Lecture by Kirsty Hooper: 'Writing Migration in Contemporary Galicia"
Professor Hooper teaches Spanish and Galician at the University of Liverpool, UK, where she is a founding editor of the journal Migrations & Identities and an assistant editor of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. She has published widely on modern and contemporary Spanish and Galician culture and literature, and is an active translator of Galician, Polish and Spanish literature.
Abstract:
This paper proposes readings of texts by migrants to and from Galicia as a means of mapping the cultural consequences, in Galicia, of the shifting relations between territory and citizenship, language and identity that have resulted from the massive population movements of the last century. While an important body of work already exists on migration between Galicia and the Americas, I argue here that the full implications of questions of migration and diaspora in Galicia can only be uncovered by relocating our discussion of diaspora and migration outside the colonial framework and the inevitably tangled linguistic, racial, cultural and historical ties within which Galician migration to Latin America has taken place. To this end, the paper focuses on writers connected with the Anglophone and Germanic diasporas for whom Galician is or has been a creative language.