Overview

Writing Galicia explores a part of Europe’s cultural and social landscape that has until now remained largely unmapped: the exciting body of creative work emerging since the 1970s from contact between the small Atlantic country of Galicia, in the far north-west of the Iberian peninsula, and the Anglophone world. Unlike the millions who participated in the mass migrations to Latin America during the 19th century, those who left Galicia for Northern Europe in their hundreds of thousands during the 1960s and 1970s have remained mostly invisible both in Galicia and in their host countries. This study traces the innovative mappings of Galician cultural history found in literary works by and about Galicians in the Anglophone world, paying particular attention to the community of ‘London Galicians’ and their descendants, in works by artists (Isaac Díaz Pardo), novelists (Carlos Durán, Manuel Rivas, Xesús Fraga, Xelís de Toro, Almudena Solana) and poets (Ramiro Fonte, Xavier Queipo, Erin Moure). The central argument of Writing Galicia is that the imperative to rethink Galician discourse on emigration cannot be separated from the equally urgent project to re-examine the foundations of Galician cultural nationalism, and that both projects are key to Galicia‘s ability to participate effectively in a 21st-century world. Its key theoretical contribution is to model a relational approach to Galician cultural history, which allows us to reframe this small Atlantic culture, so often dismissed as peripheral or minor, as an active participant in a network of relation that connects the local, national and global.

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This book represents a very significant and exciting contribution to the steadily growing field of Galician cultural studies. The author skilfully examines the ways that the experiences of migration have defined and redefined Galician identity in relation to other cultures and languages, and how Galicia has been written beyond the nation. The project thus aims for a radical redefinition of Galician writing. -- Jose Colmeiro, Prince of Asturias Chair, University of Auckland Hooper's approach to the Galician diaspora in the English-speaking world demonstrates that dynamism, changeability and multiplicity are an integral part of Galician culture. As such, Writing Galicia into the World will undoubtedly intrigue scholars seeking to understand the age-old problem of emigration from new perspectives. Galicia 21, Journal of Contemporary Galician Studies, Issue D 2012 Mapping Galicia, both geographically and culturally, has been a practice closely linked to projects of national identity. In 1834, just at the approach of the literary Rexurdimento, Domingo Fontan's Carta geometrica de Galicia appeared, the first cartographic projection to represent Galicia not as the margin of Spain, but as a territory in its own right. Since then, the project of mapping the limits of Galicia and galeguidade has held sway over artists and scholars. In 2008, Fontan's map served as a motif in Miguel-Anxo Murado's Otra idea de Galicia as he traced the less visible face of Galician cultural history. Kirsty Hooper's Writing Galicia into the World too engages with this tradition of surveying the Galician landscape, this time altering how we view the cardinal points of Galician identity such as language, territory, emigration and morrina by focusing on writers and works that emerge from non-Hispanic cultural contexts, primarily the Galician communities of London. Earlier contributions by Hooper to the rapidly growing corpus of English-language scholarship on Galicia, such as the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies' special issue, 'Critical Approaches to the Nation in Galician Studies' (2009), co-edited with Helena Miguelez-Carballeira, and Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global (2011), co-edited with Manuel Puga Moruxa, have helped to increase the visibility of Galicia outside Spain and invite critical readings that draw on theory and intellectual currents from within feminism as well as postcolonial and cultural studies. Hooper's latest monograph further advances this project by looking at the site of overlap between Galicia and the Anglophone world. As the title promises, Writing Galicia into the World inscribes Galician literatures and cultures into a global network of narratives of displacement. Hooper has analyzed a series of texts whose authors and themes cross back and forth between languages and territories, bringing to light an arresting corpus of Galician literature that is irreducible to any one language or tradition, and, as such, one that produces dynamic reading strategies. A welcome consequence of -or impetus for- Writing Galicia is that by focusing on the relationship between Galicia and the English-speaking world, Hooper places Galicia in a global context without relegating it to a mere subcategory of Hispanic Studies or filtering it through Spain in order to relate Galicia's literary tradition to that of other nations. The project has a two-fold effect of changing the way readers think of Galician emigration patterns and experiences as well as revealing how metropolitan hubs such as London have been important sites of meaning for immigrants from