Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa by ed. Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel et al. (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa by ed. Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel et al. Tania Gentic Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel, Sebastiaan Faber, Pedro García-Caro, and Robert Patrick Newcomb, eds. Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2019. 467 pp. ISBN 978-1-78962-025-2. More than two decades on, Transatlantic Studies continues to be a frame whose primary feature is its attempt to elude any one methodological, critical, or theoretical approach to studying literature, history, culture, or even geography. Seemingly about a certain geographical space, nevertheless it is constantly being rethought in terms of its edges, crossings, and coexistence with nations, local spaces, the Pacific, and other global and local geographies. These constant decenterings make the transatlantic frame both necessary and seemingly redundant, as some critics have claimed, a tension that is evident in the wide variety of essays included in Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa. As the editors explain in the introduction: "From our perspective, … Transatlantic Studies is a critical academic space where the epistemic traps of Hispanoamericanismo and Lusofonia can be understood by looking at the interstice where the national and the transnational butt heads and operate as a form of tension or conflict….an epistemic proposition to re-evaluate the cultural histories of the Atlantic rim, moving beyond the north-south, east-west division of (academic/cultural) labor, and…challenging the implicitly nationalistic narratives of Hispanism" (7). Thus, the work is grounded in the specific debates around (post)colonialism, Hispanism, and Iberian Studies that have accompanied the question of how to do the kind of cultural and historical work the theory envisions, within a contemporary Hispanic (or Iberian, or Ibero-American) Atlantic geography. A volume that includes both established texts and ideas already circulated within the Hispanic Studies field and new case studies that draw attention to the materiality of the Hispanic Atlantic world from approximately 1810 on, the book is a solid summary of the last twenty years of thinking on the transatlantic approach. [End Page 131] In 2009, Eyda Meredíz and Nina Gervassi-Navarro laid out the stakes of the transatlantic for the Luso-Hispanic field in a seminal edited number of the Revista Iberoamericana. But as this volume shows, attempts to define Transatlantic Studies as a field and a methodology persist. Resorting to the linguistic to understand this critical academic space, Joan Ramon Resina describes "Transatlantic Studies" as a conceptual space that "shifts the cognitive object to an adjectival, subordinate position, turning it into a modulation of the self-founding and self-maintaining academic enterprise" (30-31). Other essays provide more direct, at times opposing, definitions: Fran de Alba opens with the strong assertion that "Transatlantic Studies is fundamentally a postcolonial, conceptual, and disciplinary relocation of the way we study the history and culture of the Americas and Spain" (21), while Beatriz Sampedra Vizcaya suggests that thinking the space through islands "is to engage with the very opposite of a totalizing oceanic version of space and place, empire and hegemony" (101). For his part, moving slightly into the theoretical, or at least the temporal, here Julio Ortega cites Transatlantic Studies as both "nomadic" and "always in the process of rearticulation" (144, 145), while Zeb Tortorici asserts that one way to decenter the rural margin/urban center binary that has defined the Atlantic space is precisely to "avoid temporalizing narratives" and focus on thematic connections across time and space instead (87). As in previous discourses, Abril Trigo roundly rejects the field as a field: "To conclude, Transatlantic Studies (and even more so Hispanic Transatlantic Studies) does not constitute a new critical paradigm or another discipline, since it does not have a particular object of inquiry, nor propose any specific methodology, nor pinpoint a set of specific theoretical problems, all of which it shares with different disciplines and current theories in the academic market" (73). The volume openly embraces these contradictions as part of its metadisciplinary attempt to "stake out" the field (1). Yet the many possible paths to engaging with a transatlantic approach come most convincingly through the critical praxis that sustains many of the chapters: close readings of cultural events, journalism, musical performances, and...