Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory (pop. approx. 34,000) located on the Mediterranean and bordering Spain, has great symbolic importance to the British and Spanish national imaginaries. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Rock's civilian cultural life and literary production have long been overshadowed. Nonetheless, Gibraltarian writers have been publishing since the early 19th century, in Spanish, English, and Llanito - that is, the Rock's variant of Andalusian Spanish and related code-switching practice.
In the past decade, international scholars have begun to write about, and occasionally teach, Gibraltarian literature. This upswing in interest seems due, at least partly, to the public efforts of Gibraltarian writers such as MG Sanchez, an English-language novelist who lectures in the UK and Spain, and Trino Cruz, a Spanish-language poet who has deep personal and intellectual ties with Spain and Morocco. Further, Brexit's roiling impact on British territories, including Gibraltar, and the Mediterranean migrant crisis have brought renewed attention to the Rock. For these reasons, we consider the 2023 convention an opportune moment for what will likely be the MLA's first ever session on Gibraltar.
Our session brings together scholars who address the topic from distinct, albeit complementary comparative perspectives. With three speakers delivering 15-minute presentations, we will have ample time for unstructured discussion.
Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (Tulane) will speak on "Deep-time Borderscapes in Contemporary Gibraltarian Poetry." Capitalizing on the idiosyncratic comparatism bred by Gibraltar’s liminal geographic position at the interface of Europe, the Western Mediterranean, and North Africa, her presentation situates contemporary Gibraltarian poetry in relation to transnational paradigms centered on the Mediterranean as a geological and material space. She notes that whereas Gibraltar’s contentious border with Spain has acted as a vector of isolation and alienation, the Mediterranean borderscape surrounding the isthmus has mediated connectivity—both felicitous and deadly—with various geographical and cultural spaces across the sea. Drawing on poetic works composed in Spanish and English by Trino Cruz, Marisa Salazar, and unpublished poems by Humbert Hernández, this talk will extend critical readings of the “Hispano-African borderland” (Sasha D. Pack) enclosing Gibraltar to include deep-time, material forms of continuity between the European and African continents.
Leah Leone Anderson (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY) will address "Molly Bloom's Spanish Gibraltars." Published within three months of one another, two literary reviews introduced Spanish language readers to James Joyce's Ulysses. Both included excerpted translations from the novel's "Penelope" section. While Antonio Marichalar's review and translation, published in the Revista de Occidente (Spain, November 1924) initially reached a much wider audience than those by Jorge Luis Borges, published in the avant-garde journal Proa (Argentina, January 1925), given the latter's eventual international celebrity, his translation of Molly Bloom's monologue has received the lion's share of critical attention. Comparative analyses of the two translations against the English reveal a Molly Bloom whose identity as a "Llanita" (i.e. Gibraltarian) is displaced. This paper will discuss the ways Marichalar's and Borges's translation choices move the locus of Molly's memories of her childhood in Gibraltar to new geographies, and will consider the implications of those choices as they mediate Spanish language readers' first encounters with Ulysses.
Robert Patrick Newcomb (UC Davis) will address "Strategies for Writing Gibraltar into the World." He will begin with a historical overview of Gibraltarian literary production, assessing the relative prominence of Spanish- and English-language works in various genres, and in Llanito, the traditional language of Gibraltarian sociability and the vehicle for the Rock's lively tradition of popular comic theater. He will follow by comparing the discursive strategies that Gibraltarian writers of various generations have adopted to make the Rock legible to a wider world that routinely ignores Gibraltar, or whose scant knowledge of the Rock is overshadowed by its outsized role in the British and Spanish national imaginaries. These strategies include: Spanish national identification, as seen in the late-19th century poet Emilia Danero de Ramayón and later, in the novelist Héctor Licudi; English imperial identification (or "strategic Britishness"), as in the mid-20th century poet Leopold Sanguinetti; post-colonial solidarities, as seen in MG Sanchez's references to Gloria Anzaldúa and Tayib Saleh; and a trans-Straits perspective that opens Gibraltar to the Western Mediterranean, employed in the poetry of Trino Cruz.