century-old document that Derek Flitter has called the ‘revelatory cultural projection of an entire essential reality’ (302), it...

With these words, the philosopher Ramón Piñeiro, writing in 1953 at a moment of pause in Galician overseas migration, strategically deterritorializes the Galician nation, relocating it beyond Franco’s reach into an intangible realm where Galician identity is a condition or a choice rather than a burden. Piñeiro’s calculated move reframes the bond of Galicia’s diaspora communities with a homeland many could never have seen, drawing on the well of associations resonating in the Galician cultural imaginary ever since the flow of transatlantic migration was unleashed exactly a century before. It is generally accepted that during the ‘first wave’ of Galician...

Displacement is both a bodily experience and an emotional one. As Marjorie Agosín reminds us in her prose-poem ‘Creating a Map’, migration marks the body as tellingly as it marks the heart. Agosín’s words suggest that if maps of migration are to have real meaning, they must be ‘fleshed out’ not only figuratively, but also literally. They absorb meaning through their interaction with the bodies which, as Agosín so evocatively demonstrates, take upon themselves the characteristics of a map. The language of bodies and routes comes together in the map: body, hands, heart, now co-ordinates around which meaning and memory...

I argued in the previous chapter that the works of Díaz Pardo and Durán, emerging out of the crisis point of transition from dictatorship to democracy, establish a set of geopoetical co-ordinates and reading strategies that bind London into the fictional foundation and geographical imaginary of modern Galicia. In this chapter, I investigate how these co-ordinates are transformed as they are passed down to subsequent generations of migrants for whom the memory of the crisis is distant, its traces barely legible. We saw how the continued reverberation of the foundational moment is captured by Manuel Rivas inA man dos...

Language is a primary co-ordinate in cultural identity, not only as a marker of ‘being’ what one is, but as a means of ‘becoming’ something new or different. This dual function allows the language-territory-cultural identity triad that has been a fundamental tenet of modern nationalisms to exist in parallel with new, deterritorialized linguistic modes that reflect the transformations and transpositions of their speakers. In the English-speaking world, some of these modes have captured the popular imagination, such as Max Rat’sFranglais, Ilan Stavans’sSpanglish, or Robert McCrum’sGlobish. Elsewhere, speakers of languages whose social and cultural position is less secure...

I said in Chapter One that the time is right for reassessing the relationship of Galicia and Galician culture with the wider world. The project I set out to achieve inWriting Galiciawas to explore a part of the literary and cultural geography of Galician writing which, if not exactly undiscovered country, remains largely unfamiliar to most readers and critics: the Anglophone world, and especially the United Kingdom, which in has in recent years become a minor hub for Galician cultural production. Reading a range of literary texts that have arisen out of contact between Galicia and the Anglophone...