Hispanisms in the Works of Pedro Henríquez Ureña

In this article the author looks at the concept of Hispanism in the work of the Dominican writer Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Spain was present in Henríquez Ureña´s personal, humanistic, philological and essayistic interests. Linguistic brotherhood was superior to all other biases he could have held toward peninsular culture. Beginning with "En la orilla. Mi España" (1920), the writings that the author dedicates to Spanish literature are rich and plentiful, but they are not just essays and articles. In the "encyclopédiste" wake, he was closer to embracing an American Project, without giving up its Spanish roots, and open to the concept of “Hispanic”, what today we would call “transatlantic”.

“Africa begins in …”: Donato Ndongo Bidyogo’s and Francisco Zamora Loboch’s Transatlantic Cartographies

This essay takes as point of departure the well-known expression “Africa begins in the Pyrenees,” to evaluate the ways in which two postcolonial authors from Equatorial Guinea, Francisco Zamora Loboch (1948) and Donato Ndongo Bidyogo (1950) express the double consciousness that molds the writing of those living in exile in Spain, displaced by brutal dictatorships. Particular attention is paid to the transatlantic cartographies delineated by Donato Ndongo’s El metro (2007) [The subway], as it dramatizes the negotiation of Africanness in the city of Madrid, an emblem of present-day Fortress Europe. In Francisco Zamora’s case, the essay Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca (1994) [How to be Black and not die in Aravaca] and his 2009 novel Conspiración en el Green (el informe Abayak [Conspiracy in the green (The Abayak report)] demarcate the transatlantic cartographies questioning Spanish social and cultural practices that legitimize violence against Blacks.

Los amarres de la lengua: Spanish Exiles, Puerto Rican Intellectuals, and the Battle over Spanish, 1942–2016

The chapter provides a genealogy of the 2016 CILE (Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española), during which the Spanish officialdom celebrated Puerto Rico's linguistic ties to Spain as a 21st-century mercantile ploy. I review the language debates that raged in Puerto Rico in the 1940s, examining Pedro Salinas' 1948 Commencement Speech at the University of Puerto Rico, which would become his famed "Defensa del lenguaje"; revisiting Gov. Luis Muñoz Marín's 1953 speech "La personalidad puertorriqueña en el Estado Libre Asociado"; and ending with a brief coda on Ana Lydia Vega's 1981 short story "Pollito Chicken," to reflect on the positions shared by both Spanish exiles to the Caribbean and local intellectuals regarding language as a self-evident vessel of identity. The main argument is that a rhetoric of defense, crystallized in the 1940s, was redeployed by successive and presumptively opposite segments of the intelligentsia.

Transatlantic Film Studies in the Age of Neoliberalism: Towards a Postnational Cinema?

This essay argues that specialists in Transatlantic Film Studies need to contextualize their research agendas within the growing intensification of globalizing forces, above all, transnational capitalism. Within this historical context, the customary intellectual praise for aesthetic and cultural hybridity, alterity, self-dislocation and cosmopolitan deterritorialization is, at least, partially misguided. Due to the financial specificities of the film industry and its pervasive social preeminence, Transatlantic Film Studies have been a favorable academic venue to negatively evaluate the constrains, narrowness and reductive essentialism of the nation-state, as well of national communities and traditions. One should not overstate this argumentative gesture for three reasons. First, transatlantic artistic collaborations are never symmetrical and tend to be mediated by strong socio-economic and geopolitical inequalities. Second, the filmic interconnection between Spain and Latin American does not take place vis-a-vis, but under the commercial rules set by the US audiovisual mega-industry. Finally, it is a (partial) mistake to eulogize cultural miscegenation, migrancy and rhizomatic self-proliferation when many emancipatory, anti-imperialist movements have traditionally found and still find traction in autochthonous practices and habits. This is why the idea of a national cinema and specially of a national-popular cinema still deserves a careful, more dialectical attention.

The Exile as Disinherited: Pere Calders in Mexico

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Catalonia saw many of its writers and intellectuals leaving Spain for Latin America. Among them was Pere Calders. In 1937, he enlisted as a volunteer in the army of the Republic, and was appointed to the role of cartographer at the rearguard of Teruel. With the fall of the Republic, he was taken to the concentration camp of Prats de Mollo. At the end of the war, in 1939, Calders went into exile in Mexico, a country where he went on to live for twenty-three years. In exile, he encountered a different reality that often became an important aspect of his literary production, something clearly seen in his short novel Aquí descansa Nevares (1967). In this chapter, I shall argue that in Aquí descansa Nevares, Calders displays not only awareness but also recognition of both the indígenas’ cultural system of beliefs and their socio-political situation.

