peninsula

¶ What does it mean for a culture to be penin­sular?  This is not, or not just, a dis­ci­plinary question for Penin­su­larists with a capital P, for those who toil in lands known, more or less syn­ony­mously, as “Iberia.”  No, the question is about penin­sulas—in minuscule, and therefore bigger—and the impli­ca­tions of the geo­graphical for­mation itself.  To answer this and the fol­lowing ques­tions means nav­i­gating a per­ilous strait, with the sub­se­quent risk of hitting a dead end.

• Land’s end.

¶ What lessons does a peninsula hold?  Lessons that lurk, peninsula-like, at the end but also the beginning. Lessons that are appended to other lessons, sus­pended by other ques­tions.  Lessons that have become lodged in an out­growth, an off­shoot, of a larger mass.  Lessons that are stuck at the bottom, that the heart strains to pump back up and out of a torpid, numb, or swollen limb.  Lessons whose incor­po­ration into the rest of the body risks poi­soning, con­t­a­m­i­nation, and contagion,

• but also renewal.

¶ What makes a peninsula, a peninsula?  Its shape: it’s a body of land sur­rounded on three sides by water and con­nected to a larger landmass.  A pro­jection, pro­trusion, or pro­tu­berance.  It is the stem hanging from the typo­graphical bowl in the letter “P” itself.  But it is not totally clear what dis­tin­guishes a peninsula from other land masses of varying sizes that share this definition—a cape, a bill, a spit, a point, a promontory, a headland, a sub­con­tinent.  Penin­sulas are ambiguous, amor­phous, and sub­jective.  They are con­sti­tuted inevitably by their rela­tionship to adjacent lands and seas, defined less by their mor­phology than by their depen­dency.  They exist asym­met­ri­cally, always rel­ative to some­thing larger, thus sum­moning rela­tion­ships at once his­torical, political, sym­bolic (sym­biotic, par­a­sitic, exploitative).  Penin­sulas are tan­gential to the mainland.

• They are a corollary, a dan­gling signifier.

¶ Why is Iberia the Peninsula?  Look up “peninsula” in the dic­tionary, and you’ll find yourself tossed back to “the Peninsula”: “Spain and Por­tugal together; Iberian Peninsula; Iberia.”  Iberia would seem a rather odd exemplar for penin­sulas, in fact.  Blockish, clunky, and squat like the proverbial bull skin, its quad­ran­gular or pen­tagonal mor­phology would seem to defy ipso facto its own def­i­n­ition as a three-sided landmass.  What is important is that The Peninsula exceeds the toponymic reg­ister, ren­dering “Iberian” unnec­essary and redundant, while penin­sulas in Arabia, Korea, Indochina, and the Horn of Africa are denied the finality of the def­inite article.  The majuscule of The Peninsula offers an even less subtle his­torical echo of European car­to­graphic and imperial hegemony.  Florida, Baja Cal­i­fornia, the Yucatán, and the Southern Cone are penin­sulas once con­trolled by The Peninsula.

• Ceuta is a peninsula still con­trolled by The Peninsula.

¶ Where do penin­sulas come from?  The term derives from the Latin paenīnsula, or “almost an island.”  Cal­i­fornia and its lower peninsula were long thought to be an island, a mythos that orig­i­nated with Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Las sergas de Esp­landián.  Yet Fran­cisco de Ulloa’s cir­cum­nav­i­gation of the peninsula in 1539 did little to dispel the islandic fantasy.  It is as if penin­sulas’ access to land severs them from the cachet enjoyed by islands.  In the cul­tural imag­inary, penin­sulas occupy an in-between that offers neither the fan­ciful, idyllic iso­lation of an island nor the sta­bility of a land­locked enclave; they are exposed to threats both ter­res­trial and mar­itime.  Not unlike Sancho’s ínsula, penin­sulas can be almost utopia and almost reality, but perhaps never fully either.

¶ What do penin­sulas do?  “Leaving a peninsula is not always easier than leaving an island,” Predrag Matve­jević tells us, “because while the desire to leave is more readily real­izable, it is also less final”^[1]  (A peripheral/peninsular question: What does it mean that almost all prominent penin­sulas point downward on standard maps?  What if they faced upward instead?)  Even as they point, finger-like, toward other geo­gra­phies, penin­sulas under­score their own limits (pillars of Her­cules, non plus ultra).  These limits, and limit-situations, are both empha­sized and elided in Iberia.  His­tor­i­cally, its prox­imity to North Africa has made it a two-way bridge of both cul­tural exchange and dom­i­nation, and to this day it is a trag­i­cally pre­carious gang­plank to Europe.  Yet the legacy of these exchanges have also seg­re­gated Iberia from Europe (encap­su­lated in perennial debates over the ‘dif­ference’ of Spain and the racialized dis­missal, often attributed to Dumas, that “Africa begins at the Pyrenees”).  The narrow yet treach­erous margins between it and sur­rounding continents—of water to its south, moun­tains to its north—mean that Iberia is dually con­nected yet dis­jointed, sep­arate (from Europe / from Africa) yet linked (with Africa / with Europe).  The (Iberian) Peninsula is at once an echt-peninsula and a pseudo-peninsula. 

¶ Where does Penin­su­larism go?  How should we think with these valences and affil­i­a­tions of the peninsula?  How might the sin­gular con­tra­dic­tions of the Peninsula inform, reorient, and renew our dis­ci­pline?  How can Peninsularism’s his­torical status as mar­gin­al­izing (e.g. vis-à-vis Latin Amer­i­canism) and mar­gin­alized (e.g. vis-à-vis other let­tered tra­di­tions of the European mainland) afford us a useful vantage for making it less iso­lated and more inclusive?  What viaducts, isth­muses, and jetties should Penin­su­larism build to engage other areas, or to assemble new geo­graphical and arch­i­pelagic col­lec­tives?  How, in short, to depenin­su­larize the dis­ci­pline, to transpenin­su­larize our practice, to insulate Penin­su­larism from its own

• (pen)insularity?