Iberian Studies: Reflections Across Borders and Disciplines

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Núria Codina Solà / Teresa Pinheiro

Introduction: Iberian Studies – Reterritorialising the Peninsula?

All of a sudden, I saw it real and perceptible before my eyes. The Pyrenees are an incredible barrier separating the Iberian Peninsula from France and the rest of Europe. Yes, there must be something different on the other side; a very special world opens up there!¹

The German historian Willy Andreas wrote these words at a special time in European history. In Travel Impressions from Spain and Portugal, he gives an account of his journey to the Iberian Peninsula during World War II. His narrative is full of othering strategies, constructing an opposition between Europe and the Iberian Peninsula and postulating a monolithic unity on the other side of the Pyrenees. The overwhelming spatial impression of Iberia seen from a bird’s-eye perspective on a flight from Stuttgart to Madrid intensifies the author’s imagination of an exotic world on the other side. The Iberian Other is the flipside of central Europe – peace, light, plethora and prosperity contrasting with war, darkness, deprivation and destruction – but is also a resonance chamber for orientalist projections of European topoi.

Over half a century later, the political map of Europe and the imagined geographies of the Iberian Peninsula have changed radically. Spain and Portugal are no longer conceived as being outside Europe, and the exoticism emanating from Andreas’ account no longer applies to the European context of Erasmus exchanges, the Schengen area and low-cost flights. How then can we explain the emergence of Iberian Studies in academic research? Does it mean to return to pre-war perceptions of Iberia as something essentially non-European, as the Other? Does it not re-ontologise and re-territorialise a space that, following the failure of Area Studies, requires differentiation? Indeed, using a spatial category to define a research field entails the risk of being misunderstood or even of falling prey to holistic temptations regarding the Peninsula. At the same time, however, there is a need for science to accompany and explain social, political and epistemological changes. In the past forty years, much has changed both in the Iberian Peninsula and in academia – and Iberian ← 7 | 8 → Studies is a response to those changes. Yet as an emerging twenty-first-century research practice, Iberian Studies cannot perpetuate the politically biased categorisations of twentieth-century Area Studies, which was significantly influenced by the geopolitical interests of the European colonial powers and the post-war United States.² There are good reasons to come back to the space metaphor as a heuristic category to name a new research paradigm that overcomes methodological nationalism and disciplinary partition in the study of the Iberian cultures and societies; however, there is a need to reflect critically on its premises and effects.

This book contributes to a reflection on Iberian Studies as an emergent epistemological field in Western academia. The field of Iberian Studies, understood as “the methodological consideration of the Iberian Peninsula as a complex, multilingual cultural and literary system”,³ has expanded considerably in the last decades. This is the result both of the political changes in Spain and Portugal since their democratisation processes – unleashed in Portugal with the Carnation Revolution in April 1974 and in Spain with Franco’s death in November 1975 – and the failure of national philologies to react to those developments, which require more decentralised and transdisciplinary approaches.

In Spain, Franco’s death in 1975 opened the way to democratisation and decentralisation. The 1978 Constitution struck a balance between the unitary national identity promoted during the dictatorship and the aspirations of the so-called historical nationalities – Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country –, expanding the devolution process to the whole territory with the establishment of 17 autonomous communities, all with a similar degree of self-government. While it is true that this decentralisation was a political response to the so-called peripheral nationalisms’ claims for more autonomy, it also encouraged cultural production in the different languages, assuming diversity as an identitarian trace of democratic Spain. The State of Autonomies in some cases brought about a veritable cultural explosion, from education to decentralised book markets, film and television productions, theatre, press and cultural affairs. This applies in particular to co-official languages, such as Basque, Catalan and Galician, but to a certain extent other languages have also experienced renewed momentum over the past decades. The cultural and linguistic decentralisation strengthened the formation of centrifugal systems of meaning production. Questions concerning ← 8 | 9 → Spain today – coping with the past of war and dictatorship, evaluating the transition to democracy, equating concepts of collective identity in the context of political decentralisation and Europeanisation, questions of gender and social equality, the role of immigration in creating modern, European and cosmopolitan societies, to name just a few – are approached very differently in the different regions of the Spanish state. Attached to the Castilian language and concerned first and foremost with literature, Hispanism alone – as the classical research practice associated with the study of Spain – is unable to cope with this cultural and linguistic diversity.

