The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish by Adam Lifshey (review)

In The Magellan Fallacy, Adam Lifshey engages in a “tour de force” through a comparative study, at times, of African and Asian literature written in Spanish. The book focuses on the literature of the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea respectively, two geographically and culturally distant and different literary production, tradition, and experiences that intersect through the use of a global and imperial language at the time: Spanish. His is an interesting approach to the development of the literature of Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines, the only Spanish-speaking countries in their regions of the world. In the case of the Philippines, Spanish ceased being the primary language of interaction in the public and official space of transaction in 1898, whereas in Equatorial Guinea, it became one of the official languages of the country after the independence of the then territory of Spanish Guinea. The study proposed by Lifshey, far from claiming to offer any new interpretations on both the literature of Equatorial Guinea and the literature of the Philippines in Spanish, provides, however, important contextualized information and a wealth of bibliographical data pertaining to the period covered in the current volume; He also proposes new critical and theoretical avenues. The book, as the title seems to suggest, is a comparative literary history and study, in some parts, of the emergence of early Equato-Guinean and Filipino literature written in the Spanish language. The author contemplates a limited number of authors during a specific period of literary production. In the case of Equatorial Guinea, the emphasis is on three novels: Daniel Jones Mathama’s Una lanza por el Boabí (1962) published during the colonial situation, and Juan Balboa Boneke’s El reencuentro: el retorno del exiliado (1985) and María Nsue Angüe’s Ekomo (1985) both released in Spain during the postindependence period. As to the Philippines, Lifshey examines José Rizal’s El filibusterismo (1891), Pedro Paterno’s Aurora social (1910–1911), and Felix Gerardo’s Justicia social y otros cuentos (late 1930s).

The book is organized in an introduction and six chapters, in addition to a bibliography and an index. Chapter 1, entitled “Novelizations of Asia: Pedro Paterno’s Ninay (1885),” focuses on the novel Ninay by Pedro Paterno who is identified as the first Filipino novelist in any language. The main topic of Ninay, like in most of the early literary creation published during the colonial situation in Africa and Asia leans more toward what has been described as ethnographic literature. Paterno’s text, as Lifshey shows in his analysis, may be loosely situated within that literary context.

Chapter 2, “The Imperial Shift: José Rizal’s El filibusterismo (1891) and Pedro Paterno’s Aurora social (1910–11),” examines works by these two Filipino authors within the context of the colonial period. The situation of the Philippines was complex because one colonial power was replaced by another one as a result of Spain’s defeat during the Spanish–American war of 1898. The United States became the new colonizer of the Philippines which led as the author puts it to a “new cartographic drawing by the US”, and the imposition of a new imperial language: English (75). In this environment mediated by alterity new identities are imposed and/or renegotiated through a variety of discursive platforms, including literature as Lifshey shows.

Chapter 3, “Globalized Isolations: Felix Gerardo’s Justicia social,” is based on an unpublished text, a manuscript Lifshey found and consulted at the National Library in Manila, capital of the Philippines. Through this archival effort, the author poses the challenges associated with a better and thorough accounting of the corpus of texts that form Filipino literature in Spanish. In addition to locating Felix Gerardo within the context of national Filipino literature or Asian literature in Spanish, Lifshey also gives a literary overview of Filipino literature in Spanish while...