On the polysemic nature of Iberian studies: Definitions, spaces, limits1 Santiago Pérez Isasi, University of Lisbon
Abstract
This article aims to clarify the polysemic nature of Iberian Studies, marked by a multiplicity of definitions, objectives, objects and methodologies that sometimes impede collaboration or even communication between different research traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Without denying the specificity and unity of the field, I propose that we distinguish between three definitions or configurations: Iberian Studies as a multicultural expansion of Hispanism; Iberian Studies as a subfield of Comparative Literature (or Comparative Cultural Studies); and Iberian Studies as a form of Area Studies. This plural definition of the field will better allow us to understand its future possibilities, but also its dangers and limitations.
Keywords Iberian Studies space comparative literature Hispanism area studies
academic field
Resumen
Este artículo pretende mostrar y clarificar la naturaleza polisémica de los Estudios Ibéricos, marcados por una multiplicidad de definiciones, objetivos, objetos y metodologías que en ocasiones impide la colaboración o incluso la comunicación entre las diversas tradiciones científicas ambos lados del Atlántico. Sin negar la especificidad y unidad del campo, propongo distinguir entre tres diferentes definiciones o configuraciones de los Estudios Ibéricos: como una expansión multicultural del Hispanismo; como subcampo de la Literatura Comparada (o de los Estudios Culturales Comparados); y como manifestación de los ‘Estudios de Área’. Esta definición plural del campo nos permitirá percibir más claramente las posibilidades futuras del campo, pero también sus peligros y limitaciones
Palabras clave Estudios Ibéricos espacio literatura comparada Hispanismo Estudios de área
The field of Iberian Studies, particularly in its cultural or literary manifestations, has become the centre of many debates in recent years, in the context of reflections on the limits and shortcomings of Hispanism and, in general, of national literary studies. Obviously, Iberian Studies do not hold the key to solving all the problems posed by the questioning of national borders in the study of Iberian literatures. Furthermore, they should be considered in light of the development of other supranational academic fields, such as Area Studies, European Literature, World Literature and so on. Nonetheless, they offer new and promising insights on the development of the Iberian literary and cultural (poly)system, not as the mere accretion of two (or four, five or more) smaller national literatures, but as the result of complex interactions in a multilingual and multicultural space, and as the product of tensions and negotiations between centres and peripheries, and between different sources of power and identity.
In a text published in 2013 (though based on a conference presentation from 2011), I stated that Iberian Studies needed to fulfil three conditions in order to establish itself as a consolidated field:
theoretical reflections on their specificity, their methodologies, and the specific set(s) of phenomena with which they work; networks of communication that allow scholars working in this area to communicate with each other; and some level of institutional or academic recognition. (Pérez Isasi 2013: 24)
Much has been done in the last six years in relation to all of these aspects, and the future of the field seems promising. The consolidation of a growing number of Iberian Studies departments, research groups and conferences, both in the United States and in Europe,2
and the number of specialized publications that have appeared in the last ten years, demonstrate the interest that currently exists in new approaches to Iberian cultural phenomena. Networks among Iberian Studies scholars, on the other hand, continue to be informal and localized: they serve to connect scholars working in this field, but they are not unified on a global level. This often leads to a lack of awareness of each other’s proposals, theories and methodologies, particularly between scholars based on either side of the Atlantic (or between the Anglo-American and Southern European academies). Only recently have projects like Iberian Studies Reference Site (IStReS) (http://istres.letras.ulisboa.pt), with its transatlantic scope, tried to raise visibility and promote interconnections inside the field.
In this article, I would like to stress, precisely, the need for a closer connection between the two (or three) dominant trends in Iberian Studies: the definition of Iberian Studies as a multicultural and more open version of Hispanism (which developed mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom, following Joan Ramon Resina’s influential work; the definition of Iberian Studies as a subfield of Comparative Literature (or Comparative Cultural Studies), devoted to intra-peninsular relations, and with a particular focus on Spanish–Portuguese interconnections (an approach that is dominant in the Iberian Peninsula); and finally, a definition of Iberian Studies as a form of Area Studies, a trend that supersedes the limits of literary or cultural studies and includes all fields of inquiry devoted to the Iberian space. In the final section of the article I will contend that this porosity in terms of the disciplinary (and even geographical) limits of the field is not necessarily a weakness, but rather opens a fruitful space for dialogue and mutual enrichment.
The common ground of Iberian Studies: A reconfiguration of the Iberian space Although this article focuses on the problematic and polysemic nature of the term ‘Iberian Studies’, I must begin by stressing that all the trends that I will describe share a common object (the Iberian literary and cultural [poly]system, even when these precise terms are not used) and a common objective: the reconceptualization of the Iberian cultural (and also academic) space in order to contradict or supersede the national divisions and oppositions that have prevailed from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The emergence of this new field, then, can be explained in light of and folded into a wider movement; I am referring, of course, to what has been defined as the ‘spatial turn’ in the Humanities.
This reconsideration of space and its placement at the very centre of research and reflection in the Humanities can be traced back to the second half of the twentieth century. A key milestone in this chronology is the publication of Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace (1974), with its much-quoted distinction between espace perçu, espace conçu and espace vécu, but even more with its conceptualization of space as a ‘social production’ (as opposed to objective, scientific, Cartesian space) and its many applications to the fields of Urbanism, Sociology, Anthropology, but also Cultural and Literature Studies. Following this trend, Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place (1977) or Edward Soja’s Thirdspace (1996) expanded this view of human space as a social and cultural construction, a dimension in which different forces collide and compete. Other influential concepts in the spatial turn include.