Unlike Spain, the political agents of Portugal’s transition to democracy did not have to deal with internal nationalisms – quite the contrary. Political and territorial devolution has been a project of the political elites and was rejected by Portuguese voters in the 1998 regionalisation referendum. However, Portugal also has had to deal with territorial changes, albeit in the opposite direction to Spain. The decolonisation process in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution led to the recentralisation and reduction of the nation state to its European dimension. It may appear paradoxical that this territorial recentralisation did not lead to the country’s cultural homogenisation. Culturally and linguistically, the end of the Portuguese Empire resulted in migration from the former colonies to Portugal and the formation of diaspora, shaping a diverse society under democracy. Although Portugal is far less linguistically diverse than Spain and only recognises Mirandese as a co-official language, the fact is that Capeverdianu and Guinean Kriol among others are pivotal vehicles of cultural meaning in post-colonial Portuguese society.

Iberian Studies thus emerged out of the need to open towards diversity and deconstruct biases of cultural and linguistic homogeneity based on the nation states. Diversity implies looking beyond national boundaries. In fact, Iberian Studies is also a response to the rapprochement between Spain and Portugal after the democratic transition. The end of the dictatorships brought with it the decline of nationalism and isolation. The Carnation Revolution attracted significant attention in late Francoist Spanish society⁴ – the revolutionary tourism at that time heralded the end of a century of mistrust and ignorance between Spain and Portugal. The simultaneous accession of both Iberian countries to the European Community in 1986 meant a symbolic milestone in their political rapprochement. Their political agendas crossed again. The common challenges arising from European integration and globalisation made evident the need to study the histories, cultures and literatures of both Iberian countries from a comparative point of view. ← 9 | 10 →

Indeed, there has been an undeniable convergence not only in political but also in scientific terms. It is hardly surprising that one of the first attempts at scientific cooperation since the democratisation of both countries came from Geography, a research field used to ignoring state borders in the study of geographic phenomena (rivers and mountains do not recognise boundaries, after all). In the late 1970s, the Spanish and the Portuguese Geographic Societies launched the Colóquio Ibérico de Geografía, which celebrated its 16th edition in 2018.⁵ Other social sciences and humanities took longer to acknowledge what seemed obvious in Geography. In 2001, in an edited volume with the telling title La mirada cruzada en la Península Ibérica, María Cátedra aimed to counterbalance the mutual ignorance still prevalent among Portuguese and Spanish anthropologists despite their geographical proximity.⁶ Since then, much has been done to explore continuities and mutual influences in the Peninsula beyond the nation states, especially within literary studies⁷ and history.⁸

Nonetheless, Iberian Studies is far from a consolidated field, and the degree of engagement and institutionalisation differs in both countries. Paradoxically, and in spite of the dominance of Spanish in Iberian Studies, most of the publications and projects with an Iberian approach in Spain come from “the periphery of the ← 10 | 11 → system: either the academic periphery (for instance, the very few Departments of Romance Philology left, such as the one at the Complutense University of Madrid) or from the geographical periphery (Galicia, Catalonia, Extremadura).”⁹ In Portugal, the interest in Iberian Studies is growing steadily thanks to the efforts of Maria Idalina Resina Rodrigues among others, who as early as 1987 published a comparative study of literary and cultural production in the Iberian Peninsula entitled Estudos Ibéricos – Da cultura à literatura: pontos de encontro, séculos XIII a XVII.¹⁰ Currently, comparative Iberian research is spearheaded by the Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon, where the conference Looking at Iberia from a Comparative Perspective was held in 2011 – one of the most fruitful stimuli for the establishment of Iberian Studies.¹¹

