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Abstract
Space has often been relegated to time in contemporary Spanish Peninsular studies, where the issues of memory and the past have surfaced as a primary political and aesthetic concern in recent criticism. Writing both against and within this grain, monographs by Ann Davies, Nathan Richardson, Stephen Vilaseca and Lorraine Ryan underline the importance of space and spatiality in conceptualizing contemporary Spain. Through a multifaceted examination of literature, cinema, and visual arts, these scholars trace the development of the nation through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the Civil War to the destape, and from the transition to the economic crisis of 2008. While not the earliest works on Spanish urban cultural studies, these texts do serve as a strong foundation for any future work in the area.

This essay reflects on the colonial Spanish Caribbean as a heuristic that enriches Caribbean studies. First, it meditates on the usefulness and limitations of applying the category of the Spanish Caribbean to the analysis of some pre- and post-seventeenth-century texts. Then it focuses on the meaning of the nineteenth century in the Spanish Caribbean, with particular attention to the Caribbean confederation and 1898 as key moments in the colonial and decolonial process of this region. Then the essay turns to the notion of criollismo in the Spanish Caribbean and its dialectic relationship with creole and creoleness as two different fictive ethnicities that are signified differently in Latin America and the French and Anglo-Caribbean, respectively. The essay concludes with a proposal for the Spanish Caribbean as a heuristic that reconnects Spanish, Anglo-, and French Caribbean literatures in a comparative Caribbbean studies framework.