Iberian Studies represent, therefore, but one example of this reconsideration of cultural phenomena in close relation to the spaces in which they develop, and also of the crisis of canonical, teleological narrative history, and of the questioning of national
boundaries as artificial delimitations of cultural phenomena. As a field, we might say using Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology (1980), they demonstrate the tension between the espace lisse of cultural systems, with their multiple (rhizomatic) interferences, crossings and transferences, and the espace strié of national identity, which tends towards compartmentalization, binary opposition and exclusion. This transnational, multicentric and intertwined account of literary and cultural phenomena is what lies at the heart of all of the approaches to Iberian Studies, and is what gives them their raison d’être, in opposition to the national (cultural or linguistic) divisions that still predominate in many academic departments and fields.
In order to supersede the limitations of national literary studies, it is not sufficient simply to replace them with supranational ones. The objective of Iberian Studies is not, as Resina (2009: 91) argued, to merely widen the canon of our studies with the inclusion of a few peripheral cultural productions in the established and hegemonic Spanish canon, but to question the dialectics of power relations or the underlying ideological conceptualization of nation and culture. Some specific manifestations or products of Iberian Studies, however, give a strong precedence to Spain/Castile and Spanish/Castilian culture and literature, over other Iberian cultures and literatures (thus supporting the criticism by Gabilondo [2013–14] who suspected Iberian Studies of being nothing but an imperialistic expansion or reconfiguration of Hispanism); this is the case, as I will insist in the last section of this article, for the Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies (Muñoz-Basols et al. 2017), which is clearly dominated by a vision of Iberia as a Castile-centred space.
It would also be naïve to think that any spatial unit, geopolitical or otherwise, can be an objective and unproblematic object of analysis. César Domínguez has warned
of ‘the danger of transforming spaces into natural entities, i.e., of their de-ideologization’ (2007: 78) and this is especially true for supranational spatial entities which, because they do not have a nation state behind them, can be more easily mistaken for ‘natural’ entities. The fact that this same object (Iberian space) can be reconceptualized in several different ways (as I will demonstrate in the following sections) shows that questioning and deconstructing monolingual and monocultural national epistemologies do not necessarily imply that all theoretical and methodological issues are solved.
It is therefore necessary to reconceptualize the Iberian cultural space, a task that has been carried out, for instance, by Enric Bou in Invention of Space (2012) or in his contribution to New Spain, New Literatures (Martín-Estudillo and Spadaccini 2010: 3– 26). Such a reconceptualization must not ignore its own condition as an ideological and political operation, but, on the other hand, must avoid proposing, even methodologically, any sort of ahistorical essentialism. This, however, does not imply that we should ignore that in Iberia there are strong historical and cultural links and interferences that justify its consideration as an object of study. Only a truly translational historical account (or even better, an intertwined or entangled historical methodology), as opposed to a merely comparative one that juxtaposes individual narratives without ever combining them, can effectively account for such a spatial and cultural configuration.
It is important to highlight that the specificity of the Iberian literary and cultural (poly)system, if it exists, should not be approached as an essentialist or ahistorical fact. We should recall that Iberia itself is a historical construction, which was progressively developed both from the outside (chiefly by Central European Romanticism) and also
from the inside, through long debates about Spanish and Portuguese identity and also about Iberianism as an economic, political and cultural option (see Matos 2007; Pérez Isasi 2014; Rina Simón 2016). This historical and ideological construction of Iberia as a (meta)geographical concept lies at the core of research in Iberian Studies and illuminates the ideological and political nature of proposals in this field, not because it recovers an Iberist agenda, but because it questions the established nationalistic discourses, both at the political and at the academic level, and both at the centre(s) of the system and, even more so, at its peripheries.
In the following sections, I will describe the main approaches developed so far within Iberian Studies; this will make clear, I think, that from a common objective (the deconstruction and questioning of the national – and imperial – matrices of Hispanism and Lusophone Studies) stem at least three different methodologies. The fact that the three have all labelled themselves ‘Iberian Studies’ (and rightly so) has led to more than one misunderstanding and miscommunication in recent years.
Iberian Studies as a multicultural reaction to and expansion of Hispanism
Anglo-American Iberian Studies had an early and influential systematization in Joan Ramon Resina’s works, whose previous publications and ideas (some of them dating back to the 1990s) were condensed in the volume entitled Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos (2009). In this book, Resina examines the prolonged and acute crisis of American Hispanism (in the sense of peninsular Spanish Studies), a crisis that reflects the turn in American academia towards Latin American Studies (at least partially derived from a similar turn in American geopolitics during the twentieth century; Resina 2009: 99),3 but also the fact that Hispanic Studies have not been able to
adapt to the new theories and methodologies developed in the last decades (Resina 2009: 111ff.).4 This crisis has led, Resina argues, to paralysis in the field, to a decrease in prestige and therefore in the number of students interested in peninsular Hispanism, which in both practical and scientific terms made Spanish departments shift towards Latin American or Chicano Studies, pushing peninsular Hispanism further away from the centre of academic discourse. Sebastiaan Faber reaches similar conclusions when he states that the rise of Iberian Studies can be seen as the consequence of two different factors, one external and one internal to academia:
On one hand, it can be seen as the academic response to Spain’s own reinvention in the 1970s and 1980s as a forward looking, fully European, cutting-edge nation, re-introducing itself on the international stage after the long, drab years of Francoism. On the other hand, the turn to cultural studies has also evidently been a response to institutional changes in the British and American academy. (2008: 9)
It is in this context that Resina situates his proposal for Iberian Studies, as one possible solution to the problems of peninsular Hispanism in American academia. His proposal stems from a reconsideration of Spain as a multicultural and multilingual entity, and from an epistemological decentralization that works not by merely broadening the canon of Spanish literature to include (or co-opt) a few elements taken from other non-Spanish-speaking literatures, but by adopting a new object: the Iberian Peninsula considered as a complex system in which nations (and cultures) interact historically.