At the same time, Iberian Studies is a logical reaction to changes that go beyond Iberian society and Iberian academia. The formation of Iberian Studies as a new research field was also propitiated by the shifts within the academic areas concerned with the Iberian Peninsula outside Spain and Portugal. These developments took shape mostly in the Anglophone context, where the consolidation of World Literature and Cultural Studies was paralleled by the crisis of Hispanism and Lusitanism and the epistemological reorientation of Area Studies and European Studies. In the United States, the influence of Latin American Studies (which was comparative from the beginning) helped to reformulate the role of Hispanism and inaugurate “an alternative paradigm” that revised its “theoretical and methodological framework as much as its object of study.”¹² Following the comparative and transnational approach of World Literature or Area Studies, Iberian Studies “look[s] beyond Spain and Portugal as states”¹³ and searches for relations between the Peninsula’s various cultures and literatures as well as for “intersections with other cultural areas outside the Peninsula.”¹⁴ Yet, far from ← 11 | 12 → imagining the Peninsula (or the nation state) as a culturally homogeneous space, Iberian Studies highlights its cultural and linguistic diversity and is not afraid of confronting its discontinuities. In her comprehensive article “The Iberian Turn: An Overview of Iberian Studies in the United States”, Esther Gimeno Ugalde offers a comprehensive outline of the researchers, activities and institutions that contributed to Iberian Studies in the American academy. Joan Ramon Resina’s Del hispanismo a los estudios ibéricos is regarded as a “starting point for the field in the United States.”¹⁵ However, there were some ground-breaking initiatives that preceded the publication of Resina’s book and opened the way for a multilingual and complex view of the Iberian space. For example, the University of California, Santa Barbara, “was one of the first in the US to include the study of all five of the Iberian Peninsula’s official languages and their respective literatures in its course offerings.”¹⁶ Similarly, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York hosts chairs in Galician, Catalan and Basque, established in 1988, 2003 and 2011 respectively. Moreover, as early as 1967, the University of Nevada, Reno, founded the Basque Studies Program, which later became the current Center for Basque Studies.

In the UK, the strong influence of Cultural Studies contributed to a solid tradition of Iberian Studies, mostly devoted to the study of cultural and social change in contemporary Iberian societies. Helena Buffery, Stuart Davis and Kirsty Hooper, authors of the seminal Reading Iberia volume (2007), helped to situate Iberian Studies as an alternative to the language and literature disciplines in the UK and highlighted the interdisciplinary profile of the field. On an institutional level, Queen Mary, Richmond, Birmingham, Newcastle, Liverpool, Warwick, Birkbeck and Sheffield University among others offer courses on both Portuguese and Spanish culture, sometimes also including courses on the other cultural and linguistic communities of the Iberian Peninsula (mainly Catalan).¹⁷ In addition, the Association for Contemporary Iberian Studies, established in 1978, and the International Journal of Contemporary Iberian Studies, first published in 1988, ← 12 | 13 → have played a pivotal role in establishing an international and multidisciplinary research on Iberian Studies in close association with scholars from the Peninsula.

In continental Europe and outside Spain and Portugal, the study of Iberia looks back to distinct scientific traditions that differ substantially from those in the American and British contexts. In France, the existence of significant Iberian minorities due to exile and migration movements from Spain and Portugal during the dictatorships contributed to the early institutionalisation of Iberian Studies. The 34th Congrès de la Société des Hispanistes Français, entitled “Cultures lusophones et hispanophones: penser la relation” and organised by Maria Graciete Besse in 2009, helped to strengthen the already existing Iberian tradition, visible in research groups such as the Centre des Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur les Mondes Ibériques et Contemporains (CRIMIC) at the Sorbonne, which focuses on literary and cultural production from the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America from the Nineteenth century onwards. This kind of institutionalised centre for Iberian Studies is lacking in Germany, where the study of the Iberian Peninsula is either a (rather small) part of multidisciplinary research centres on Iberian and Latin American Area Studies or is associated with the study of national languages and literatures in romance languages departments. The presence of Iberian Studies as a research agenda in its own right is limited to the contributions of a few university departments in Bamberg, Chemnitz, Göttingen and Marburg. The Jornadas de Estudios Culturales Ibéricos, established in 2014, represent an attempt to institutionalise Iberian Studies in Germany.

