Mapping Galicia, both geographically and culturally, has been a practice closely linked to projects of national identity. In 1834, just at the approach of the literary Rexurdimento, Domingo Fontán''s Carta geométrica de Galicia appeared, the first cartographic projection to represent Galicia not as the margin of Spain, but as a territory in its own right. Since then, the project of mapping the limits of Galicia and galeguidade has held sway over artists and scholars. In 2008, Fontán''s map served as a motif in Miguel-Anxo Murado''s Otra idea de Galicia as he traced the less visible face of Galician cultural history. Kirsty Hooper''s Writing Galicia into the World too engages with this tradition of surveying the Galician landscape, this time altering how we view the cardinal points of Galician identity such as language, territory, emigration and morriña by focusing on writers and works that emerge from non-Hispanic cultural contexts, primarily the Galician communities of London.Earlier contributions by Hooper to the rapidly growing corpus of English-language scholarship on Galicia, such as the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies'' special issue, ''Critical Approaches to the Nation in Galician Studies'' (2009), co-edited with Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, and Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies: Between the Local and the Global (2011), co-edited with Manuel Puga Moruxa, have helped to increase the visibility of Galicia outside Spain and invite critical readings that draw on theory and intellectual currents from within feminism as well as postcolonial and cultural studies. Hooper''s latest monograph further advances this project by looking at the site of overlap between Galicia and the Anglophone world. As the title promises, Writing Galicia into the World inscribes Galician literatures and cultures into a global network of narratives of displacement.

Hooper has analyzed a series of texts whose authors and themes cross back and forth between languages and territories, bringing to light an arresting corpus of Galician literature that is irreducible to any one language or tradition, and, as such, one that produces dynamic reading strategies. A welcome consequence of -or impetus for- Writing Galicia is that by focusing on the relationship between Galicia and the English-speaking world, Hooper places Galicia in a global context without relegating it to a mere subcategory of Hispanic Studies or filtering it through Spain in order to relate Galicia''s literary tradition to that of other nations. The project has a two-fold effect of changing the way readers think of Galician emigration patterns and experiences as well as revealing how metropolitan hubs such as London have been important sites of meaning for immigrants from European peripheries.Writing Galicia comprises five chapters that offer a theoretical and historical framework for interpreting literature written between the Anglophone world and Galicia (Chapters 1 and 2), as well as detailed analyses of a pleasingly eclectic selection of texts -in which are represented the novel, the chapbook, the short story, poetry and the graphic novel- written across generations of writers moving between different spaces (Chapters 3-5). As Hooper points out, the late-twentieth-century migrations of Galicians to destinations other than Spain and Latin America have inhabited the margins of the Galician imaginary, which, unfortunately, has left us with a partial understanding of Galician experience. Yet, as she illustrates throughout the book, the groups bound for London, removed at once from more traditional Hispanic and British nexuses of colonial relations, have acquired the spatial, political and discursive distance from which to question and redefine the experience of emigration and of Galician cultural identity. Hooper finds in the territorial, cultural and linguistic displacement of this community the tools for rethinking Galician culture and history, as well as the narrative strategies used to voice Galician experience in today''s globalized world.In addition to exploring the relation between geography and narration, the texts that Hooper has chosen are grouped according to their position in the migratory process.

Hooper analyzes works whose protagonists are migrants from Galicia, particularly Isaac Díaz Pardo''s O crime de Londres: a criada que estrangulou a súa ama pola música (1977), Carlos Durán''s Galegos de Londres (1978) and Manuel Rivas''s A man dos paíños (2000), in order to understand how the fracturing of place and identity are represented in these texts. She then moves on to discuss works -Xesús Fraga''s A-Z (2003), Xelís de Toro''s Os saltimbanquis no paraíso (1999) and Almudena Solana''s Las mujeres inglesas destrozan los tacones al andar (2007)- whose authors and/or characters belong not to the generation of emigrants, but instead are raised in the Anglophone world and must figure out what it means to be or not to be Galician. Finally, Hooper turns to a group of poets, Ramiro Fonte, Xavier Queipo and Erin Moure, whose works are crafted around the traditional foci of Galician identity (language, territory, culture) but whose linguistic density and fractures mean that the texts exceed any limits that a national or linguistic literary model might impose. Not only does Hooper bring to light these lesser-known works of the past four decades that deal with migrations to and from Galicia and northern Europe, but she also provides a fresh context for works on emigration by more visible authors such as Manuel Rivas. Writing Galicia, however, is more than a survey of Galician literature related to the Anglophone world or a collection of readings. Instead, through her critical approaches, Hooper discovers new ways of reading Galician migration born from the narratives themselves, methods that invite readers to revel in the ludic, transformative and multiple relations between language, territory and identity, and to think about Galician literature, not only In her discussion of poets Moure and Queipo, Kirsty Hooper states that their transnational works implore readers ''to luxuriate in the process of reading itself'' (164). I would argue that the same can and ought to be said of Writing Galicia. The passion for Galicia as an object of study found in the works of Ramón Piñeiro and Castelao is brought together with the critical frameworks of postcolonial theorists such as Édouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall in order to map the Anglo-Galician experience.

The result is a text that is as theoretically poignant as its prose is smooth, and a cartography that, in ways similar to Fontán''s map, bridges the gap between territory and imaginary, history and representation. However, the new cartographies that Hooper advances go further still. While they recognize the traditional markers of Galician culture and identity, they also reveal that language, territory and nostalgia are not fixed points or essential aspects of modern galeguidade but exist only in relation to other experiences and positions. Hooper''s approach to the Galician diaspora in the English-speaking world demonstrates that dynamism, changeability and multiplicity are an integral part of Galician culture. As such, Writing Galicia into the World will undoubtedly intrigue scholars seeking to understand the age-old problem of emigration from new perspectives. Danny M. Barreto, Galicia 21, Journal of Contemporary Galician Studies, Issue D.