They Need Nothing: Hispanic-Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period by Robert Richmond Ellis (review)

While the influence of Asia on the early modern Spanish psyche was significant, it has been largely overlooked. Scholars of Spanish literature and history who explore such issues as transoceanic relation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have thus far mostly focused on America. Some have recently acknowledged the importance of early works on Asia for the study of Spanish literature and history, but much remains to be done to provide general works that offer fundamental references for continued reading, and Ellis deserves our thanks for undertaking the formidable task of providing scholars an overview of these writings, and discussing both their historical contexts as well as literary significance.

Consisting of four chapters, They Need Nothing examines the representations of East and Southeast Asia (Japan, China, Cambodia, and the Philippines) in a select number of early works written by Spanish soldiers and missionaries. At times the author also seeks to reveal how Asians reacted to and argued with the presence of Spaniards during the period. In his Introduction, the author identifies these early Spanish writings as examples of “Hispanic Asianography” and considers them as a continuation of colonial discourses. He expresses his awareness of the discursive differences in various representations of Asia and Asians although he does not explicitly acknowledge the significance of the generic diversity of the works he examines. In this section, Ellis also discusses the idea of intermarriage, suggested by Jesuit Alonso Sánchez in the mid-1580s, between Spaniards and Chinese as an efficient means to achieve Christianization of the latter. He quotes a passage by Sánchez and discusses the Jesuit’s stereotypical characterization of the Chinese as intelligent, noble, and honorable, despite their lack of Christian faith and Spanish valor. According to Ellis, Sánchez’s endorsement of the “superiority” of the Chinese “reveals a fundamental problem with which early modern Europeans struggled as they increasingly interacted with non-European peoples” (4). The disquieting question of why God had chosen to endow the non-Christian Chinese with his greatest blessings, in Ellis’s opinion, would lead certain Spanish missionary writers of the early modern period “to question profoundly their personal identities and cultural assumptions” although it would not sway their faith (5).

In his first chapter, Ellis attends to the depictions of the Japanese in the writings of three missionaries, Francisco Xavier, Marcelo de Ribadeneira, and Luis Sotelo. He detects a “tension between a process of identification and differentiation” in the Jesuit’s representation of the Japanese and links such tension to the idea of “the impossibility of any permanent self-identification” because of Japan’s refusal to convert (38). Ellis then turns to a review of the writings of two Franciscan friars. He first pays special attention to Ribadeneira’s account of the martyrdoms of 1597 through portrayals of individual Japanese and Spaniards, and then reconstructs Sotelo’s propagandistic accounts of the Keichō Embassy (1596–1615) in Spain and Italy in three news pamphlets (relaciones de sucesos). Of particular importance in chapter one, in which Ellis considers early modern Japanese responses to Spanish Catholic incursions into Japan, is his endeavor to look beyond Spanish ideas about Japan by including a discussion of Namban art of the Momoyama period (1573–1615) as well as the writings of the Japanese Christian apostate Fabian Fucan (1565–1621) and the anti-Christian diatribes, Kirishitan monogatari ‘Christian stories’ (1639). These Japanese sources, in Ellis’s words, constitute “a counterpart not only to early modern European ethnographies of Asians but also a crudely reductionist kind of Western orientalism” (62).

The notions of China revealed in the histories by soldier Miguel de Luarca, Augustinian Juan González de Mendoza, Jesuit Diego de Pantoja, and Dominican Domingo Fernández Navarrete are the subject of chapter two. The author singles out Navarrete’s text from the other three writers by giving special emphasis to the Dominican’s self-reflexivity, which he attributes to Navarrete’s personal interactions with the...