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.