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 in Writing Galicia was 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 world, Writing Galicia traces the emergence, development, and sometimes failure of a series of innovative attempts to navigate the shifting relations between cultural identity, cultural history, cartography and aesthetics that have shaped post-democratic Galicia. I also said in Chapter One that one of the objectives of Writing Galicia was to understand not only the internal organization of the works I would read, but also their organization in relation to one another, as part of Galician cultural production and cultural history, and, too, as part of a wider, transnational conversation. If the study has achieved its purpose, the dynamic, relational geopoetics theorized and historicized in the opening chapters will have been modelled, tested, and perhaps tempered in the critical readings that followed.

At the outset, I wondered whether we might discover a spatial or cartographical figure to represent Galicia's experience, along the lines of Glissant's ‘poetics of Relation’ or Gilroy's Black Atlantic. I hope that the readings developed in Writing Galicia begin to sketch out the contours of such a figure, in providing snapshots of hitherto obscure points in the relational network within which Galician cultural history, and Galician cultural production, operate. My readings have coalesced around three principal hubs: the body as a map of migration's scars (Chapter Three); the yearning for invisibility, for erasure from the map (Chapter Four); translingual poetry as a catalyst for expanding and re-positioning Galicia's literary landscape (Chapter Five). At the same time, however, the stories these works tell, the geographies they describe and the physical and emotional experiences they convey provide an important connection with the largely invisible history of Galicia's post-war emigration.