Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-6d856f89d9-5pczc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T07:44:34.527Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

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

Kirsty Hooper
Kirsty Hooper
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
Get access

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. […]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×