el interés de las literaturas vasca, catalana y gallega no es un asunto de corrección política. Su incorporación al currículo del hispanismo es ante todo un asunto de coherencia epistemológica. La historia (política, social, literaria) de la Península Ibérica no puede estudiarse adecuadamente sin atender a la dialéctica entre las naciones peninsulares. (Resina 2009: 91)
(the interest in Basque, Catalan and Galician literatures is not an issue of political correctness. Their incorporation into the curriculum of Hispanism is first and foremost an issue of epistemological coherence. The (political, social, literary) history of the Iberian Peninsula cannot be adequately studied without attending to the dialectic among peninsular nations.)5
It is precisely this ‘dialectic among Iberian nations’ that constitutes the core of Iberian Studies, even if the expression used by Resina is not optimal, in my view. First of all, it projects an image of homogeneity inside each of the cultural spaces that exist and interact inside the complex Iberian polysystem, when each is in reality complex and contains its own centres and peripheries, tensions and conflicts. Second, the term ‘nation’, so ambiguous and so ideologically charged, does not seem ideal for describing the entities which maintain literary and cultural relations among themselves; the more proper term ‘(inter)literary and cultural (poly)system’, as proposed by Casas (2003), may be useful to avoid unproductive debates about the number and extension of the Iberian nations, as we will see in the next section.
Resina does not ignore the political and controversial nature of his proposal when he confronts established American Hispanism, which he considers to be not only
outdated and unproductive, but also inherently centralist and hegemonic: ‘Lo que propongo es evidentemente un programa político o, más bien, un proyecto epistemológico sin pretensiones de imparcialidad política’ (‘What I am proposing is of course a political programme or, better yet, an epistemological project without pretensions of political impartiality’) (Resina 2009: 92). However, his criticism of the imperialistic cultural, academic and political core of Hispanism would be more effective, I believe, if it were not so tainted with a tendency to place a clear focus on Catalan literature and culture, relegating other Iberian geocultural spaces to a secondary (or tertiary) position; this opens Iberian Studies to the (fair) objection that it does not question the link between literature and power, but only changes the position and the relative size of the centres of power, or, as Gabilondo (2013–14) puts it, projects fantasies of imperial domination over other Iberian nations and cultures.
Other recent publications, mainly produced by British and American academics, offer approaches to Iberian Studies which are generally similar to Resina’s, in that they too question traditional Hispanism as a valid field, expand the established canon and call for a renewal of theories and methodologies as applied to Iberian phenomena. This is the case, for instance, for the edited volumes From Stateless Nations to Postnational Spain (Bermúdez et al. 2002), Reading Iberia (Buffery et al. 2007), New Spain, New Literatures (Martín-Estudillo and Spadaccini 2010) and Iberian Modalities (Resina 2013). These publications, though varied in scope and object, demonstrate some common characteristics that define this approach to Iberian Studies: a preference for contemporary phenomena (the ‘pressure of presentismo’ identified by Resina and, more recently, by Gimeno Ugalde 2017: 4); a plurality of cultural objects that go beyond
literature and texts; and a plurality of theoretical and methodological approaches, ranging from Cultural Studies to Queer Studies, Translation Studies or Gender Studies.
On the other hand, the Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies (Muñoz-Basols et al. 2017) offers a wide chronological scope, from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, and a variety of disciplines and objects (chiefly History and Literary and Cultural Studies), while placing itself in the ‘Resinian tradition’ of Iberian Studies and therefore ‘promot[ing] a more comparative mode within Hispanism in particular’ (Muñoz-Basols et al. 2017: xxiii). It is noteworthy, once again, how this Companion explicitly defines itself as a ‘broad church, seeking to showcase some of the best writing on Iberian subjects rather than to offer a specific theoretical or methodological intervention in the debates currently shaping Iberian Studies’ (Muñoz-Basols et al. 2017: xxiii). In my view, the main limitation of this volume (independently of the quality of the individual chapters, which is not in question) is precisely this absence of a coherent vision on what Iberian Studies are, or should be, a lack of theoretical reflection that manifests itself in the clear predominance of the Spanish/Castilian geocultural space in most of the chapters and sections.
In fact, theoretical and methodological eclecticism (in other words, the prevalence of practice over theory) is one of the defining characteristics of American and British Iberian Studies. In the words of Mario Santana: ‘rather than “theories”, […] what is urgently needed are theoretically informed “practices” that would facilitate the expansion of material archives, which in turn may facilitate the discovery and articulation of critical problems relevant to the field’. (Santana, quoted in Newcomb 2015: 196)
Silvia Bermúdez too, in her ‘archaeology of the field’ published in 2016, defends the role of her department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, claiming:
ha sido desde la praxis como mi departamento participa, desde finales del siglo XX, en la reconfiguración de los modelos representativos e interpretativos en la enseñanza y en la investigación académica norteamericana con la implementación de cursos y proyectos que reconocen la complejidad cultural, lingüística, y nacional del espacio geopolítico conocido como la Península Ibérica. (Bermúdez 2016: 24).
(It has been through practice that my department has participated, since the end of the twentieth century, in the reconfiguration of the representative and interpretative models of teaching and research in the North American academy, with the implementation of courses and projects which recognize the cultural, linguistic and national complexity of the geopolitical space known as the Iberian Peninsula.)
