ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the development of so-called "transatlantic studies" in Anglo-American Hispanism. Nearly all works that make up transatlantic studies, however, are anchored in one side of the Atlantic. What many call transatlantic studies today largely resulted from the convergence of two major fields within Hispanism, namely, Latin American and peninsular literary studies. Sometime between the height of the debates over Latin Americanist subaltern studies in the late-1990s and critiques of the Spanish nation-state in peninsular studies in the mid 2000s Hispanists in North America began to conceptualize their work specifically as transatlantic. The chapter focuses on the history of transatlantic studies over the past decade and a half, and begins with an exposition of the field's two dominant paradigms exemplified by the work of Julio Ortega and Walter Mignolo. It ends by taking stock of the present theoretical conjuncture by offering critiques of both paradigms and suggesting, perhaps, a way out of their oppositional deadlock.
