Federico García Lorca is a particularly elusive figure whose poetic achievement poses challenges to both “ideological” and “theological” approaches to literature. Surely a hermeneutics of suspicion is needed to untangle his numerous ideological contradictions: his orientalism, his Spanish nationalism, his internalized homophobia, and his sacralization of violence come to mind. Surely nothing could be worse than a naive “love of Lorca” that merely reproduced the contradictions of the poet’s own ideology! In my recent book Apocryphal Lorca I myself adopted a skeptical attitude toward Lorca’s North-American reception, finding that poets in the US were not nearly suspicious enough of their own stereotypes of Spanish culture.

And yet Lorca’s work also offers a model of receptivity itself. ...