Proposal for an MLA Permanent Section and a Discussion Group on Galician Studies (Draft) May 5, 2013 Dear Professors Marianne Hirsch and Margaret Ferguson, We, the signatories of this letter, graduate students, research fellows, lecturers, professors, and administrators of Galician, Luso-Hispanic and Modern Language Studies in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, and beyond, would like to respectfully request the creation of both a Permanent Section and a Discussion Group on Galician Studies (including –but not limited to– Language, Literature, and Culture) at the Modern Language Association. Galicia, along with Catalonia and the Basque Country, is one of the three Spanish autonomous communities with the constitutional status of ‘historic nationalities.’ Like Catalonia and the Basque Country, it has a language, literature and culture distinct from Castilian, with a long and dynamic history. The westernmost corner of current Spain, Galicia became a separate kingdom in 409 and a full part of the Crown of Spain in the 16th century. As the centre during the Middle Ages of Galician-Portuguese language and literature, which eventually gave rise to the current Galician and Portuguese languages, Galicia is a bridge between the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds. Despite the centralization process promoted by Castile and, later, Spain, the Galician language has survived, being spoken (often along with Spanish) by almost 70 percent of the region’s current population. Galicia’s own history is inherently outward-looking. It was settled by both Celts and Romans, who left their marks in different ways, allowing Galician Studies today to enter into dialogue with both Romance and Celtic Studies. From the Middle Ages, the place of Galicia’s capital, Santiago de Compostela, as the third holiest site in Christendom and destination of Europe’s most famous pilgrimage route, connected Galicia with Europe and the Christian world. Meanwhile, its position on Iberia’s Atlantic coast made Galicia a key staging-post for transatlantic migration, trade and exploration, creating close connections with the Caribbean, North and South America. Thanks to this outward-looking history, during the last 15 years, Galician Studies has begun to stake a claim in the Anglophone academy as an interdisciplinary field connecting Spanish, Portuguese, Romance, Celtic, Caribbean and Latin American Studies. In addition, it has an important but as yet underexploited role to play in the current emergence of Iberian and Transatlantic frameworks for Hispanic Studies. The current consolidation of Galician Studies in the Anglophone academy builds on a long and prestigious history. Prominent Galician scholars were welcomed in the United States after the Spanish Civil War, and many eventually became leading figures in Luso-Hispanic Studies. These include Ramón Martínez López (a hispanic medievalist at the University of Texas-Austin), Ernesto Guerra da Cal (a lusitanist at Washington Square College), Xosé Rubia Barcia (a literature professor at UCLA), and Emilio González López (a hispanist at the City University of New York). Professor González López also founded the first academic Center for Galician Studies in the early 1980s at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. During the 1980s and 1990s, the US and UK hosted the first four conferences of the International Association of Galician Studies (AIEG; http://www.estudosgalegos.org/) at: U Maine at Orono, 1985; Brown, 1988; CUNY Graduate Center, 1991; Oxford, 1994. Subsequent conferences, which 1 Proposal for an MLA Permanent Section and a Discussion Group on Galician Studies (Draft) attract a large international audience, have taken place at Trier, Germany (1997), Havana, Cuba (2000), Barcelona, Spain (2003), Bahia, Brazil (2006), Santiago/A Coruña/Vigo, Spain (2009), and Cardiff, UK (2012). The next edition will be in Buenos Aires, Argentina (2015). During the last three decades, Galician government-funded Centers for Galician Studies have been created at the universities of Birmingham, Oxford-Queen’s College, Cork (Ireland), Stirling (Scotland), Bangor (Wales), California-Santa Barbara and La Trobe (Australia). Galician language, literature and culture are now taught at Universities such as Liverpool, Exeter, Southampton and Warwick (UK), and Wisconsin- Milwaukee; they appear ‘below the title’ as part of many more Peninsular and Iberian Studies programs, and over 50 doctoral dissertations on Galician language, literature and culture have been completed in Anglophone universities since 1995 (see Appendix 1). Galician Studies has a significant and growing presence in English-speaking countries, above all the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as evidenced by the number of