One of the problems that Iberian Studies as a multicultural expansion or reaction to Hispanism presents is the difficult integration of Portugal and Portuguese literature and culture into this new paradigm, both from a theoretical and from an institutional perspective: even if Castilian culture ceases to be the core of the new discipline, intra-Spanish relations, tensions and interferences remain the focus of most of the production in this branch of Iberian Studies. One exception to this rule is found in Robert Patrick Newcomb’s works (2011; Newcomb and Gordon 2017), which defend a wider dialogue
between Hispanic and Lusophone Studies (including, in this case, the Latin American space), and particularly in Schacht Pereira’s contribution to one of these volumes, entitled ‘Portuguese and the emergence of Iberian Studies’ (Schacht Pereira 2017). However, in most of the publications listed in this chapter, Portugal is greatly underrepresented, and often disconnected from ‘Spanish’ internal issues and tensions. I will insist further on this point in this article’s final section.
This Spanish centralism (with the addition of a few peripheral ‘tokens’) is in fact the most serious criticism that can be made of this approach to Iberian Studies. As Esther Gimeno Ugalde explains:
Iberian Studies […] will have to consider its own limitations and encourage critical self-reflection if it is to avoid falling into the unproductive simplicity of establishing itself as the ‘Trojan horse’ of Peninsular Hispanism, or the blind illusion that it represents a panacea for the study of Iberian literatures, cultures, and languages. (2017: 20)
Joseba Gabilondo, in this same line of thought, opposes Joan Ramon Resina’s definition of Iberian Studies in an article on ‘Spanish nationalist excess’ (2013–14). In his text, Gabilondo sees Iberian Studies as an attempt by a centralist and nationalistic Hispanism to reappropriate ‘peripheral’ Iberian cultures, as a strategy to regain its hegemonic position within American academia without having to share its power or question its intellectual foundations. His call for a new Iberian Studies that stems not from Hispanism but from Comparative Literature coincides with the way in which Iberian Studies have chiefly been pursued in Spain and Portugal, as I will argue in the
next section. This underscores the need for stronger transatlantic links and communication. On the other hand, in his introduction to his history of Basque Literature, Before Babel (2016), Gabilondo proposes his own model of literary history, which he applies to the Basque space but which could be applied elsewhere: a ‘subalternist-postnational-differential’ (2016: 55), a proposal that may very well illuminate future works in the field of Iberian Studies.
Iberian Studies as comparative studies
Joan Ramon Resina is widely – and, in general terms, correctly – considered the founding father and main proponent of Iberian Studies (particularly of the term itself); however, it is also true is that, from 1980 onwards, some scholars of Spanish and Portuguese studies in the Peninsula felt the need to reconsider the relations between Iberian literatures and cultures, and their placement within European, western and global cultural and academic systems. These pioneers’ initiatives from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s did not identify them as practitioners of Iberian Studies, since the term had still not gained visibility and traction; and they also did not stem (only or chiefly) from a reaction to peninsular Hispanism (and Portuguese Studies), but as a reaction to a complex set of social, cultural and political circumstances that involved both Spain and Portugal.6
I am referring, for instance, to the transition from dictatorship to democracy in both Spain and Portugal; to the integration of both countries into the European Union; and to the strong reappearance of peripheral identities in Spain and the definition of this country as a ‘nation of nations’ (albeit more rhetorically than in practice, and not without opposition). This opened up the possibility, and even the need, to rethink the
way in which the literatures and cultures of Spain and Portugal interacted with each other throughout history. On the Portuguese side of the border, the quick, disorganized and traumatic process of decolonization, which followed years of colonial wars and provoked the arrival to the country of the so-called retornados (‘returnees’), led to a period of self-reflection and reconsideration of Portugal’s place and identity in the contemporary world.
In this context, the first efforts to establish a common field of study for Spanish and Portuguese literatures were animated by a desire to reform: they tried, symbolically at least, to mend the broken bridges between both countries after decades of being ‘neighbours with their backs turned on one other’ (a stereotype that appears regularly in publications on Iberian relations). These Iberian dialogues (which in fact in many cases included physical encounters among Iberian writers and scholars) identified themselves as a continuation of the fruitful period of proximity and intellectual exchanges that occurred around the fin de siècle (from 1870 to 1930 approximately) and that were identified with a vague form of cultural Iberianism.7 This is the case, for example, for the RELIPES – Relações linguísticas e literárias entre Portugal e Espanha conferences, which took place in Évora, Salamanca and Covilhã (Magalhães 2007a, 2007b); for the Aula Aberta (Marcos de Dios 2007) and Aula bilingüe (Marcos de Dios 2008, 2012) symposiums; and for the Suroeste exhibition, which was displayed at the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC) in 2010, and which then produced quite a large and elegantly illustrated publication (Sáez Delgado and Gaspar 2010).8
It is important to point out that, in contrast to their American (or Anglo-American) counterparts, Iberian Studies as they developed in Spain and Portugal in the
late 1990s and 2000s are more closely linked with the fields of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and with the development and implementation of systemic literary theories, particularly in the field of literary history, than with peninsular Hispanism (in its traditional or reformulated form). The strength of Spanish Philology departments, and their attachment to certain epistemological traditions and objects (and their resistance to others), might explain the almost complete disconnection between Iberian Studies in Spain and departments of Hispanic Philology. On the other hand, Portuguese literature and culture departments in Spain (Salamanca, Extremadura) and Spanish literature and culture departments in Portugal (Évora, Lisboa, Coimbra, Beira Interior) have shown a much bigger interest in exploring the Iberian interconnections, proving, perhaps, that fields and departments with a weaker institutional position are more open to interacting with new epistemological trends, as a way to gain academic specificity, as well as wider recognition and relevance.