Despite these and numerous other contributions – or precisely due to their exponential increase in a relatively short time frame –, Iberian Studies is still in “need [of] a coherent set of methodological tools and theoretical frameworks”.¹⁸ Rather than offering a final statement on what constitutes Iberian Studies, this volume intends to showcase the variety of topics, methods and locations that the field encompasses. In order to bring cultural and linguistic diversity to the fore, it seeks to balance the implicit centralist approach that still dominates the field. As remarked by Gimeno Ugalde and Pérez Isasi in this volume, most publications in Iberian Studies focus on Spain as their main object of analysis, while Portugal and the other cultural and linguistic areas (Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country, in decreasing order of occurrence) occupy a secondary position and/or are often related to the centre. Therefore, this volume privileges a comparative approach to the two Iberian nation states (Spain and Portugal) and avoids turning the field into a reloaded version of Hispanism. Moreover, it covers a diverse array ← 13 | 14 → of cultural and linguistic areas, ranging from Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country to Asturias and Aragon, analysing their cultural productions in their own right (and, in most cases, in their own languages). To this end, section IV of this book opens up a space of dialogue between Galicia and the Basque Country. It is through the juxtaposition of the two regions – and not by addressing their relation to an assumed Castilian centre – that their interrelations and discontinuities become visible.

In addition, this volume aims to strengthen interdisciplinarity within Iberian Studies. With exception of the UK, where cultural analyses are common practice, Iberian Studies tends to focus almost exclusively on literary texts, ignoring other cultural manifestations that provide valuable tools for the analysis of identity discourses, cultural transfers and social transformations. The contributions in this book range from History, Digital Humanities, Literary History, History of Philosophical Thought, Literary Analysis and Cultural Studies and are based on literary texts, newspapers, historical archives, political discourses, online databases, legal texts, interviews and drawings.

Finally, as a discipline that legitimises itself through the reference to a specific space (the Iberian Peninsula) and whose mission runs the risk of being (mis)conceived as reterritorialising, it is almost imperative for Iberian Studies to address those identities and cultural phenomena that transcend the Peninsula’s geographical borders. Pérez Isasi provides a few examples that require further consideration:

For instance, how do these studies of Iberian literatures deal with its insularities, or with what in earlier times were Iberian colonies, including Latin America or the Lusophone world? Is this Iberian division strong enough to justify the exclusion of Basque literature written in Iparralde, the French part of the Basque Country? How about Latin, Arab or Hebrew writers in the Peninsula? Are writers from modern day Gibraltar British, Iberian, or both?¹⁹

The impact of the Sephardic and Islamic heritage in the Iberian Peninsula is a case in point of the need to consider Iberian Studies as a deterritorialised paradigm and is therefore discussed in the final chapter of this book.

The articles are organised in five different thematic chapters, each of them exploring distinct ways of rethinking Iberia. The first section, entitled “Theoretical Reflections on Iberian Studies”, provides an overview of the state of the art in Iberian Studies and discusses questions concerning its future development. In “Lo ‘ibérico’ en los Estudios Ibéricos: meta-ánalisis del campo a través de sus publicaciones (2000-)”, Esther Gimeno Ugalde and Santiago Pérez Isasi give ← 14 | 15 → an account of the goals, scope and limitations of Iberian Studies by reviewing nine of the most relevant publications in the field and analysing the 1.630 items included in the Iberian Studies Reference Site (IStReS) according to geographical areas and language of publication. Based on this analysis, they formulate several suggestions on how to overcome the inherent centripetal structure of the field. In “Estudos Ibéricos e História Ibérica: passado, presente e futuro”, José Miguel Sardica points to some flaws of Iberian historiography, such as the dominance of Spanish-oriented studies and Portugal’s subordinate role. In order to overcome this asymmetry, he highlights the benefits of a comparative historical analysis and illustrates them by revising the mutual influences, interdependencies and dialectics of Spanish and Portuguese history during the twentieth century, in a convincing approach to Iberian history as entangled history or histoire croisée.

