Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 New Cartographies? Towards a Geopoetics of Galician Cultural History
- 2 Mapping Migration in Contemporary Galicia
- 3 Transition(s) and Mut(il)ations: Isaac Díaz Pardo, Carlos Durán, Manuel Rivas
- 4 The Second Generation: Disappearing from the Map? Xesús Fraga, Xelís de Toro, Almudena Solana
- 5 Towards a Poetics of Relation? Ramiro Fonte, Xavier Queipo, Erin Moure
- Conclusions
- Works Cited
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 New Cartographies? Towards a Geopoetics of Galician Cultural History
- 2 Mapping Migration in Contemporary Galicia
- 3 Transition(s) and Mut(il)ations: Isaac Díaz Pardo, Carlos Durán, Manuel Rivas
- 4 The Second Generation: Disappearing from the Map? Xesús Fraga, Xelís de Toro, Almudena Solana
- 5 Towards a Poetics of Relation? Ramiro Fonte, Xavier Queipo, Erin Moure
- Conclusions
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
We 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 …
(Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation 89)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 Galicia takes 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 long history of emigration means that in much of the world, especially but not only in Latin America, Galicia is the public face of Spain: today, more than 27 per cent of Spaniards registered overseas are Galicians. This paradox means that emigration has long played a central role in the Galician cultural and political imaginary. The intense connection that we see today between cultural representations of emigration and their political implications is unprecedented. As I explain in more detail in Chapter Two, the controversy over the emigrant vote in the Galician elections of summer 2005, and the way that all the political parties played on cultural expectations of the emigrants’ relationship with the homeland in order to win what would turn out to be the deciding votes, revealed the extraordinarily high political stakes of the way we think, talk, and write about emigration in Galicia today.
A chief argument of this book is that it is time these long-standing cultural and political discourses rooted in the massive nineteenth-century migrations to Latin America, which dominated discussion before, during and after the 2005 elections, were inflected by recognition of other geographies and other experiences of migration.
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- Writing Galicia into the WorldNew Cartographies, New Poetics, pp. 1 - 9Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011