Writing Galicia explores a part of Europe’s cultural and social landscape that has until now remained largely unmapped—the exciting body of creative work that, since the 1970s, has emerged as a result of contact between the small Atlantic nation of Galicia and the Anglophone world. Paying particular attention to the community of London Galicians and their descendants, this book traces representations of Galician cultural history through art and close, critical readings of literary works by, among others, Carlos Durán, Manuel Rivas, Xesús Fraga, and Ramiro Fonte. Too often neglected in literary studies, Galician culture is strongly evident throughout Europe’s cultural landscape, and this book allows us to reframe this small Atlantic culture.

Writing Galicia explores a part of Europe’s cultural and social landscape that has until now remained largely unmapped: the exciting body of creative work emerging since the 1970s from contact between the small Atlantic country of Galicia, in the far north-west of the Iberian peninsula, and the Anglophone world. Unlike the millions who participated in the mass migrations to Latin America during the 19th century, those who left Galicia for Northern Europe in their hundreds of thousands during the 1960s and 1970s have remained mostly invisible both in Galicia and in their host countries. This study traces the innovative mappings of Galician cultural history found in literary works by and about Galicians in the Anglophone world, paying particular attention to the community of ‘London Galicians’ and their descendants, in works by artists (Isaac Díaz Pardo), novelists (Carlos Durán, Manuel Rivas, Xesús Fraga, Xelís de Toro, Almudena Solana) and poets (Ramiro Fonte, Xavier Queipo, Erin Moure). The central argument of Writing Galicia is that the imperative to rethink Galician discourse on emigration cannot be separated from the equally urgent project to re-examine the foundations of Galician cultural nationalism, and that both projects are key to Galicia‘s ability to participate effectively in a 21st-century world. Its key theoretical contribution is to model a relational approach to Galician cultural history, which allows us to reframe this small Atlantic culture, so often dismissed as peripheral or minor, as an active participant in a network of relation that connects the local, national and global.

Ukrainian Galicia was home to Poles, Jews and Ukrainians for hundreds of years. It was witness to both World Wars, starvation, mass killings and independence movements. Family members of the authors include survivors of German concentration camps and the GULAG prisons. They fought in Austrian, Polish, Russian and German armies, as well as in the Ukrainian pro-independence army. They were arrested by the Gestapo and the NKVD, tortured and even declared dead. They survived against the most unlikely odds. Their stories, shadows and secrets permeate this book and provide a rich background to some of the most dramatic events humanity has witnessed.

This book examines contemporary audio/visual production in Galicia as privileged channels through which modern Galician cultural identities have been imagined, constructed and consumed, both at home and abroad.

Galician audio/visual culture has experienced an unprecedented period of growth following the process of political and cultural devolution in post-Franco Spain. This creative explosion has occurred in a productive dialogue with global currents and with considerable projection beyond the geopolitical boundaries of the nation and the state, but these seismic changes are only beginning to be the subject of attention of cultural and media studies. This book examines contemporary audio/visual production in Galicia as privileged channels through which modern Galician cultural identities have been imagined, constructed and consumed, both at home and abroad. The cultural redefinition of Galicia in the global age is explored through different media texts (popular music, cinema, video) which cross established boundaries and deterritorialise new border zones where tradition and modernity dissolve, generating creative tensions between the urban and the rural, the local and the global, the real and the imagined. The book aims for the deperipheralization and deterritorialization of the Galician cultural map by overcoming long-established hegemonic exclusions, whether based on language, discipline, genre, gender, origins, or territorial demarcation, while aiming to disjoint the center/periphery dichotomy that has relegated Galician culture to the margins. In essence, it is an attempt to resituate Galicia and Galician studies out of the periphery and open them to the world.

