Encounters between Catalan Studies and the Global Hispanophone

Harkema, Leslie; Harkema, Leslie

Catalonia occupies a paradoxical position in colonial and global history, as both a participant in Spanish imperial projects and a region historically marginalized within the Castilian-centric state. While the wealth of modern Barcelona–and other Catalan cities–-was deeply entangled with transatlantic slavery and colonial commerce, Catalonia has also been historically framed as peripheral, and Catalan language and culture subjected to political marginalization in Spain. This panel will examine these tensions, exploring how coloniality operates within and beyond Iberian spaces through intersectional and transhistorical approaches to twentieth and twenty-first century literature and cultural production from Catalonia and/or in Catalan.

This joint session of the Catalan Studies forum and the Global Hispanophone forum offers an opportunity for scholars from both fields pondering similar questions regarding colonial legacies and imaginaries to exchange ideas. Catalan Studies specialists will benefit from the application of global perspectives on coloniality to Catalan topics, while scholars more grounded in Global Hispanophone studies will appreciate questioning the predominance of Spanish in their approaches to the field. The unusually high number of inquiries and abstract submissions received for this session indicates a great deal of interest in this conversation.

Building on recent work on the cultural legacies of slavery in modern Spain (Tsuchiya and Vialette 2025), theorizations of the global hispanophone (Sampedro-Vizcaya and Campoy-Cubillo 2022), and (post)coloniality in the Iberian context (Miguélez-Carballeira 2024), the panel will feature current research of established and emerging scholars working at the intersection of the two fields. Each of the four presenters will be allotted 14 minutes for their presentations, to allow ample time for discussion in a 75-minute session.

Tania Gentic will examine how the first Catalan novels for children, Josep Folch i Torres’ Massagran books (1910, 1913), produce an “aurality of race” informed by Catalonia’s colonial relations with Cuba that echoes throughout later adaptations of the stories in comic strips and television in the 1980s and 1990s. Gentic’s analysis of the written, aural, and visual portrayal of Black voices in various Massagran performances expands understandings of Catalan nationalist projects geographically and temporally, back to the sounds of slavery in the Caribbean and forward to post-Transition Catalonia.

Adam Singh will analyze Catalan novelist Lluís Ferran de Pol’s 1960 Érem quatre, narrated from the perspective of an exiled Catalan soldier who exposes the mistreatment of Indigenous people in post-Revolutionary Mexico. Singh argues that the novel is underscored by a dual criticism of empire that becomes apparent when the novel is read through the lens of decolonial theory. By writing the novel in Catalan but focusing the narrative on Mexico, Ferran de Pol levied a critique towards the treatment of minoritized languages and cultural suppression on both sides of the Atlantic, reflecting what many exiled authors saw as a shared experience between themselves and Indigenous Mexican people.

Cristián Ricci’s presentation will demonstrate how the colonial past continues to shape the logics of marginality in contemporary Barcelona through analyses of Youssef El Maimouni’s Nadie salva a las rosas and Karima Ziali’s Una oración sin Dios, two novels that challenge dominant narratives of belonging by featuring a transgender woman and a gay Riffian Muslim man as protagonists. By positioning racialized queer subjects at the center of their narratives, El Maimouni and Ziali reveal how Barcelona’s urban peripheries function as sites where histories of empire, migration, and sexual regulation converge.

Finally, Anna Casas Aguilar will examine discourses of being physically and culturally colonized by international tourism that have appeared in Catalonia’s cultural production since 2010. Analyzing various texts including the graphic novel Todo bajo el sol, the soap opera Paraíso, and the documentaries Overlooking (2019) and Sense ficció. Negrers (2023), Casas Aguilar will problematize the use of the term “colonization” to speak about overtourism on the Catalan Mediterranean coast and demonstrate how international tourism sparks self-reflection regarding Catalonia’s and Spain’s heritage and position as a colonial power.

The four presenters bring a range of perspectives to the panel as scholars at different points in their careers (one PhD candidate, two associate professors, and one full professor) at universities in distinct regions of the U.S. and Canada. With diverse backgrounds in comparative literature and Latin American, Iberian, and North African literatures and cultures, and drawing methodologically from sound studies, transatlantic studies, gender studies, and film studies, their presentations will frame a larger interdisciplinary discussion about the intersections between Catalan Studies and Global Hispanophone studies.

518 Encounters between Catalan Studies and the Global Hispanophone: Calls for Papers