Writing Galicia in/to the World: New Cartographies, New Poetics

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The problem that drives this study is the question of how to 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. It argues that Galicia's relationship with the rest of the world is complicated, in that while on the one hand, Galician literature operates as a major literature (in Deleuze & Guattari's terms), on the other, Galicia remains a part of the Spanish state whose nationhood is disputed, and therefore - in the state context - minor. A further complicating factor is that due to Galicia's longstanding tradition of emigration, Galicians provide such a disproportionate number of Spanish expatriates - they make up 6% of the total Spanish population, but 27% of Spaniards abroad - that in many places they are the public face of Spain: in several Latin American countries all expatriate Spaniards are referred to as 'gallegos'. Emigration to Latin America is acknowledged to have played a crucial role in the construction of modern Galician identity; the very real political stakes it continues to raise became all too evident during the controversy over the emigrant vote in the Galician elections of Summer 2005. This study argues that the overwhelming focus on the relationship with Spain and Latin America in both Galician studies of emigration and Galician cultural theory has led to an impasse that both reinforces Galicia's 'minor' position with relation to Spain and perpetuates the colonial structures of the Hispanic world. Seeking to develop an alternative framework for understanding Galicia and Galician writing in the world, it takes as its case study a selection of works from the little-known but dynamic corpus of creative texts emerging from the 'new wave' of migration between Galicia and the Anglophone world since the 1970s, most of them published in the decade since 1999. Crucially, this corpus includes not only work by Galicians living and travelling abroad, but by citizens of other countries for whom Galician is a creative language. Writers under discussion include: Ramiro Fonte, Xesús Fraga, Isaac Díaz Pardo, Carlos Durán, Almudena Solana, Manuel Rivas, Xelís de Toro, John Rutherford, James R Salter, Xavier Queipo and Erin Moure. The study is based on a combination of theoretical analysis and close reading, which is essential given that the majority of the writers under analysis are familiar with critical and theoretical arguments about language, nation, culture and identity, and this is often a fundamental concern of their work. Both the overall theoretical framework and individual readings build on (postcolonial) theories that seek to reorient discussions of cultural identity and its location(s) from fixed essences to dynamic processes. I am acutely aware that the application of Anglophone and Francophone theory to the Galician case is problematic (not least because Galicia's self-identification as a postcolonial nation is, for many reasons, a matter of debate); my intention is thus not to subordinate discussion of Galician texts and contexts to particular theoretical paradigms, but rather to use insights from a range of critical literatures to develop novel ways of exploring these texts and contexts. I focus in particular on the following important points of concurrence that make this a fruitful process: the crucial role of language, the importance of displacement and deterritorialisation, a concern with anti-essentialism, the critique of nationalist or (broadly) Western cultural models, and the central role played by culture in the absence of political institutions.