Luis Cernuda’s “Historial de un libro”: A Travelogue

The essay offers a reading of Luis Cernuda's intellectual biography, "Historial de un libro" (Chronicle of a Book), a travelogue where the author traces the routes through which his poetry was generated. In the chronicle life and poetry unfold in tandem and refract under mutual illumination. Cernuda's response to the voices with which he meets on his way from Spain to the New World forges a poetics of crossings, while it extends bridges between physical, metaphorical, and discursive territories. From a temporal and spatial point of view beyond the end of the journey, life and art form a horizon towards which the traveler is headed and on which, at the end, the poet inscribes his diaspora across countries and continents as translation and interpretation of a poetic continuum made of lived experience, literary depiction, and critical reading.

Rewriting the Colonial Past: Spanish Women Intellectuals as Agents of Cross-Cultural Literacy in the Mexican Press

The article examines the creation of a journalistic network between Mexico and Spain by women writers in the second half of the nineteenth-century. I argue that journalistic aesthetics and feminine didacticism were shared and stimulated through editorial relationships on both sides of the Atlantic. This editorial dialogue created a presence for Spanish women writers in the Mexican public sphere and opened up a debate regarding the construction of historical discourse. The illustrated feminine journal became a platform for experimentation with cultural categories and questioned the uni-directionality of historical discourse. It raises a debate regarding the compartmentalization of national histories and created a space in which culture was made intelligible for both sides of the Atlantic –a space of cross-cultural literacy. The study of the press is a tool to understand intellectual transatlantic networks and the formation of a transatlantic Republic of Letters.

Inscribing Islands: From Cuba to Fernando Pó and Back

In the construction of Atlantic paradigms, Africa—and its multiple intersections with both the Americas and Europe—has frequently been absent, or brought into the debate under the useful yet limited rubrics of diaspora, migration or creolization. In such configurations, the African continent typically emerges as an imagined presence for Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin-American or Afro-European definitions of identity. Re-engaging the Atlantic in a new direction could press us to move beyond these paradigms in which the energy driving the narrative originates in Europe or the Americas. Pursuing the turn towards a new island history of the Atlantic, this essay will address an array of links—trajectories, journeys, passages—between the islands of Cuba and Fernando Poo (today Bioko), during the second half of the nineteenth century. Fernando Poo –part of the Spanish empire since the eighteenth century— began to serve as the destination for the eastward movement of Cuban emancipated slaves, and as a prison colony for Cuban political deportees. Some of these deportees left detailed accounts of their Atlantic and African experiences. Addressing these deportee narratives, will provide a new discursive angle for critically re-locating Africa within the Atlantic, and will ask how reading the insular Caribbean from an island perspective might prove a useful disciplinary practice in the production of Atlantic knowledge.

Transatlantic Studies: The Discipline that Thinks Itself Beyond its Threshold

Transatlantic studies can be seen as a response to institutional pressures to rationalize resources by collapsing former units into “super-regional” frames of reference. Transatlanticism proposes an inter-continental framework, bringing under its canopy the cognate but often alienated specialties of Hispanism and Latin Americanism. In the “new” discipline, the old system of Hispanic studies, featuring the culture of Castilian Spain and its linguistic legacy in the nations born of its former colonies, reasserts itself under conditions of scarcity associated with the implosion of the Humanities. An alternative to this “modern” paradigm could be a postmodern, ironic discipline. The mark of the postmodern is the retention of pre-modern elements within an incongruous structure operating with a different functionality. For transatlantic Hispanism, irony could translate into awareness of the discipline’s imperial origins, while recasting it according to a new principle of organization that no longer rests on the alleged universality of an imperial language that fixes cultural value. An ironic discipline takes stock of its limits, and by doing so leaves them conceptually behind. In this way, and in this way only, it thinks the “trans” of the “trans” and assumes its place in the post-postmodern university.

Nicolás Guillén and Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa (1953)

The 1953 poetry notebook Poesia negra de expressão portuguesa [Black Poetry of Portuguese Expression] was first work that brought together negritude poetry from across the Lusophone African world. Edited by Angolan intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade and Sao Tomean poet Francisco Tenreiro, the short collection declares itself an anti-colonial intervention into the negritude movements underway in the Francophone world since the 1930s. Little has been made, however, of the notebook’s dedication to Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén or the inclusion of Guillén’s poem “Son Número 6” [Son Number 6] in the collection. This article argues that the juxtaposition of Guillén’s “Son No. 6” with the Lusophone poems consolidates an alternative transatlanticism that emphasizes Guillén as a black poet, rather than themes of racial and cultural mixing, and thus shifts the circuits of collaboration away from francophone negritude's colony-metropole axis to the South. Poetic techniques such as call-and-response and the socially-embedded, metonymic construction of blackness shared among Guillén and Lusophone poets Agostinho Neto, Noémia de Sousa, and António Jacinto show how the notebook establishes the origins of both negritude poetry and negritude identity in the trans-Atlantic poetic conversation itself.