Claiming a Space for Spanish Asian Studies

Since Miguel López de Legazpi’s colonial settlement in 1565, Spain has provided a large body of texts informing cultural, racial and geographic differences of various Asian countries. In fact, the first literature on Asia dates back to 1549 with the letters written by Francisco Xavier. Although early Spanish writings about Asia were mainly motivated by imperial ambitions, they came to establish insightful resources through which one can understand how Spain has construed Asia and Asians over the centuries. However, only in the second half of the twentieth century scholars began paying attention to Spain’s epistemological construction of Asia. In the following pages we will offer a brief overview of scholarship dedicated to this topic and lay out how the academic focus has evolved during the last few decades. Kathleen Davis, a specialist in nineteenth-century Spanish literature on China, will review several recently published books covering from the sixteenth-century to the end of Spanish imperialism, while focusing on how Spanish discourse on China has developed in comparison with studies on other Asian nations. As we move into the twentieth-century Yeon-Soo Kim will demonstrate the new ways in which Spain comes into contact with Asian cultures. By looking at Spain’s institutional supports for studies of Asia, she will also explore how culture has become an indispensable “resource,” to borrow George Yúdice’s idea, to promote tolerance towards Asian immigrants and to advance economic investments abroad.

With regards to the colonial and modern Hispano-Asianography, Robert Richmond Ellis’s They Need Nothing: Hispanic Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period, and Joan Torres-Pou’s Asia en la España del siglo XIX: literatos, viajeros, intelectuales y diplomáticos ante Oriente, which were published in 2012 and 2013, mark a profound shift in the field by exploring many untouched terrains and widening interpretative angles. While both authors share several common themes, they differ in their approaches. For example, Ellis examines texts on Japan, China, Cambodia and the Philippines from a cultural studies perspective, dealing especially with the ways in which race and sexuality play a role in the construction of Spain’s colonial discourse. Torres-Pou’s monograph includes discussion of India, China, Cochinchina, and, again, the Philippines. He looks at colonial discourse in war chronicles and travel narratives and examines how these writings influence works of fiction in such authors as Juan and Luís Valera in Spain and the Filipino author José Rizal. Many readers will be surprised to learn that Spain had interests and even colonial designs on such places as China and Cambodia. Because Spain had an established colony in the Philippines for three centuries, both Ellis and Torres-Pou spend a great deal of space analyzing the construction of a colonialist discourse and the revelations of colonial abuses through Jose Rizal’s writings. Torres-Pou concentrates on Noli me tangere (1887) and El filibusterismo (1891), the two novels that document the tensions between the Spanish representatives of colonial power, particularly the priests, and the various levels of Filipino society with a view towards constructing a nationalist sentiment, On the other hand, Ellis looks at lesser-known but no less important works such as Rizal’s edition of Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1890), and his letters to Francisco Blumentritt. Ellis finds the letters particularly interesting because of the ways in which Rizal exoticizes and orientalizes Madrid, revealing “his own embeddedness in the imperialist discourses he ostensibly challenges” (171).

Before publication of these two books, the topic of Hispano-Asian encounters has received only tangential treatment. Lily Litvak’s work from the 1980s, Geografías mágicas (1984) and El sendero del tigre (1986), mentioned only a few accounts of travelers to East and Southeast Asia. For nineteenth century studies, the publication in 1995 of Carlos García-Romeral Pérez’s Bio-bibliografía de viajeros españoles (siglo XIX) stands out as a resourceful study that greatly facilitated scholars’ ability to locate texts and authors who wrote about Asia. Entering into the 2000s, scholars like Gayle...