This double special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies has been conceived as an invitation to encompass, in our respective spaces of knowledge circulation, the wide and divergent histories and cultural production of regions that have recently been bundled together under the category of the "Global Hispanophone". This rubricostensibly echoing the more established Global Lusophone, Francophone and Anglophone traditionscomes to incorporate the cultures and historical experiences of North Africa, Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines, among other geographic entities: all territories that were once bound by the Spanish Empire, particularly as it existed beyond Latin America, the Caribbean and the Iberian Peninsula itself. The reasons behind the rising interest in this area of studies are numerous; they include increased scholarly attention to migration, transnational and diaspora studies, human and cultural traffic between Africa, the Maghrib and Spain, and cross-border Spanish-language studies, as well as renewed impulses in academia to embrace peripheral territories by expanding the traditional confines of academic fields.The Global Hispanophone was institutionalized as an area of study by US academia in 2015, through the Modern Language Association's approval of a permanent forum with this name. The initial drive responded to the association's reorganizing and compartmentalizing of knowledge production into new fields and subfields through divisions and fora, including the Global Hispanophone Forum, a genealogy that prompts us to reflect on the role that scholarly societies (and, in a self-reflective exercise, special issues of journals) play, or might play, in shaping, naming and dissecting the contours of our academic pursuits. It also invites us to ponder the ways in which such institutional dispositions compel us, on occasion, to engage with regions hitherto marginal to various centers, transcending existing boundaries, and to place these regions' pasts and presents in dialogue with other realms. Such a reconfiguration of our intellectual and geographic mapswe are keenly awaremight also unintentionally entail naturalizing what were only proposed as working categories.This process is, however, neither unproblematic nor unique to the Global Hispanophone. Gaurav Desai, concerned with the rebranding of the MLA's former Division of English Literatures other than British and American as the new Global Anglophone Forum, has reflected recently, in a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, on the debates generated by the restructuring and renaming of divisions and discussion groups and, relatedly, on the valences of the terms postcolonial,

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In the construction of Atlantic paradigms, Africa—and its multiple intersections with both the Americas and Europe—has frequently been absent, or brought into the debate under the useful yet limited rubrics of diaspora, migration or creolization. In such configurations, the African continent typically emerges as an imagined presence for Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin-American or Afro-European definitions of identity. Re-engaging the Atlantic in a new direction could press us to move beyond these paradigms in which the energy driving the narrative originates in Europe or the Americas. Pursuing the turn towards a new island history of the Atlantic, this essay will address an array of links—trajectories, journeys, passages—between the islands of Cuba and Fernando Poo (today Bioko), during the second half of the nineteenth century. Fernando Poo –part of the Spanish empire since the eighteenth century— began to serve as the destination for the eastward movement of Cuban emancipated slaves, and as a prison colony for Cuban political deportees. Some of these deportees left detailed accounts of their Atlantic and African experiences. Addressing these deportee narratives, will provide a new discursive angle for critically re-locating Africa within the Atlantic, and will ask how reading the insular Caribbean from an island perspective might prove a useful disciplinary practice in the production of Atlantic knowledge.

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