It is not coincidental, then, that the most exhaustive and most interesting attempt to develop a coherent theory and methodology for Iberian Studies was undertaken by members of the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela: individual or collective works published by César Domínguez, Fernando Cabo, Arturo Casas, Elias Torres Feijo, Anxo Abuín and Anxo Tarrío Varela (among them, the groundbreaking Bases Metodoloxicas para unha historia comparada das literaturas na península Ibérica, Abuín and Tarrío Varela 2004) have shaped a core of theoretical proposals, which are also the basis of what is thus far the magnum opus of Iberian Studies: A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula (Cabo Aseguinolaza et al. 2010; Domínguez et al. 2016), sponsored by the International Association of Comparative Literature. The explicit
objective of this publication, as stated in the introduction (‘to present a particular situation in order to reveal a fundamental factor in the understanding of the Iberian Peninsula as a complex and dynamic framework of interliterary relations’, Cabo Aseguinolaza et al. 2010: xii), presents Iberian Studies as a subfield of Comparative Literature. A very similar definition may be found in an article by another scholar from Santiago de Compostela, Arturo Casas:
the Iberian geocultural space can be studied as an example of (macro)polysystem, understood, as Even-Zohar did, as a group of national literatures which are historically linked and which maintain among themselves a series of hierarchical relations and fluxes in terms of repertories and mutual relations. (Casas 2003: 73–74)
The Rede Galabra de Estudos na Cultura research network, also based in Santiago de Compostela, has likewise contributed to the development of a complex theoretical and methodological framework for the study of interliterary relations, in this case paying particular attention to Galician literature and culture and their connections with Portugal, with Iberia and also with the Lusophone world at large. For instance, Elias Torres Feijo’s works (2002, 2004, 2011, among others) apply Bourdieu’s concept of champ littéraire and Even-Zohar’s methodologies to construct a proposal for a comparative study of Iberian literatures and cultures:
The understanding of literary activity as an heterogeneous and dynamic network composed of a series of macro-factors including institution, market, product,
repertoire, producer, and receiver enables us to pay attention to the structures of the fields, the positions and functions occupied by different participants, and the modes of relation between the fields of literature and power. (Torres Feijo 2011: 2)
In fact, one of the most striking differences between Iberian Studies as they developed in the American academy and the dominant trend in Spain and Portugal is that the latter evidences a significant theoretical coherence around what are usually known as ‘systemic theories of literature’, namely Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field, Dinoyz Ďurišin’s concept of interliterary systems and Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystems theory.9 The influence of Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field and Ďurišin’s interliterary theory can be seen in most peninsular research on Iberian studies: as we have seen, the Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula defined Iberia as ‘a complex and dynamic framework of interliterary relations’, and Arturo Casas’s article on Iberian literary history is also entitled ‘Sistema interliterario y planificación historiográfica a propósito del espacio geocultural ibérico’ (2013). In fact, Ďurišin himself used the Iberian Peninsula as an example of ‘interliterary community’: ‘the community of Spanish, Catalonian, Galician (northwest Spain) and Basque literatures in Spain’ (1988: 126).
While Bourdieu’s and Ďurišin’s proposals are extremely influential, Iberian Studies in the Iberian Peninsula have even more extensively adopted Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystems theory, which places emphasis ‘on the multiplicity of intersections, and hence on the greater complexity of structuredness involved. Also, it strongly stresses that in order for a system to function, uniformity need not be postulated’
(Even-Zohar 1979: 291). Apart from the works published in Santiago de Compostela, which we have already mentioned, Even-Zohar’s polysystems theory has also been applied by several scholars and research groups, both in Portugal and in Spain, such as Antonio Sáez Delgado from the University of Évora (2012, 2014); Xaquín Núñez Sabarís (2011) and his group, in particular Carlos Pazos (2015), at the University of Minho; the members of the Diálogos Ibéricos e Ibero-Americanos (DIIA) research group, coordinated by Ângela Fernandes and based at the Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon (Fernandes et al. 2010; Pérez Isasi and Fernandes 2013); Jon Kortazar and his research group LAIDA – Literatura eta Identitatea (2016); and researchers from the Department of Romanic Philology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, led by Juan Miguel Ribera Llopis (2015; Ribera Llopis and Arroyo Almaraz 2008).
That peninsular Iberian Studies stem chiefly from Comparative Literature (and not from a multicultural expansion of Hispanism, as in the Anglo-American case) also has consequences in terms of the privileging of certain areas, chronological periods and topics. If in the previous section we saw that Anglo-American Iberian Studies have had difficulty integrating Portugal and Portuguese culture, in the case of peninsular Iberian Studies it becomes one of the main axes of research. In fact, many of the events, publications and research groups mentioned so far (RELIPES, Aula Ibérica/Aula bilingüe, Suroeste, DIIA, etc.) are devoted to studying the relation between Portugal and other Iberian literatures and cultures: usually Spain, but also Galicia (as in the case of Galabra) and Catalonia (in Víctor Martínez-Gil’s works, e.g. 2010, 2016). Intra-Spanish relations (for instance Catalonian–Castilian or Basque–Galician–Catalan
interconnections) are not completely absent, but they are not the defining element of the field, as they have been in the case of Iberian Studies as an expansion of Hispanism.
Peninsular Iberian Studies are also more varied in their chronological scope: even if some degree of ‘presentism’ can also be detected, there is a very significant number of studies devoted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (particularly to the period of the Dual Monarchy, in which Spain and Portugal shared a common ruling dynasty) and even more so to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of intense cultural exchange between these countries. Of course, many studies on medieval literatures and cultures, which inevitably move across and beyond contemporary national and linguistic boundaries, could be considered to be Iberian Studies avant la lettre, even if they are not identified as such.
