Toward a Multicultural Configuration of Spain

Reviewed by: Toward a Multicultural Configuration of Spain: Local Cities, Global Spaces ed. by Ana Corbalán, and Ellen Mayock Joanne Pol Corbalán, Ana, and Ellen Mayock, eds. Toward a Multicultural Configuration of Spain: Local Cities, Global Spaces. Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2015. Pp. 211. ISBN 978–1-61147–669-9. In the last twenty years, there has been a timely increase in the number of publications that focus on the relationship between Spain’s transforming topography and demography as well as the complex effects on the nation’s identity and its conceptualization as such. The increase in publications points towards a need to respond to the changes by creating a dialogue that reflects on the concept of Spanish identity that has been and continues to be created and reshaped. An early example of the urgency to examine contemporary Spanish culture is Jo Labanyi’s edited volume Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice (2002), which presents an interdisciplinary approach to twentieth-century Spanish culture. Ana Corbalán and Ellen Mayock’s Toward a Multicultural Configuration of Spain: Local Cities, Global Spaces publication offers an important contribution to the study of Spain’s multicultural reconfiguration in the new millennium. Central to the text’s analysis of Spain’s new multicultural canvas is the analysis of the crucial points of contact between its local cities and the ever-rising global migration to the peninsula. It is precisely at these points of contact that multilayered negotiations of culture take place and as a result reshape the face of the nation. The notion of reshaping begets the questioning of how was Spain’s identity as a nation conceptualized, by the editors, prior to the global and local interactions in this text. This question is answered in the introduction where they “argue that Spain has never been a homogenous nation, although many discourses tend to highlight this supposed standardized, but unique, Spanish identity” (xiii). In fact, it is the very imaginary model of Spain as a nation with a homogenous identity that is explored and challenged throughout the volume. The book is structured as a collection of fifteen essays written by university professors from around the globe. The essays, which are also designated as chapters, are further organized effectively into three subdivisions: Literary Representations of the Local and the Global, Migration Space and Tourism in Documentary Films, and Multicultural Encounters in Local Spaces: Cinematic Depictions. Each chapter offers a critical analysis of Spanish contemporary texts and visual depictions by exploring the interactions of the intersecting cultures, the local and global, as well as confronting the tensions among these intricate relationships. The introduction provides a valuable understanding of Spain’s current demography by presenting data from recent newspaper articles from Spain, El País and the United States, The New York Times. From the onset, the quality of the citations, in their original language and subsequent translations, prove to be excellent by offering a smooth linguistic transition to the current analysis. The statistics highlight the continuous depopulation of rural areas, as depicted in Icíar Bollaín’s 1999 film, Flores del otro mundo, as well as the influx of the migrations to the urban areas. The specific migratory groups that are of focus, in the volume, hail from: Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. In addition, they serve as a launching pad to open the conversation of a new configuration of Spain that [End Page 342] encompasses the complex relationship between, and questioning of, Spanish identity and space in the face of the growing migrations that is accompanied by the compelling force of globalization. Five points of contention arise with the new “multicultural configuration” which are: 1) “how we designate of spaces and places such as the local, ‘glocal’ and translocal”; 2) “the intersection between and among the rural, the urban, and the suburban”; 3) “postmodern considerations of the center and the periphery”; 4) “the phenomenon of places, spaces and non-places”; and 5) “definitions of nationalism, micronationalisms and power” (xi, xii). The following fifteen chapters richly draw upon and confront the five previously articulated points of contention by offering an overall high quality of critical discourse that is anchored

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