Romance Languages and Literatures

The title of this essay capitalizes on the inherent “tensions between the commonly cited homophones” (Wilson, Sandru and Welsh 3) routes and roots, rutas y raíces, in an attempt to exponentially multiply the semantic potential of the ruin. Of course, the use of this trope is not completely new, but it is fundamentally relevant and pertinent here, for it posits the intimate relation between space and time, between history and place, and it is conducive to a historiography that alters the conventional linear models of colonial and modern conceptions of progress. Ruins, rust, and remnants, for their part, are a privileged space for questioning the past (colonial or not) as well as the present, and a propitious locus for interrogating disciplinary purposes and practices. I will argue that ghost-like villages and vacuumed-like empty islands can be as eloquent about the past as archives—as we commonly understand them—statistics, and libraries.

Under the current cartographies of globalism, where frontiers mutate, vacillate, and mark the contiguity of discourse, questioning the Spanish border seems a particularly urgent task. The volume engages a wide spectrum of ambivalent regions—subjects that currently are, or have been seen in the past, as spaces of negotiation and contestation. However, they converge in their perception of the “Spanish” nation-space as a historical and ideological construct that is perpetually going through transformations and reformations. This volume advocates the position that intellectual responsibility must lead us to engage openly in the issues underlying current social and political tensions.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Benita Sampedro and Simon Doubleday

Chapter 1. Europe’s ‘Last’ Wall: Contiguity, Exchange and Heterotopia in Ceuta, the confluence of Spain and North Africa
Parvati Nair

Chapter 2. Migration, Gender, and Desire in Contemporary Spanish Cinema
Rosi Song

Chapter 3. State Narcissism: Racism, Neoimperialism, and Spanish Opposition to Multiculturalism (On Mikel Azurmendi)
Joseba Gabilondo

Chapter 4. Constructing Convivencia: Miquel Barceló, José Luis Guerín, and Spanish-African Solidarity
Susan Martín Márquez

Chapter 5. Galicia Beyond Galicia: A man dos paíños and the Ends of Territoriality
Cristina Moreiras-Menor

Chapter 6. Foreignness and Vengeance: On Rizal's El Filibusterismo
Vicente Rafael

Chapter 7. Through the Eyes of Strangers: Building Nation and Political Legitimacy in Eighteenth-Century Spain
Alberto Medina

Chapter 8. On Imperial Archives and the Insular Vanishing Point. The Canary Islands in Viera y Clavijo’s Noticias
Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián

Chapter 9. Manso de Contreras’ Relación of the Tehuantepec Rebellion (1660–1661): Violence, Counter-Insurgency Prose and the Frontiers of Colonial Justice
David Rojinsky

Chapter 11. (The) Patria Besieged: Border-Crossing Paradoxes of National Identity in Cervantes’s Numancia
Michael Armstrong

Chapter 12. Border Crossing and Identity Consciousness in the Jews of Medieval Spain Mariano
Gómez Aranda

Chapter 13. Seven Theses Against Hispanism
Eduardo Subirats

Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index

Engaging the Atlantic might be useful, even instrumental, in putting together and taking apart the elements of the colonial on both shores of the divide – if it is conceived as providing possibilities for network analysis and comparative colonialities rather than as an expansion of the tradition of imperial Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch history. Equatorial Guinea, a Portuguese and later a Spanish colony, is an Atlantic site of colonial convergence. Its history presents the opportunity to approximate the field of study to other latitudes by examining the branches of Portuguese and Spanish imperial practices in America and Africa and, in passing, questioning traditional definitions of area, regional, period and national studies. In rethinking Iberian and Latin American Studies across the Atlantic, and in opening the field of inquiry, we add a spatial dimension to the colonial haunting, which enables us to alter our traditional perception of body flow, nuancing hegemony and shifting locus. In this colonial equation Africa no longer figures as the passive departure point for a one-way traffic, the quintessential homeland of the diaspora,  forever a place of origin and purity. The case study presented here is in several instances a compelling example of a process in reverse.

Undoubtedly, the inclusion of Africa in intellectual discussions of Spanish imperial and colonial history and criticism broadens the traditional scope of the subject, but most important, it offers an opportunity for a wider dialogue with African communities on issues such as exile, migration, integration, and multicultural relations. Equatorial Guinea, a country where Spanish continues to be the official language, will be the focal point of attention. The imperial inheritance continues to link metropolis and colony in ways that are equally urgent and problematic. The essay is devoted to the poetic work of a number of Equatoguinean writers who were forced to seek refuge outside their country and chose the ex-metropolis, Spain, as their home in exile. There is a consensus among these writers themselves that poetry written from exile was one of the most forceful forms of resistance during the years of silence, especially under the dictator Francisco Macías when even the use of the word 'intellectual' was forbidden by the regime. Exile and migration, and their literary expressions, problematizing the question of home and return within this community, will be our main concern.