Iberian studies as Area Studies
The resurgence of Area Studies as a valid academic endeavour can also be considered as a consequence of the spatial turn mentioned at the beginning of this article. Area Studies can be defined as the study of a certain geographical region (South East Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe or, in our case, the Iberian Peninsula) from a broad range of disciplines. In Szanton’s words:
Within the US university, Area Studies scholarship attempts to document the existence, internal logic, and theoretical implications of the distinctive social and cultural values, expressions, structures, and dynamics that shape the societies and nations beyond Europe and the United States. (Szanton 2004: 2)
These types of multidisciplinary and geographically defined studies were originally, more often than not, tied to economic, geopolitical and colonial interests (as anyone familiar with Said’s Orientalism knows). Current Area Studies, however, are different from Area Studies as they developed during the Cold War; they share with the former certain characteristics, such as an interest in otherness and their focus on geographical, political and economic peripheries (defined from the northern and western centres), but they have been rethought and reconfigured from a postcolonial perspective. Some of the differences from the previous model of Area Studies include ‘a denial of essentialist concepts of culture […]; an openness to cultural processes [and] cross-national collaboration, involving experts from the region to be studied as well as third-country researchers’ (Pinheiro 2013: 32).
Area Studies have also been proposed as a subfield (or subcategory of fields) within comparative literature itself, in ‘the pursuit [of] new (or renewed) geographies that go beyond the nation but resist the centrifugal pull, the temptation, of “the world”’ (see Bush 2017), most famously by Gayatri Spivak in her 2005 manifesto Death of a Discipline. Iberian Studies, as described in the previous two sections (in both their Anglo-American and peninsular configurations), could therefore fit this definition of Area Studies as a subfield of Comparative Cultural Studies.
There is, however, another trend within Iberian Studies that locates them within the wider definition of Area Studies: as an interdisciplinary field strictly defined by its geographical scope and not by its content or methods. In her contribution to Looking at Iberia, Teresa Pinheiro made a compelling defence of the benefits of tying Iberian Studies to Area Studies. In her text, she argues that ‘Iberian Studies can learn from Area Studies by overcoming national boundaries and studying more cross-cultural
phenomena’ (Pérez Isasi 2013: 35). Further, she observed three lines of ‘cross-cultural research’ that could benefit Iberian Studies: ‘To look beyond Spain and Portugal as states, rather searching for relations among the different cultures of the Iberian Peninsula […]; to look for intersections with other cultural areas outside the Peninsula [such as diasporas and exiles]’; [and] ‘to insert Iberian Studies as one among other Area Studies within European Studies [which] offers the opportunity for comparative analysis especially with Eastern Europe or South-Eastern Europe’ (Pérez Isasi 2013: 36). Pinheiro herself has developed some of these lines of study, for instance in publications such as Peripheral Identities: Iberia and Eastern Europe between the Dictatorial Past and the European Present (Pinheiro et al. 2011). Her production, then, offers a very particular take on Area Studies, a field which, as she herself has shown (Pinheiro 2013), has a longer and wider tradition in Germany than in other European countries, and is being pushed forward by official recommendations and policies.
While Pinheiro’s is the most elaborate defence of Iberian Studies as Area Studies, this trend has been granted its greatest visibility by the Association of Contemporary Iberian Studies (ACIS), which in its constitution states that its aim is ‘to promote and advance the study of social, cultural, economic and political aspects of contemporary relevance to the Iberian area, together with its languages’, while the disciplinary areas accepted in its conferences include
Politics, government, international relations, the EU, nationalism, regionalisms, transnational issues and processes; Economics, business, labour, social and welfare issues; Cultural production in all its forms (e.g. film, television, journalism, literature, media, advertising, digital communication & social
networking); Social and Cultural Studies (e.g. identity, gender, ethnicity, popular culture); Leisure, tourism, sport; Contemporary history; Language, Linguistics, language Policy; Education and pedagogy.
This very journal, the International Journal of Iberian Studies, which is published under the sponsorship of ACIS, follows the same guidelines and aims. In fact, when it was founded (in 1978) by scholars from polytechnic universities, ACIS was conceived as a more open and comprehensive alternative to the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, traditionally focused on literary and cultural studies (Deacon 2001: 602), thus showing a similar renovative intention as Joan Ramon Resina’s in the United States.
As mentioned before, the tendency to view Iberian Studies as Area Studies (in its broader sense) is not majoritarian, but it is highly visible in at least two European countries outside the Iberian Peninsula: the United Kingdom and Germany. It is worth considering this as a possible development path for Iberian Studies, not only because of this international visibility, but also because of the possibility of ‘cross-cultural research’, as hinted at by Pinheiro.
Limits but not limitations: Iberian Studies as a field on/of the margins
In this article, I have analysed the basic coordinates that guide Iberian Studies, in its different theoretical and methodological configurations, showing both their theoretical and methodological divergences, but also their common objectives and their grounding in the ‘spatial turn’ of the Humanities in the late twentieth century. I hope to have demonstrated that there is, in fact, a common reconfiguration of Iberian cultural and
academic space that justifies, and underlies, all forms and manifestations of Iberian Studies on both sides of the Atlantic ocean: the creation of a new epistemological map that takes space as its basis, without understanding it as an absolute, ahistorical reality. This common underlying spatial configuration ensures the unity of the field regardless of the divergences between different trends, which again need not necessarily be considered a weakness of the field, but rather can be view as an opportunity for mutual enrichment if there is sufficient communication.