scholarly monographs on Galician subjects in MLA fields (see Appendix 2). Since 2004, the González-Millán Galician Studies Email Discussion List (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/galician-studies) has provided an online forum for Galician Studies in English-speaking academia. Galician Studies scholars are becoming an increasingly familiar presence at high-profile scholarly conferences in the US, including the Mid-American Conference on Hispanic Literatures, the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, MI) and, most importantly, the MLA, through both its Annual Convention and its regional partner conferences. Since 2005, Galician Studies has had a regular presence at the MLA Annual Convention, primarily through Special Sessions.1 The publication in 2011 by MLA of Hooper & Puga’s edited book Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: between the Local and the Global is a clear endorsement of Galician Studies’ growing institutional presence. The establishment of a Permanent Section and Discussion Group on Galician Studies would provide a focus for Galician Studies within the MLA and the wider English-speaking academy. It would raise the profile of Galician language, literature and culture not only as a discrete object of study, but also as inherently connected to wider interdisciplinary debates in Spanish, Portuguese, Romance, Celtic, Caribbean and Latin American Studies. It would be an invaluable means of building capacity in this emerging field whose potential contribution to the ongoing development of Iberian and Transatlantic frameworks for Hispanic Studies remains distinctly under-recognized. Finally, it would provide a crucial signal of solidarity with our colleagues in Galicia at a time when Galician language and culture, and the Galician academy itself, are facing unprecedented institutional, political, and economic pressure. For all of these reasons, and considering the growing presence of Galician Studies in English-speaking academia, the MLA’s recognition of other less-studied languages, literatures and cultures (including Catalan Studies) we most enthusiastically encourage 1 MLA2005: session 127, Twenty-First-Century Galician Studies: New Spaces, New Voices. MLA2007: session 106, Galician Cultural Identity within and beyond Geographic and Linguistic Borders, and session 557, Feminist Trajectories: Desde las Monjas to the New Left. MLA2009: session 431, Construction of Galician Identity in Nineteenth-Century Journalism and Literature. MLA2011: session 104. Fragmented Memories, Languages, and Identities in Contemporary Galician Literature, and session 761, Language Ideologies, Policies, and Discourse in Contemporary Galicia: A Cross-Dimensional Analysis. 2 Proposal for an MLA Permanent Section and a Discussion Group on Galician Studies (Draft) the MLA to create both a Permanent Section and a Discussion Group on Galician Studies. Respectfully submitted, 1. Alex Alonso Nogueira, Associate Professor, Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, City University of New York 2. Rafael Álvarez, Graduate Student, Department Spanish and Portuguese, University of California at Santa Barbara 3. Rosario Álvarez Blanco, Distinguished Professor of Galician and Portuguese Philology, Institute for the Galician Language, University of Santiago de Compostela; Member and Treasurer, Royal Galician Academy of Language; Vice President, Council for the Galician Culture 4. Pedro Álvarez Mosquera, Associate Professor, University de Salamanca (Spain) 5. Rene Antrop-Gonzalez, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction/Second Language Education, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 6. Diana Arbaiza, Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, North Carolina State University 7. Michael Armstrong-Roche, Associate Professor, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures, Wesleyan University, CT 8. Bettina Arnold, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee 9. Burghard Baltrusch, Associate Professor, University of Vigo (Galicia, Spain) 10. Silvia Bermúdez, Professor and Chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California-Santa Barbara 11. Paula Bouzas, Lecturer in Luso-Hispanic Linguistics, University of Göttingen (Germany) 12. Claudia Cabello-Hutt, Assistant Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of North Carolina, Greensboro 13. Antonio F. Cao, Associate Professor, Hofstra University 14. Arturo Casas, Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, Department of Spanish Literature, Literary Theory & Linguistics, University of Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain) 15. Susana Castillo-Rodríguez, Lecturer, University of New Hampshire 16. Obdulia Castro, Associate Professor and Chair, Department