European peripheries. Writing Galicia comprises five chapters that offer a theoretical and historical framework for interpreting literature written between the Anglophone world and Galicia (Chapters 1 and 2), as well as detailed analyses of a pleasingly eclectic selection of texts -in which are represented the novel, the chapbook, the short story, poetry and the graphic novel- written across generations of writers moving between different spaces (Chapters 3-5). As Hooper points out, the late-twentieth-century migrations of Galicians to destinations other than Spain and Latin America have inhabited the margins of the Galician imaginary, which, unfortunately, has left us with a partial understanding of Galician experience. Yet, as she illustrates throughout the book, the groups bound for London, removed at once from more traditional Hispanic and British nexuses of colonial relations, have acquired the spatial, political and discursive distance from which to question and redefine the experience of emigration and of Galician cultural identity. Hooper finds in the territorial, cultural and linguistic displacement of this community the tools for rethinking Galician culture and history, as well as the narrative strategies used to voice Galician experience in today's globalized world. In addition to exploring the relation between geography and narration, the texts that Hooper has chosen are grouped according to their position in the migratory process. Hooper analyzes works whose protagonists are migrants from Galicia, particularly Isaac Diaz Pardo's O crime de Londres: a criada que estrangulou a sua ama pola musica (1977), Carlos Duran's Galegos de Londres (1978) and Manuel Rivas's A man dos painos (2000), in order to understand how the fracturing of place and identity are represented in these texts. She then moves on to discuss works -Xesus Fraga's A-Z (2003), Xelis de Toro's Os saltimbanquis no paraiso (1999) and Almudena Solana's Las mujeres inglesas destrozan los tacones al andar (2007)- whose authors and/or characters belong not to the generation of emigrants, but instead are raised in the Anglophone world and must figure out what it means to be or not to be Galician. Finally, Hooper turns to a group of poets, Ramiro Fonte, Xavier Queipo and Erin Moure, whose works are crafted around the traditional foci of Galician identity (language, territory, culture) but whose linguistic density and fractures mean that the texts exceed any limits that a national or linguistic literary model might impose. Not only does Hooper bring to light these lesser-known works of the past four decades that deal with migrations to and from Galicia and northern Europe, but she also provides a fresh context for works on emigration by more visible authors such as Manuel Rivas. Writing Galicia, however, is more than a survey of Galician literature related to the Anglophone world or a collection of readings. Instead, through her critical approaches, Hooper discovers new ways of reading Galician migration born from the narratives themselves, methods that invite readers to revel in the ludic, transformative and multiple relations between language, territory and identity, and to think about Galician literature, not only In her discussion of poets Moure and Queipo, Kirsty Hooper states that their transnational works implore readers 'to luxuriate in the process of reading itself' (164). I would argue that the same can and ought to be said of Writing Galicia. The passion for Galicia as an object of study found in the works of Ramon Pineiro and Castelao is brought together with the critical frameworks of postcolonial theorists such as Edouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall in order to map the Anglo-Galician experience. The result is a text that is as theoretically poignant as its prose is smooth, and a cartography that, in ways similar to Fontan's map, bridges the gap between territory and imaginary, history and representation. However, the new cartographies that Hooper advances go further still. While they recognize the traditional markers of Galician culture and identity, they also reveal that language, territory and nostalgia are not fixed points or essential aspects of modern galeguidade but exist only in relation to other experiences and positions. Hooper's approach to the Galician diaspora in the English-speaking world demonstrates that dynamism, changeability and multiplicity are an integral part of Galician culture. As such, Writing Galicia into the World will undoubtedly intrigue scholars seeking to understand the age-old problem of emigration from new perspectives. -- Danny M. Barreto Galicia 21, Journal of Contemporary Galician Studies, Issue D 2012 In post 13, when I spoke of Blanchot and translation as a step outside time, I briefly mentioned UK critic and Galician literary scholar Kirsty Hooper. Her landmark book Writing Galicia into the World is also a step outside time, one important to translation in a critical sense and in a wider optic. Its mission is other, but it opens up the stakes of translation itself, in a way that is co-incident with, and that has learned from, ideas of writers such as Edouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze. Her work allows us to look anew at what it means to cross the borders