Galician Identity in a Global Era: Camilo Gonsar’s Cara a Times Square (1980)
Dr David Miranda (Prifysgol Bangor/Bangor University)

Abstract:
The content of this seminar is part of a long-term project in which I analyse the presence of New York City in twentieth and twenty-first century Galician literary works. Specifically, I will discuss the tension between the local and the global in relation to the Galician context by looking at Camilo Gonsar’s novel Cara a Times Square (Towards Times Square) (1980)

As scholars such as José Colmeiro have suggested, Galician modern identity is partially defined by its diasporic nature, due to extensive migrations to South America and different European countries since the nineteenth century. However, the presence of Galician emigrants in North America has been usually overlooked and literary renditions of cities such as New York remain understudied. That is the case of Cara a Times Square (1980), a seminal text of the so-called Nova Narrativa Galega (New Galician Narrative), which has been mainly categorised as a novel highly influenced by French Existentialism. Without dismissing this approach completely, I also propose that the novel cannot only been seen as part of a corpus of Galician literary works located in New York, but also represents an early example of the growing tension between the local and the global in present times, as theorised by scholars such as Marc Augé and Manuel Castells. Importantly for my analysis, this tension is becoming increasingly central to contemporary Galician Studies, as recent volumes such as Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global (World Literature Reimagined) (2011) edited by Kirsty Hooper and Manuel Puga, show.

Dr David Miranda is Lecturer in Spanish at Bangor University.