As the previous sections show, the reconfiguration of Iberian space as a complex rhizome of interliterary (and intercultural) relations cannot pretend to be exhaustive or free of contradictions and limitations; it cannot pretend to be self-evident, neither can it exclude or deny other supranational interrelations that operate simultaneously inside and outside the Iberian Peninsula, in particular with its colonial past and the territories the peninsular empires encompassed. Selecting a self-contained and geographically limited space will always provoke new tensions between the inside and the outside, between what is left out and what is included; in the case of the Iberian Peninsula, questions remain about literatures and cultures that have developed historically both inside and outside it (for instance, Catalan, Galician and Basque literatures); about its insularities and other extra-peninsular territories such as Ceuta and Melilla; about its exiles and diasporas, which are geographically disperse but culturally interconnected with the ‘metropolis’; and about its interferences with other supranational entities, such as European, western and global cultures, the Atlantic Fringe, Lusofonia and Iberoamérica, to name just a few. Some of these geographical and cultural territories occupy an in-between position (both inside and outside the scope of Iberian Studies),
which makes them both problematic but at the same time highly rich objects for analysis.
In other words, space itself, and the spatialization of literary and cultural research, must also be carefully examined, avoiding the danger that César Domínguez (2006) warned about: the de-ideologization of space, the temptation to consider it as a natural and therefore self-evident object on which to base our object of study. Lefebvre’s considerations in The Production of Space (1974), which opened the way for the reconsideration of space as a social and political construction, should be enough to put into question that vision of space as an unproblematic ground. The Iberian Peninsula, whose physical or geographical limits could seem obvious if not examined critically, is a term as debatable and as constructed as Spain, Portugal or any other (meta)geographical concept, when considered from a geocultural point of view. The historical process of construction of the concept of Iberia, both from the inside and from the outside, has already been extensively explored, but it remains within the core of Iberian Studies.
It should not be forgotten that the study of cultural relations is also the study of power structures, of tensions between centres and peripheries and between different centres that struggle for predominance or hegemony; and that these tensions and struggles, this plurality of centres and peripheries, can be found, fractally, at any level of analysis that we choose. In other words: if Iberian Studies reject (and rightfully so) any imposition of a supposed homogeneity for national literatures and cultures, and we denounce the way in which this homogeneity erases difference, we must be equally cautious when we examine each of the different literatures and cultures that oppose or counterbalance that centralizing and hegemonic tendency, be they Catalan, Basque,
Galician, Jewish, African, queer or women’s literatures produced in the Iberian Peninsula. All are plural and polycentric, subject to tendencies towards homogenization and difference.
It is at this point that Itamar Even-Zohar’s theory of polysystems, with its explicit recognition of ‘heterogeneous multiplicity’, although not yet thoroughly developed in some respects, can offer us theoretical and methodological tools for describing the inter- and intra-systemic dynamics of Iberian literatures (what Joan Ramon Resina vaguely called ‘the dialectics among nations’). If Iberian Studies makes sense from an epistemological point of view, and if it is to be productive in terms of literary and cultural analysis, it must be able to show that this ‘interliterary community’ or ‘Iberian polysystem’ is something different, and also something richer, than the mere juxtaposition of its components. For instance, it should be able to better include and explain the case of bilingual or transculturated authors (in Ďurišin’s terms ‘multi-domicile writers’, 1988: 130), as well as the specific mechanisms that configure cultural interrelations, among which, as Itamar Even-Zohar has repeatedly pointed out, translation plays a significant role (see Lafarga et al. 2011; Gallén et al. 2011).
It is in these liminal spaces where Iberian Studies should be at home: not only in a questioning of national and disciplinary boundaries, but in a constant self-reflection that avoids both essentialism and triumphalism. Only by focusing on the relations between what is peripheral or even omitted by the traditional canon or literary history, and on the relation between these peripheries and the canonical centres, will Iberian Studies grow as a field and offer new possibilities of analysis. This includes geographical peripheries (the non-centre-mediated relations between Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country, for instance), but also cultural peripheries inside each
individual literary and cultural system. While Iberian Studies radically question the existence of national boundaries, they too often show an unexamined respect for the established canon, merely establishing links between some of the best known and most studied cultural nodes in Iberian cultural history, such as Unamuno, Pessoa or Saramago, to name but a few obvious examples.
This danger of contributing to the same hegemonic discourses (i.e. an uncontested national centrality and a well-established cultural history and canon) is not just a theoretical one: the practices of Iberian Studies analysed so far show that Spanish (or Castilian) literature and culture still occupy centre stage. This Hispano-centrism (which undermines, if not cancels out, the ideological and epistemological project of Iberian Studies) is visible in many recent publications that identify themselves with Iberian Studies; for instance, out of the 50 chapters that comprise the Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies (Muñoz-Basols et al. 2017), 43 deal with Spanish (or Castilian) history or literature, and of those, eighteen do so without comparing it with any other Iberian geocultural space. In the case of the Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, the first volume (Cabo Aseguinolaza et al. 2010) is much more balanced (22 texts focus on Spain/Castile, nineteen on Portugal, thirteen on Catalonia, twelve on Galicia and seven on the Basque Country) than the second (Domínguez et al. 2016: 37 texts on Spain/Castile, seventeen on Portugal, fourteen on Catalonia, nine on Galicia and nine on the Basque Country). On the other hand, out of the 1254 entries currently included in the IStReS database (Gimeno Ugalde and Pérez Isasi 2017), 797 (almost two-thirds) deal with Spain/Castile.
