Hispanic Studies

José Jouve-Martín

A novel approach

Maeve Haldane | For some, the road from Madrid to Montreal winds through Berlin and Washington, D.C. José Jouve-Martín's route to the Department of Hispanic Studies at McGill started with a degree in his hometown at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, in philosophy with a specialization in cultural anthropology. A desire to delve further into the philosophical tradition led to a two-year stint in Berlin and an embrace of the German language. Then, armed with a year-long Fulbright scholarship, he went to Georgetown University, where he was wooed by a bounty of resources and the siren call of a doctorate in literature and cultural studies in the States.

Owen Egan

"I wanted to see how different academic systems worked," Jouve-Martín said, impressed with how the relationship between students and professors in North America is less distant than in Europe. As well, thanks to links at Georgetown to anthropology, he was pleased to be "able to work in the literary tradition without losing sight of the social sciences."

Although many doors were open to Jouve-Martín, he says, "To be honest, McGill was my first choice." The Hispanic Studies Department was seeking a scholar in memory studies, which gives him the freedom to explore a wide range of topics and themes.

"I'm interested in how we represent our past, how we construct what happened to us, not only as societies, but as individuals," said Jouve-Martín. Memory studies look at the different strategies of historical representation, he says, and "not just what is considered to be the facts, but what are the narratives." Is official history subjective, or is just a socially sanctioned narrative? These questions are fundamental to his first discipline, philosophy. "How do we think about who we are?" he asks.

These representations of facts -- in novels, folktales and dominant histories -- tell different, yet often interlocking, stories. He wonders, "Where do you establish the division between the historical narratives and the fictional narratives? How much fiction is in history, how much fact is in the novel?"

Jouve-Martín is intrigued by how history has been told of and by indigenous peoples in Latin America, and how different groups use history in political settings. "We look to historians to tell us what to think of the past," he says, but other forms of historical imagination can be very powerful. For instance, Spain's epic poem El Cid has shaped the popular understanding of medieval times more than any strict history has. "There's been an appropriation of history by the historians," he said with a laugh.

"After the discovery [of America], the way indigenous people have transformed the knowledge about the past is mixed with the European tradition. Most of the time it does not count as history in the professional sense. But it is important as a way to construct identity as a group and to mobilize resources in political struggles."

A New World example of reconfiguring the dominant version of the past can be found in the works of seventeenth-century historian Garcilaso de la Vega, a mestizo born of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess. With one foot in each culture, he wrote poetry, literature and a history of Peru. His Incan relatives regaled him with tales of kings, which he used along with the classical European method of telling a history through a strict timeline. Incan narrative technique was blended with a European organization of information.

Jouve-Martín is keeping busy with teaching two courses this term, one on the history of ideas in Latin America, which explores the notion of Latin American thought as independent from European thought. The other is on representations of the dictator in the Latin American novel, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch. A novel can express and capture a reality that scholarly discourse cannot, he says, such as "the way that humour and tragedy play out in a dictatorship, how these fears are constructed; how dictators acquire almost mythical proportions to their people."

"The human historical imagination is polymorphous," Jouve-Martín says. His future collaborations will, no doubt, take many forms. Currently he's exploring the possibility of setting up a program in memory studies. He says that "it would be devoted to the study of the past from an interdisciplinary perspective." For this endeavour, Jouve-Martín hopes to attract the participation of the departments of literature, history and anthropology, among others.