The emergence of Iberian Studies as a challenge to the paradigm of Hispanism has not only forced a re-examination of the cultural and linguistic relations within the Iberian Peninsula, but also raised some questions (and anxieties) about the significance of the transatlantic dimension in our field. For some critics, Iberian Studies may be understood as a strategic move to revamp the old-fashioned Peninsularism, as an attempt to regain intellectual prestige and institutional status within the Anglo-American academy by presenting the study and teaching of the European side of the Hispanic Atlantic as being relevant on its own, and Spain as a rightful member of the globalized world—without having to resort, as has been the case in the past, to the allure and the exoticism of being a romanticized other on the periphery of Europe or to interest in the Spanish-speaking Americas to justify its contribution to the service of language instruction. If the decisive surge of Latin Americanism in the 1960s and 1970s displaced Peninsular studies from a central position in our field (at least within certain institutional frameworks), Iberian Studies could be the white knight arriving to save the day—or so the reasoning goes. According to Sebastiaan Faber,

A similar argument has been used in response to the increasing popularity of Transatlantic Studies. Thus, Joan Ramon Resina sees Transatlantic Studies as a response to the crisis of Peninsular Hispanism: “pressured by demography and by the presentism resulting from a narrow application of cultural studies, the field of Spanish […] has been losing historical depth,” and given “the growing hegemony of Latin American literature [… ,] a ‘new field’ in ‘trans-Atlantic studies’ has arisen, permitting ‘Peninsularists’ to reposition themselves nearer the dominant Americanism” (2005: 96).