In general, self-reflection on the promotion of the languages and cultures of Iberia has diverged significantly on either side of the North Atlantic. The anglophone areas of western Europe have, with characteristic reserve and traditional phlegm, proved hesitant to involve themselves in a reasoned debate on the issue and, with a geniality characteristic of warlords in the best gangster films, have preferred to make things personal. The wounded, class-conscious lamentations on the subject’s orientation uttered by Barry Jordan in his initial exercise in metacriticism, for example, were amplified significantly in Malcolm Read’s (“Travelling South”;Language, Text, Subject; Educating) subsequent no-holds-barred...

It is perhaps rather unconventional to start an analysis of what the academic discipline of Iberian studies is or could be by referring to an American sports film,Field of Dreams(1989). Nevertheless, I hope to show that some interesting connections can be made by relating the fantasy that the film’s plot is built upon to the underlying assumptions that have sustained the field of Spanish studies, and the new epistemological spaces that the disciplinary paradigm of Iberian studies can open up. Allow me, then, to talk a bit aboutField of Dreams. While popular in its time, it is...

There is no question that one of the most promising developments in American Hispanism in the last decade has been the aspiration to transform the discipline of Hispanism – or at least that part of the discipline devoted to the so-called peninsular literature, traditionally and almost exclusively centered on Spain’s cultural production in the Spanish language – into a wider field of Iberian studies, where the interliterary relations and internal complexity of multilingual culture in the Iberian peninsula become major objects of analysis and research. It is not my intention here to formulate a critique of Hispanism or a vindication...

Nearly a century ago, in an opuscule entitledMomentum Catastroficum, Pío Baroja made an assertion upon which we must meditate in various ways: “If Catalonia separates from Spain, within fifty years it will be spiritually French” (55). Independent of his motivations, the thing that most attracts our attention in Baroja’s affirmation (which in no way can be understood simply as aboutade) is his ability to do something that Catalans have scarcely done for some time: that is, to think about our literary, intellectual, political, and editorial culture, once independence from Spain has been achieved. This issue cannot be assumed...

Cultural history has provided an ample base of knowledge regarding the complex and multifaceted current of political-cultural perspectives and thought known as Iberianism. This label has housed many projects, such as “annexing” or “fusing” Portugal into the Spanish state, an Iberian federation of these two states, or schemes for the creation of an Iberian League of Nations. Iberianism was a complete failure in the political realm, oscillating between aspirations for the creation of a single peninsular state and the pursuit of some other formula to accommodate the Portuguese national identity within a new Iberia orHispania. Many Spanish adherents saw...

When thinking about the topic of this essay, I was puzzled by the astonishing amount of material written concerning the state (Spain) and its relationship with its regional parts: of course I use the term “regional” without any intention of hurting anyone’s sensibility. On the contrary, if you want to study the Iberian peninsula on an equal basis (without considering the whole superior or better than its parts and vice versa), then the quantity of material drops dramatically.

Francisco María Tubino, far from being an intellectual or politician involved in some independence project, is an outstanding voice of a special...

In previous work my main concern has been to “translate” the insights of Americo Castro about identity formation in the Iberian peninsula into a conceptual framework of ethnicity studies. Contrary to the many critiques of Americo Castro’s work – mostly on the part of historians – I advocated an anthropological reading of it. Drawing on the work of Fredrik Barth, Anthony D. Smith, and John Armstrong, I studied historical and contemporary processes of ethnogenesis and ethnicity in Spain. The central concept of my analysis wascasticismo, viz. theethnicidentification with Christianity as opposed to Islam and Judaism (Stallaert,Etnogénesis;...

When we regard the Iberian peninsula as a self-contained and culturally multipolar constellation – a “pequeña totalidad geográfica e histórica” (Resina 46) – we find that one specific feature is particularly striking, and that is the region’s high degree of social, ideological, and political conflict. This is especially the case for the twentieth century, the historical era on which this essay focuses. Antagonisms develop along two different axes of conflict: on the one hand, between multinationalism and the nation-state, and on the other, ideological conflicts between communism/Republicanism and Falangism/fascism. Of course, these vertical and horizontal tensions do not occur in...

The ancient Roman geographer Strabo is best known, within Iberian studies, as being the source of the infamous comparison of Hispania to a bull’s hide. As with most quotations taken out of context, Strabo’s original source bears more complexity than is revealed by common discourse. Using a more precise translation, Strabo actually writes that Spain (and he certainly means Hispania) resembles an ox hide, just as Sicily is akin to a triangle and the Peloponnese to a plane-leaf (128). Strabo, more importantly, argues that a totalizing image of a landmass is not at all the ideal manner by which to...

In the last twenty-five years, Jews have emerged as a literary figure as well as a literary theme in Spain. Catalan writers such as Maria Àngels Anglada (1930–99), Carme Riera (1948–), and Vicenç Villatoro (1957–) approach the Jewish theme and the representation of the Jew as literary character in order to reflect on issues regarding identity and history in novels, such asEl violí d’Auschwitz(1994),Dins el darrer blau(1994), andMemòria del traïdor(1996), respectively. WithDins el darrer blau, written between 1989 and 1993, published in Catalan in 1994 and in Castilian in 1996,...

Many an age has imagined itself through a sea. The ancients lived “like frogs around a pond,” as Aristophanes famously put it, while the Jesuits divided the seventeenth-century world into the Indies of “over there” and “over here.” After 1945 it was NATO and “Atlantic studies” that animated studies unified by a geographic concept based on a body of water, until the rise of China put wind into the sails of the “Pacific rim.” Today the “Union for the Mediterranean,” with its 43 member states (including such Mediterranean lands as Estonia, Ireland, and Sweden) and accompanying plethora of books and...

In 1552 Portuguese humanist João de Barros published the first volume of hisDécadas da Ásia, a historical account of the first half-century of Portugal’s Asian empire modeled on Livy’sHistory of Rome.¹ In the introduction to this first volume, he speaks directly to the Portuguese king João III, offering the ailing monarch a dense and complex theorization of empire, praxis, language, the senses, and immortality. Speaking at length of the central place of historical narrative in the workings of empire, Barros weaves together three seemingly disparate threads. The first of these is an episode from the history of Alexander...

Fernando Pessoa is known to have been many authors. Each had a name, but these were not pseudonyms. Rather, they areheteronyms, as he explains in an oft-quoted autobiographical blurb requested bypresençamagazine.¹ Only so neurotic a namer as Pessoa could have possibly come up with the difference between these concepts, which is basically a distinction about how names are used. Whereas pseudonyms are optional labels for one and the same person, as it were, a heteronym is the given name of a person who simply never had a body. A heteronym is the proper kind of namesake, that...

Some years ago, in a lecture on the exhaustion of national literary history, Universidade de Lisboa professor Miguel Tamen argued for the privileged view of outsiders on a nation’s culture. “Don’t trust the natives!” he warned, advising against drawing systemic conclusions from the identification between point of view and object of study. Tamen’s skepticism about national literary histories led him to assert that a literature is best represented by its foreign authors. His proposition opens up intriguing modalities of analysis. One would study not the Paris of Baudelaire or Zola but that of Benjamin or Rilke. Not the London of...