of language, and better understand literature's role in this crossing. To tweak from the press website[1], the book's key theoretical contribution is to model a relational approach to a nation's cultural history, which allows us to reframe a culture often dismissed as peripheral or minor as an active participant in a network of relation that connects local, national and global. The exciting thing is that it opens many possibilities to future investigators, and not just to those who study Galician culture (though, please, folks, do study Galician culture!). Hooper's work is also co-incident and co-intuitive with ideas such as Anne-Marie Losonczy's cosavoir, or co-knowledge, a current influence on the production of Quebec poet Chantal Neveu and others. Hooper's conclusion resonates: Writing Galicia is, and could only ever be, the first step in a much bigger and hopefully collective project. Among the pressing questions she realizes still need to be addressed: is the question of the alofonos, those writers who publish in Galician even though it is not their native language. Many of their works... share a spatialized view of cultural identity, which is played out in the geopoetical frameworks they create. This to me is the stakes of translation played out in another way, for translators too enter as allophones, non native speakers, into a language and culture, and bear the seismic risks of their move, their bearing of that language back into their own. A generosity prevails, but the move can also cause fractures. Translation can be a kind of fracking, if we're not taking care. Articulations based in analysis and comparative research in literature, history and philosophy such as Hooper's and Losonczy's provide essential thinking for translators, as well as for critics. Spatialization, indeed! Hooper, further: The value of the maps, the co-ordinates, the networks of relation considered in Writing Galicia lies in their potential to address not only the community of Galician readers, but outwards, transforming the 'very conditions of possibility' of the other reading communites of the Spanish state, but also-potentially-of the English-speaking world. Ultimately, she ends, the power of the readings that emerge lies in their dynamic interaction with the multiple networks of relation which, in the words of Eduoard Glissant, are 'not prompted solely by the defining of our identities, but by their relation to everything possible as well-the mutual mutations generated by this interplay of relations.' This interplay is relentless and beautiful, and affects our ongoing relationship to translation into English, creating new, contiguous spaces for writers and critics to explore. [1] which really says: Its key theoretical contribution is to model a relational approach to Galician cultural history, which allows us to reframe this small Atlantic culture, so often dismissed as peripheral or minor, as an active participant in a network of relation that connects the local, national and global. -- Erin Moure Jacket2 20120122

This book represents a very significant and exciting contribution to the steadily growing field of Galician cultural studies. The author skilfully examines the ways that the experiences of migration have defined and redefined Galician identity in relation to other cultures and languages, and how Galicia has been written beyond the nation. The project thus aims for a radical redefinition of Galician writing. -- Jose Colmeiro, Prince of Asturias Chair, University of Auckland

This book represents a very significant and exciting contribution to the steadily growing field of Galician cultural studies. The author skilfully examines the ways that the experiences of migration have defined and redefined Galician identity in relation to other cultures and languages, and how Galicia has been written beyond the nation. The project thus aims for a radical redefinition of Galician writing. Jose Colmeiro Prince of Asturias Chair, University of Auckland

"This book represents a very significant and exciting contribution to the steadily growing field of Galician cultural studies. The author skilfully examines the ways that the experiences of migration have defined and redefined Galician identity in relation to other cultures and languages, and how Galicia has been written beyond the nation. The project thus aims for a radical redefinition of Galician writing. Hooper's approach to the Galician diaspora in the English-speaking world demonstrates that dynamism, changeability and multiplicity are an integral part of Galician culture. As such, Writing Galicia into the World will undoubtedly intrigue scholars seeking to understand the age-old problem of emigration from new perspectives. Mapping Galicia, both geographically and culturally, has been a practice closely linked to projects of national identity. In 1834, just at the approach of the literary Rexurdimento, Domingo Fontan's Carta geometrica de Galicia appeared, the first cartographic projection to represent Galicia not as the margin of Spain, but as a territory in its own right. Since then, the project of mapping the limits of Galicia and galeguidade has held sway over artists and scholars. In 2008, Fontan's map served as a motif in Miguel-Anxo Murado's Otra idea de Galicia as he traced