Malcolm K. Read. Educating the Educators: Hispanism and its Institutions. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003 [Book review]

Malcolm Read says of his objective in writing his latest work, Educating the Educators:

My aim throughout has been less to write a book in the currently fashionable academic genre of memoir writing than to uncover the political and ideological presuppositions of Hispanism, as these were filtered through my own life experiences. (12)

It is an intriguing proposition and, as its author notes, not one without pitfalls. The book itself went through several revisions and re-submissions as it baffled some editors with its multivalent, class-conscious style. For what Read takes on in his book is to map his own role in developing and sustaining a Marxist stance on the subject's relation to social formations and ideology and how this correlates to his own journey from working class beginnings to the academy in one of its most conservative and traditionalist domains: British Hispanic Studies. His book is hence a hybrid affair. It mixes details of his childhood and adolescence in Derby, England, his forthwith but unexpected entry into the university, with critiques of post-war pedagogy and the trajectory of scholarship within Hispanic Studies in the U.K. from this period to the present day.