Yoknapatawpha County-on-the-Mediterranean: Barcelona, Literary Capital of Catalan-language Letters and the Third World (1962-1975)

Resum

Against the backdrop of a perceived near total hegemony of Anglophone norms and scholarly practices within the discipline of international geography, a growing chorus of voices from outside Anglo-Saxon geography is currently pleading for a greater sensitivity to context and language diversity in the field. Nowhere is the sense of exclusion and marginalization more acute than in the often frustrated attempts by non-English language geographers to publish in the leading Anglo-American geographical journals. This paper argues that the current state of debate on the issue has reached a certain conceptual impasse, as those voices from the self-proclaimed peripheries of international geography today cannot seem to reconcile a central tension between a call for greater context-specificity in knowledge production and an abiding concern to avoid the parochialism of local or national scholarly traditions. In an attempt to open alternative visions for publishing practices within the non-English language discipline, the author engages in a geo-historically informed analysis of the Barcelona-based book publishing industry during a crucial time of socio-political transition informed by anti-Franco cultural resistance. By excavating the geo-history of this urban industrial milieu (1962-75), the author attempts to reveal how the Catalan capital became, for a brief moment, the center of a world, connecting not only Latin America to the Iberian Peninsula but articulating wider politico-cultural projects between the global North and South. The political as well as geographical knowledge revealed from this case, it is argued, demonstrates that the task of creating a truly international geography may be more complex than its advocates may wish to acknowledge.