The need to stay alert to ‘Spanish nationalist excess’, in Gabilondo’s (2013–14) words, is obvious, and should be combined with an equally strong awareness of a
possible ‘Iberian essentialist excess’: the tendency or temptation to build an epistemological wall that severs Iberian cultural phenomena from any other space, even from that with which they were historically related. A good example of this implicit or explicit questioning of national boundaries in literature and culture, and at the same time of Iberian Studies’ own limits and limitations, is Katiuscia Darici’s Ph.D. thesis, presented at the University of Verona in December 2017. While it positions itself clearly and explicitly within the field of Iberian Studies (Darici 2017: 23–36), it analyses literary works that break through or question the geographical limits of Iberia: Pandora al Congo by Albert Sánchez Piñol, El viajero del siglo by Andrés Neuman and La filla estrangera by Najat El Hachmi.
What Darici’s thesis signals is that it could be fruitful, although challenging, to explore the possibilities of post-national literary history, as proposed and experimented with in Gabilondo’s Before Babel: ‘a postnational history is more interested in explaining where the system fails, i.e. the cracks and noises of any system. It aims at historicizing any system and ultimately questioning the very idea of a system’ (Gabilondo 2016: 59). While Iberian Studies may still be in the system historization stage, this process may be greatly enriched by the simultaneous study of what resists being systemic: the fringe or liminal spaces and countercultural products that have been and are still being excluded from our considerations. In this sense, crossing Iberian Studies with Subaltern Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Translation Studies, Gender Studies or Queer Studies (all of which have already started being applied to Iberian phenomena, mainly in Anglo-American academia) could bring a new phase to the field.
By way of conclusion, it will be useful to return to Joan Ramon Resina: the innovation that Iberian Studies has brought forward does not merely lie in an
amplification of the field of study, from a national to a supranational level. It is not a mere juxtaposition of literary and cultural canons or literary and cultural histories, and even less a reaffirmation of a traditional Hispanic canon, with a few token elements from ‘peripheral’ cultures. It also cannot pretend to solve all the problems, contradictions and limitations of national literary histories, just by choosing a different, bigger, more complex geographical space; a geographical space, no matter how self-evident it may seem, does not in itself create a field of inquiry. In this way, Iberian Studies are based in two apparently contradictory statements: that Iberian cultures constitute a specific kind of geocultural entity (an ‘interliterary polysystem’, in Arturo Casas’s words); and that this historical and cultural entity is not an essentialist or idealistic construction, but a historical construction in constant need of reexamination. In other words, Iberian Studies will only have a place, be it in Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies or Area Studies, if they are able to show that they offer a better understanding of how the literary and cultural productions of the Iberian Peninsula interact in a dynamic, multicentric, rhyzomatic way, without refusing any of the theoretical and methodological proposals that make this a lively field of discussion and reflection.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, in 2013 Iberian Studies were in dire need of three things: ‘theoretical reflections on their specificity, their methodologies, and the specific set(s) of phenomena with which they work; networks of communication that allow scholars working in this area to communicate with each other; and some level of institutional or academic recognition’ (Pérez Isasi 2013). In the past five years, the field has progressed in all three aspects, thanks to contributions that arrive from both sides of the Atlantic, and thanks to initiatives that try to bridge the gap
between the two. I hope that the work of disambiguation that I have tried to carry out will also promote dialogue between different trends and traditions of Iberian Studies, so that the field can move forward without losing its plurality and its richness.
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Contributor details
Santiago Pérez Isasi is assistant researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. He is currently undertaking a research project funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), entitled ‘Digital Map of Iberian Literary Relations (1870–1930)’ (IF/00838/2014). He is also the coordinator, together with Esther Gimeno Ugalde, of Project Iberian Studies Reference Site (IStReS).
Contact:
Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, Almeda da Universidade, 1600-214 Lisbon, Portugal.
E-mail: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9548-4655 Notes
1 This article is a result of the ongoing research on ‘Nationalism and Literary Regenerations in the Iberian Peninsula (1868-1936)’ and the associated Exploratory Project Digital Map of Iberian Literary Relations (Ref: IF/00838/2014), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT-IP).
2 To name but a few recent ones: the annual conference of the Association for Contemporary Iberian Studies (ACIS), held every September in the United Kingdom, Spain or Portugal; the annual Forum for Iberian Studies organized by Oxford University; annual symposia organized by the UC Comparative Iberian Studies Working Group; II Jornadas de Estudios Culturales Ibéricos, which took place in Chemnitz in November 2017; the conference Os Estudos Ibéricos a partir da periferia, organized in Lisbon in March 2018; and the first IberTRANSLATIO conference, which will be held in Lisbon in March 2019.
3 It could be argued that a similar turn has displaced the centre of Lusophone Studies in the United States, from Portugal to Brazil, as manifested by the increase in programmes of
‘(Portuguese and) Luso-Brazilian Studies’ in many British and American universities. This could be linked with the general preference towards Latin America at the expense of the Iberian ‘metropolis’, as was the case with American Hispanism, but also with the growing prevalence of Brazil as a global economic, political and cultural agent in the twenty-first century (Dauvergne and Farias 2012).
4 There have been many publications, in recent years, that question and criticize Hispanism and propose alternative methodologies, from within the Anglo-American academic world and also (although more rarely) from Spain and the rest of the Iberian Peninsula: works such as Ideologies of Hispanism (Moraña 2005), Spain beyond Spain (Epps and Fernández Cifuentes 2005), New Spain, New Literatures (Martín-Estudillo and Spadaccini 2010), Un Hispanismo para el siglo XXI (Cornejo Parriego and Villamandos Ferreira 2011), Nuevos hispanismos: Para una crítica del lenguaje dominante (Ortega 2012) or Los límites del Hispanismo: Nuevos métodos, nuevas fronteras, nuevos generous (Pérez Isasi et al. 2016). All of these are collective volumes that
