El hispanismo en los Estados Unidos y la 'España plural'

Abstract

Most scholarly work on national literatures seems to take for granted the existence of its object of inquiry, and seldom addresses the segmentation of modern culture according to national and/or linguistic boundaries. During the last twenty years, however, the history and politics of Hispanism has been the focus of an intense debate among scholars. This need to rethink the disciplinary boundaries — and even the name — of the study of Spanish or Hispanic culture(s) can be understood as a response to two developments: the general shift from 'literary criticism' to 'cultural studies', and a more specific remapping of the cultural geography of the Spanish-speaking world. If the first is the result of a paradigmatic change in the Humanities at large, the second is closely linked to the emergence of areas that had remained until then marginal to the core of Hispanic studies: the literatures of Latin America after the boom of the 1970s, the culture of Latinos in the United States in the wake of multiculturalism, and of 'peripheral' cultures in post-Franco Spain. This essay examines how these developments and debates have fostered a rethinking and in fact a reconfiguration of the institutional life of American Hispanism. It calls for a transformation of the field of so-called 'Peninsular Literature' (traditionally centred on the production in the Spanish, i.e. Castilian, language) into a wider field where the interliterary relations and internal complexity of multilingual culture in the Iberian Peninsula become major objects of analysis and research.

Most scholarly work on national literatures seems to take for granted the existence of its object of inquiry, and seldom addresses the segmentation of modern culture according to national and/or linguistic boundaries. During the last twenty years, however, the history and politics of Hispanism has been the focus of an intense debate among scholars. This need to rethink the disciplinary boundaries — and even the name — of the study of Spanish or Hispanic culture(s) can be understood as a response to two developments: the general shift from 'literary criticism' to 'cultural studies', and a more specific remapping of the cultural geography of the Spanish-speaking world. If the first is the result of a paradigmatic change in the Humanities at large, the second is closely linked to the emergence of areas that had remained until then marginal to the core of Hispanic studies: the literatures of Latin America after the boom of the 1970s, the culture of Latinos in the United States in the wake of multiculturalism, and of 'peripheral' cultures in post-Franco Spain. This essay examines how these developments and debates have fostered a rethinking and in fact a reconfiguration of the institutional life of American Hispanism. It calls for a transformation of the field of so-called 'Peninsular Literature' (traditionally centred on the production in the Spanish, i.e. Castilian, language) into a wider field where the interliterary relations and internal complexity of multilingual culture in the Iberian Peninsula become major objects of analysis and research.

La mayoría de los estudios sobre literaturas nacionales parece dar por sentada la existencia de su objeto de investigación, y apenas cuestiona la segmentación de la cultura moderna en base a fronteras nacionales o lingüísticas. Durante los últimos veinte años, sin embargo, la historia y la política del hispanismo ha sido objeto de intenso debate académico. Esta necesidad de reconsiderar las fronteras disciplinarias — e incluso el nombre mismo — del estudio de las culturas españolas o hispánicas puede entenderse como una respuesta a dos acontecimientos: el giro generalizado de la 'crítica literaria' hacia los 'estudios culturales', y la más peculiar reformulación de la geografía cultural del mundo de habla española. Mientras el primero es resultado de un cambio paradigmático en el conjunto de las humanidades, el segundo está íntimamente ligado a la emergencia de áreas que habían sido consideradas marginales para los estudios hispánicos: las literaturas de Latinoamérica tras el boom de la década de 1970, la cultura de los latinos en los Estados Unidos en aras del multiculturalismo, y las culturas 'periféricas' en la España postfranquista. Este ensayo examina cómo estos procesos y debates han promovido la revisión e incluso la reconfiguración de la vida institucional del hispanismo norteamericano, y propone una transformación del estudio de la denominada 'literatura peninsular' (centrado tradicionalmente en la producción en lengua castellana) en una disciplina más amplia que tenga como objeto prioritario las relaciones interliterarias y la complejidad interna de la cultura multilingüe de la Península Ibérica.