1 - Dine with the Opposition? ¡No, gracias! Hispanism versus Iberian Studies in Great Britain and Ireland

Summary

In general, self-reflection on the promotion of the languages and cultures of Iberia has diverged significantly on either side of the North Atlantic. The anglophone areas of western Europe have, with characteristic reserve and traditional phlegm, proved hesitant to involve themselves in a reasoned debate on the issue and, with a geniality characteristic of warlords in the best gangster films, have preferred to make things personal. The wounded, class-conscious lamentations on the subject's orientation uttered by Barry Jordan in his initial exercise in metacriticism, for example, were amplified significantly in Malcolm Read's (“Travelling South”; Language, Text, Subject; Educating) subsequent no-holds-barred diatribe against the discipline and its ideological direction in the form of short shrift visited on its founding fathers and its generalized compliance with the Establishment. The ensuing polemic, involving Nicholas Round and Stephen Hart (“Politics of Hispanism”; “From Schizoidism”) among others, still remains as one of the most striking and violent interchanges in the history of peninsular studies in our islands.

Happily, the interchange conducted in North America, while no less committed, has tended to retain a restraint, pertinence and analysis of a more educated and less intimate nature. In this more reserved environment, a whole series of commentators have outlined convincingly a particular dimension of the subject which the present essay would aspire to explore: I refer, of course, to how the institutionalization of what we know as Hispanism in Great Britain and Ireland has been influenced by a vision in keeping with the imperialist designs of a whole generation of intellectuals for whom Spanish philology was synonymous with the promotion of the language of Castile and its culture and the corresponding exclusion of other tongues native to the state and their creative expression.

In a series of well-reasoned critiques, Thomas Harrington, Sebastiaan Faber and, in particular, Joan Ramon Resina (“Hispanism”; Del hispanismo) have demonstrated impeccably how, rather than dissociate themselves from the reactionary centralist discourse of Franco and his followers, democratic intellectuals such as Unamuno, Menéndez Pidal, Ortega y Gasset, Américo Castro, Salvador de Madariaga, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz and others persisted in their support of the traditionalist promotion of the unity of Spain and the singularity of Castilian in what became an alarmingly Darwinistic crusade to ensure that their peculiar preference was the fittest and most fitting victor in a putative struggle for national and linguistic hegemony.