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1 - New Cartographies? Towards a Geopoetics of Galician Cultural History

Kirsty Hooper
Kirsty Hooper
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Summary

Maps provide the very conditions of possibility for the worlds we inhabit and the subjects we become.

(John Pickles, A History of Spaces: 5)

Maps play a decisive role in the definition and development of culture and identity. Ramón Otero Pedrayo's classic Galician novel Arredor de si (Around Himself, 1930) is essentially a novelized account of the emergence of a modern Galician consciousness. At its cathartic moment, the protagonist Adrián Solovio confronts a huge print of Domingo Fontán's iconic Carta geométrica de Galicia ‘Geometric Map of Galicia’ in the chamber of his uncle Don Bernaldo. When Don Bernaldo, from his deathbed, introduces his nephew to the century-old document that Derek Flitter has called the ‘revelatory cultural projection of an entire essential reality’ (302), it is a pivotal moment not only for Solovio, but also for the theorization of Galician cultural identity:

Meu fillo, vai ó despacho e descolga aquel mapa grande … Quero velo denantes de morrer … – o sobriño, coa axuda da señora Pascual, trouxo á alcoba o mapa de Fontán. Pendurárono da parede. Os ollos do enfermo reviviron. A man figuraba sinalar horizontes. Unha pura alegría animaba a faciana murchiña e branca. Adrián, cunha candea na man, ía alumeando os lugares que o vello dicía con voz lonxana: Corme, Laxe, Camariñas, Niñóns … Adrián non sabía sempre atopar os sitios. O enfermo falaba: ‘Non, á dereita, á esquerda, un pouco ó norte’ – a candea alumeou longamente un nome e o sitio de Compostela. […]

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Writing Galicia into the World
New Cartographies, New Poetics
 , pp. 10 - 38
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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