the less visible face of Galician cultural history. Kirsty Hooper's Writing Galicia into the World too engages with this tradition of surveying the Galician landscape, this time altering how we view the cardinal points of Galician identity such as language, territory, emigration and morrina by focusing on writers and works that emerge from non-Hispanic cultural contexts, primarily the Galician communities of London. Earlier contributions by Hooper to the rapidly growing corpus of English-language scholarship on Galicia, such as the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies' special issue, 'Critical Approaches to the Nation in Galician Studies' (2009), co-edited with Helena Miguelez-Carballeira, and Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global (2011), co-edited with Manuel Puga Moruxa, have helped to increase the visibility of Galicia outside Spain and invite critical readings that draw on theory and intellectual currents from within feminism as well as postcolonial and cultural studies. Hooper's latest monograph further advances this project by looking at the site of overlap between Galicia and the Anglophone world. As the title promises, Writing Galicia into the World inscribes Galician literatures and cultures into a global network of narratives of displacement. Hooper has analyzed a series of texts whose authors and themes cross back and forth between languages and territories, bringing to light an arresting corpus of Galician literature that is irreducible to any one language or tradition, and, as such, one that produces dynamic reading strategies. A welcome consequence of -or impetus for- Writing Galicia is that by focusing on the relationship between Galicia and the English-speaking world, Hooper places Galicia in a global context without relegating it to a mere subcategory of Hispanic Studies or filtering it through Spain in order to relate Galicia's literary tradition to that of other nations. The project has a two-fold effect of changing the way readers think of Galician emigration patterns and experiences as well as revealing how metropolitan hubs such as London have been important sites of meaning for immigrants from European peripheries. Writing Galicia comprises five chapters that offer a theoretical and historical framework for interpreting literature written between the Anglophone world and Galicia (Chapters 1 and 2), as well as detailed analyses of a pleasingly eclectic selection of texts -in which are represented the novel, the chapbook, the short story, poetry and the graphic novel- written across generations of writers moving between different spaces (Chapters 3-5). As Hooper points out, the late-twentieth-century migrations of Galicians to destinations other than Spain and Latin America have inhabited the margins of the Galician imaginary, which, unfortunately, has left us with a partial understanding of Galician experience. Yet, as she illustrates throughout the book, the groups bound for London, removed at once from more traditional Hispanic and British nexuses of colonial relations, have acquired the spatial, political and discursive distance from which to question and redefine the experience of emigration and of Galician cultural identity. Hooper finds in the territorial, cultural and linguistic displacement of this community the tools for rethinking Galician culture and history, as well as the narrative strategies used to voice Galician experience in today's globalized world. In addition to exploring the relation between geography and narration, the texts that Hooper has chosen are grouped according to their position in the migratory process. Hooper analyzes works whose protagonists are migrants from Galicia, particularly Isaac Diaz Pardo's O crime de Londres: a criada que estrangulou a sua ama pola musica (1977), Carlos Duran's Galegos de Londres (1978) and Manuel Rivas's A man dos painos (2000), in order to understand how the fracturing of place and identity are represented in these texts. She then moves on to discuss works -Xesus Fraga's A-Z (2003), Xelis de Toro's Os saltimbanquis no paraiso (1999) and Almudena Solana's Las mujeres inglesas destrozan los tacones al andar (2007)- whose authors and/or characters belong not to the generation of emigrants, but instead are raised in the Anglophone world and must figure out what it means to be or not to be Galician. Finally, Hooper turns to a group of poets, Ramiro Fonte, Xavier Queipo and Erin Moure, whose works are crafted around the traditional foci of Galician identity (language, territory, culture) but whose linguistic density and fractures mean that the texts exceed any limits that a national or linguistic literary model might impose. Not only does Hooper bring to light these lesser-known works of the past four decades that deal with migrations to and from Galicia and northern Europe, but she also provides a fresh context for works on emigration by more visible authors such as Manuel Rivas. Writing Galicia, however, is more than a survey of Galician literature related to the Anglophone world or a collection of readings. Instead, through her critical approaches, Hooper discovers new ways of reading Galician migration born from the narratives themselves, methods that invite readers to revel in the ludic, transformative