"Of all the differentiated regions comprising contemporary Spain, Galicia is possibly the most deeply marked by political, economic and cultural inequities throughout the centuries. Processes of national construction in the region have been patchily successful. However, Galicia's cultural distinctness is easily recognizable to the observer, from the language spoken in the region to the specific forms of the Galician built landscape, with its mixture of indigenous, imported and hybrid elements. The present volume offers English-language readers an in-depth introduction to the integral aspects of Galician cultural history, from pre-historical times to the present day. Whilst attention is given to the traditional areas of medieval culture, language, contemporary history and politics, the book also privileges compelling contemporary perspectives on cinema, architecture, the city of Santiago de Compostela and the urban qualities of Galician culture today." -- Provided by the publisher.

Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium: The Ends of Spanish Identity investigates the predominant perception of liminality—identity situated at a threshold, neither one thing nor another, but simultaneously both and neither—caused by encounters with otherness while negotiating identity in contemporary Spain. Examining how identity and alterity are parleyed through the cultural concerns of historical memory, gender roles, sex, religion, nationalism, and immigration, this study demonstrates how fictional representations of reality converge in a common structure wherein the end is not the end, but rather an edge, a liminal ground. On the border between two identities, the end materializes as an ephemeral limit that delineates and differentiates, yet also adjoins and approximates. In exploring the ends of Spanish fiction—both their structure and their intentionality—Liminal Fiction maps the edge as a constitutive component of narrative and identity in texts by Najat El Hachmi, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Javier Marías, Rosa Montero, and Manuel Rivas. In their representation of identity on the edge, these fictions enact and embody the liminal not as simply a transitional and transient mode but as the structuring principle of identification in contemporary Spain.

Galicia was created at the first partition of Poland in 1772 and disappeared in 1918. Yet, in slightly over a century, the idea of Galicia came to have meaning for both the peoples who lived there and the Habsburg government that ruled it. Indeed, its memory continues to exercise a powerful fascination for those who live in its former territories and for the descendants of those who emigrated out of Galicia. The idea of Galicia was largely produced by the cultures of two cities, Lviv and Cracow. Making use of travelers' accounts, newspaper reports, and literary works, Wolff engages such figures as Emperor Joseph II, Metternich, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Ivan Franko, Stanisław Wyspiański, Tadeusz "Boy" Żeleński, Isaac Babel, Martin Buber, and Bruno Schulz. He shows the exceptional importance of provincial space as a site for the evolution of cultural meanings and identities, and analyzes the province as the framework for non-national and multi-national understandings of empire in European history.

Beyond Sentidiño: New Diasporic Reflections on Galician Culture is an interdisciplinary study of Galician literature, languages, and cultures. The volume brings together essays from fields across the humanities and social sciences to foster a discussion that incorporates new concepts that, as of now, are not part of the imaginary of Galiza: gentrification, language imperialism, youth unemployment, deruralization and deindustrialization, media control, technocapitalism, and gender and sexual normativity. It also serves to moderate a conversation about how independence from the political, material, and sociocultural networks of autonomic Galiza allows diasporic scholars to think of Galician culture in a de-essentializing manner. Working and living in the diaspora provides a lens through which to unmask the hegemonic neocolonial and neoliberal representation and reproduction of Galicianness promoted by different social, political, and mediatic powers.

This book—aimed at both the general reader and the specialist—offers a transatlantic, transnational, and multidisciplinary cartography of the rapidly expanding intellectual field of Galician Studies. In the twenty-one essays that comprise the volume, leading scholars based in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand engage with this field from the perspectives of queer theory, Atlantic and diasporic thought, political ecology, hydropoetics, theories of space, trauma and memory studies, exile, national/postnational approaches, linguistic ideologies, ethnographic poetry and photography, Galician language in the US academic curriculum, the politics of children’s books, film and visual studies, the interrelation of painting and literature, and material culture. Structured around five organizational categories (Frames, Routes, Readings, Teachings, and Visualities), and adopting a pluricentric view of Galicia as an analytical subject of study, the book brings cutting-edge debates in Galician Studies to a broad international readership.