The second section – “Entangled Cultural History” – puts Sardica’s approach into practice, offering several case studies of a relational historical analysis of the Iberian Peninsula. In “¿Qué dijeron los papeles? Intercambios ibéricos desde la perspectiva de la prensa histórica”, Pablo Hernández Ramos analyses the political statements of nineteenth-century Madrid newspapers with regard to Iberism. Regardless of their ideological differences and their contrasting views on the form of government (monarchy versus republic), the newspapers contributed to developing an Iberian consciousness and suggested administrative and economic measures to bring the Iberian union to fruition. In “¿Un reflejo, una consecuencia o un paralelismo? Las contestaciones sociales en Portugal y España entre 1900 y 1910”, Beatriz Valverde Contreras compares social protest and street revolts in Portugal and Spain between 1900 and 1910. Despite the diverse factors that led to these upheavals, Valverde highlights the permeability of the border and shows how social movements and political ideas travelled across countries, turning the public space into a space of protest. In “Espanhóis em Portugal: ócio, militância e exílio no contexto do processo revolucionário (1974–1975)”, Rita Luís looks at the Spanish so-called revolutionary tourism in Portugal during the Carnation Revolution. Rather than a simple leisure activity, tourism is conceived as an emancipatory political practice against Francoism: many Spaniards travelled to Portugal to participate in political activities and access cultural goods that were forbidden in Spain. Using interviews, archives and newspapers, Luís traces the Spanish presence in revolutionary Portugal and expounds its reception both on the Portuguese and the Spanish side.

The contributions in section three – “Centre and Periphery Dynamics in Literature and Politics” – explore literary and cultural relations on the Iberian Peninsula, which are often characterised by power dynamics and a core/periphery ← 15 | 16 → structure. These dynamics become particularly evident in the case of Asturias. Although the Asturian literature and language do not enjoy the same degree of recognition as Basque, Catalan or Galician literature today, the general interest in regional movements during Romanticism contributed to the reception of Asturian literature in Madrid and the rest of Spain, as described by Juan C. Busto Cortina in “Visiones desde el centro hacia la periferia en el XIX: el caso de la literatura asturiana”. In “Vic i Barcelona: perifèria i centralitat a la literatura catalana”, Núria Codina addresses the province vs. capital dichotomy in Catalan literature, revealing the cultural and social tensions and power relations that operate on a regional level and within the same cultural and linguistic community. She analyses the symbolic representation of Vic as a provincial city in Miquel Llor’s Laura a la ciutat dels sants (1931), Maria Àngels Anglada’s No em dic Laura (1981) and Najat El Hachmi’s La filla estrangera (2015) and compares it with Clarín’s depiction of Vetusta in La Regenta (1884–85). Manuel López Forjas emphasises the value of Joaquín Costa’s thought for Iberian Studies in “¿Estereotipos o complementos de la nación ibérica? Joaquín Costa y las diferencias regionales en España para su articulación política”. Costa’s pluralistic view of Spain, based on his identification with Aragon and his thoughts on the role of Spain in the European context, resonate with current debates in Iberian Studies and constitute an important historical document in terms of discursive formation. In “Iberian Nearby Experiences: (In)utility, Lightness, (of Being and Things)”, Enric Bou examines representations of everyday life in the works of several twentieth-century Iberian writers – Pessoa, Castelao, Josep M. de Sagarra, Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Tere Irastortza – and associates the significance of this experience in Iberian literature with the past centrality and current peripheral position of Iberian cultures in political terms.