and multiple relations between language, territory and identity, and to think about Galician literature, not only In her discussion of poets Moure and Queipo, Kirsty Hooper states that their transnational works implore readers 'to luxuriate in the process of reading itself' (164). I would argue that the same can and ought to be said of Writing Galicia. The passion for Galicia as an object of study found in the works of Ramon Pineiro and Castelao is brought together with the critical frameworks of postcolonial theorists such as Edouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall in order to map the Anglo-Galician experience. The result is a text that is as theoretically poignant as its prose is smooth, and a cartography that, in ways similar to Fontan's map, bridges the gap between territory and imaginary, history and representation. However, the new cartographies that Hooper advances go further still. While they recognize the traditional markers of Galician culture and identity, they also reveal that language, territory and nostalgia are not fixed points or essential aspects of modern galeguidade but exist only in relation to other experiences and positions. Hooper's approach to the Galician diaspora in the English-speaking world demonstrates that dynamism, changeability and multiplicity are an integral part of Galician culture. As such, Writing Galicia into the World will undoubtedly intrigue scholars seeking to understand the age-old problem of emigration from new perspectives. In post 13, when I spoke of Blanchot and translation as a step outside time, I briefly mentioned UK critic and Galician literary scholar Kirsty Hooper. Her landmark book Writing Galicia into the World is also a step outside time, one important to translation in a critical sense and in a wider optic. Its mission is other, but it opens up the stakes of translation itself, in a way that is co-incident with, and that has learned from, ideas of writers such as Edouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze. Her work allows us to look anew at what it means to cross the borders of language, and better understand literature's role in this crossing. To tweak from the press website[1], the book's ""key theoretical contribution is to model a relational approach to a nation's cultural history, which allows us to reframe a culture often dismissed as peripheral or minor as an active participant in a network of relation that connects local, national and global."" The exciting thing is that it opens many possibilities to future investigators, and not just to those who study Galician culture (though, please, folks, do study Galician culture!). Hooper's work is also co-incident and co-intuitive with ideas such as Anne-Marie Losonczy's ""cosavoir,"" or ""co-knowledge,"" a current influence on the production of Quebec poet Chantal Neveu and others. Hooper's conclusion resonates: ""Writing Galicia is, and could only ever be, the first step in a much bigger and hopefully collective project."" Among the pressing questions she realizes still need to be addressed: ""is the question of the alofonos, those writers who publish in Galician even though it is not their native language."" ""Many of their works... share a spatialized view of cultural identity, which is played out in the geopoetical frameworks they create."" This to me is the stakes of translation played out in another way, for translators too enter as allophones, non native speakers, into a language and culture, and bear the seismic risks of their move, their bearing of that language back into their own. A generosity prevails, but the move can also cause fractures. Translation can be a kind of fracking, if we're not taking care. Articulations based in analysis and comparative research in literature, history and philosophy such as Hooper's and Losonczy's provide essential thinking for translators, as well as for critics. Spatialization, indeed! Hooper, further: ""The value of the maps, the co-ordinates, the networks of relation considered in Writing Galicia lies in their potential to address not only the community of Galician readers, but outwards, transforming the 'very conditions of possibility' of the other reading communites of the Spanish state, but also-potentially-of the English-speaking world."" ""Ultimately,"" she ends, ""the power of the readings that emerge lies in their dynamic interaction with the multiple networks of relation which, in the words of Eduoard Glissant, are 'not prompted solely by the defining of our identities, but by their relation to everything possible as well-the mutual mutations generated by this interplay of relations.'"" This interplay is relentless and beautiful, and affects our ongoing relationship to translation into English, creating new, contiguous spaces for writers and critics to explore. [1] which really says: ""Its key theoretical contribution is to model a relational approach to Galician cultural history, which allows us to reframe this small Atlantic culture, so often dismissed as peripheral or minor, as an active participant in a network of relation that connects the local, national and global."""

Author Information

Kirsty Hooper is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick.

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