Hybridity in Spanish Culture is an anthology that explores hybridity in select works from the dawn of Imperial Spain to the twenty-first century. The phenomenon of hybridity has been pervasive throughout Spanish history. The hybrid literary and visual texts studied in this volume-ranging from aljamiado writings and the legacy from the convivencia to contemporary immigration narratives-blur or erase purportedly fixed boundaries: between history and fiction, story and History, nationality and transnationalism, subjectivity and objectivity, as well as between genres, cultures, languages and eras. Hybridity constitutes the state of simultaneously belonging to categories that had previously been considered exclusive. It renders the concept of pure as a construct, a chosen perception, a psychic imposition on experience. Implicit within hybridity is a fusion of two or more separate factors, entities or concepts, but the essential aspect of this fusion is that the hybrid text becomes an original. Hence, hybridity nods to the past, but points to the future. Hybridity in Spanish Culture, written both in Spanish and English, as a metahybrid, is a collection about hybridity that is a hybrid itself. In hopes of blurring borders, dissipating taxonomies, and dehierarchizing binary oppositions, the European and US authors and editors contribute to cultural studies scholarship and underscore the omnipresence and ubiquity of interstitial conditions as they relate to national or cultural identity, linguistic crossings, inter-genre blendings and the conception of home and belonging.
About the Author: Maria P. Tajes (PhD Rutgers University, 2002) is Associate Professor of Spanish at William Paterson University, New Jersey, USA. She specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary Spanish literature, with an emphasis on Spanish migration. She authored the book El cuerpo de la emigracion y la emigracion en el cuerpo; desarraigo y negociacion de identidad en la literatura de la emigracion espanola. She has also published several book chapters and articles on authors from Spain, Latin America and Africa. Maureen Tobin Stanley (PhD Michigan State University 2000) is Associate Professor of Spanish Language, Literature and Culture at the University of Minnesota Duluth, USA, who has co-authored and edited (with Gesa Zinn) two volumes on contemporary female European exile (Palgrave MacMillan). Tobin Stanley, whose research interests include memory, women's literature, exile and deportation literature as they relate to twentieth- and twenty-first century Spain, has recently completed a sole-authored tome on the reflections of the Holocaust in Spanish culture. Emily Knudson-Vilaseca is an independent scholar with a PhD from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA, in Hispanic and Lusophone Literatures and Linguistics. Her focus is immigration in twentieth- and twenty-first century Portuguese and Spanish Peninsular literatures. She has published articles in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies and elsewhere, as well as a book chapter in Para Um Leitor Ignorado: Ensaios sobre a ficcao de Lidia Jorge.