The section “Decentralised Literature and Memory” explores the representations of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism in contemporary Galician and Basque literature. In “(Des)memoria cultural e ficción literaria: o caso da narrativa galega actual sobre o franquismo”, Diego Rivadulla Costa focuses on the memory boom in contemporary Galician literature, particularly from 2000 onwards, and situates it within the historical and political context in Galicia and Spain. He distinguishes between two modes of narration, mimetic and reconstructive, and analyses their different functions in Galician literature and its specific sociocultural context. Izaro Arroita Azkarate and Mikel Ayerbe Sudupe discuss an example of so-called perpetrator fiction in Basque literature in their article entitled “La transmisión de una memoria crítica en la obra de Ramon Saizarbitoria: análisis de la representación del falangista en La educación de Lili”. Ramon Saizarbitoria’s novel La educación de Lili is representative of the reflexive mnemonic mode, as ← 16 | 17 → it illustrates the process of remembering and helps to blur black-and-white conceptions of the Falangist side and war sides in general.

The final section, “Deterritorialising Iberian Studies: Arab and Jewish Heritage”, seeks to expand the spatial and epistemological limits of the field by integrating minority identities and diasporic groups. Nicola Gilmour’s essay “The Recuperation of Spain’s Islamic Past in Contemporary Historical Fiction” deals with the representation of Al-Andalus in contemporary historical novels. They expand traditional conceptions of Spanish identity by reinforcing the notion of convivencia and embracing the mythscape of a tri-cultural past. In “Revisiting Isomorphism: The Routes of Sefarad in Spain and Portugal”, Silvina Schammah Gesser and Teresa Pinheiro consider the national agendas behind the Spanish and Portuguese recovering of the Jewish past. By focusing on the Spanish Red de Juderías and its Portuguese counterpart, the Rede de Judiarias, they show how these touristic activities pursue major economic and diplomatic goals.

The contributions to this book show what Iberian Studies stands for. It conceives the Iberian Peninsula as culturally and linguistically diverse, a space where centuries-old exchange processes intersect. It is committed to the democratisation of culture as defended in Cultural Studies since its emergence in post-war UK, applying it to the so-called Iberian peripheries: the borders, the outskirts of the big cities and the provinces take centre stage as much as state capitals. Barcelona can be seen as the capital of a periphery when related to Madrid, or as the centre of cosmopolitan Catalanism. In its commitment to diversity, Iberian Studies today does not seem to suffer from holistic ambitions.

This book was made possible thanks to the contributions of numerous people and institutions. The essays originated in the II Jornadas de Estudios Ibéricos hosted by the Iberian Studies Chair at the Institute of European Studies, Chemnitz University in 2017. We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to Constanze Friedrich Aguilar, Silke Hünecke, Ludmilla Jabs, Julian Kühlborn, Anja Riedel, Ana Troncoso and Thomas Weißmann for their valuable assistance during the meeting. The conference and the production of this book was kindly supported by the Instituto Camões and the Spanish Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. We are especially indebted to the contributors, who travelled long distances and faced the cold of Chemnitz’s November days to reinforce the dialogue between academic Iberianists based not only in Spain and Portugal but also in Italy, Germany, Austria, Israel and New Zealand. The strong representation of young scholars with high levels of scientific sophistication and linguistic skills in several Iberian languages reinforces our conviction that we are but at the beginning of a solid and fruitful paradigm called Iberian Studies. ← 17 | 18 →

Bibliography

Andreas, Willy: Reisebilder aus Spanien und Portugal. F. Bruckmann: München 1949.

Buffery, Helena / Davis, Stuart / Hooper, Kirsty (eds.): Reading Iberia: Theory / History / Identity. Peter Lang: Oxford 2007.

Cabo Aseguinolaza, Fernando / Domínguez, César / Abuín, Anxo (eds.): A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. Vol. 1. John Benjamins, Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée: Amsterdam, Philadelphia 2010.

Cátedra, María (ed.): La mirada cruzada en la Península Ibérica. Perspectivas desde la Antropología Social en España y Portugal. Catarata: Madrid 2001.

Domínguez, César / Abuín González, Anxo / Sapega, Ellen (eds.): A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. Vol. 2. John Benjamins, Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée: Amsterdam, Philadelphia 2016.