The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. See Sundiata for twentieth-century population statistics in Guinea (Equatorial Guinea, 32). 2. See Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel by Resil Mojares for the canonical account of written vernacular literature in the Philippines prior to the appearance of the ‹rst texts that are generally considered novels, all of which were written in Spanish. See Frontier Constitutions by John Blanco for a recent contestation of the categorizations and genealogical logic of Mojares (188–90). Chapter 1 1. Some sources list the publication year of Sampaguitas as 1881. In 2008, Manuel García-Castellón wrote that he had discovered a book of verse entitled Flores ‹lipinas (Filipino Flowers) by Miguel Zaragoza that antedates the publications by Paterno and his successors. According to García-Castellón, “Nada conocemos de este misterioso Miguel Zaragoza, cuyos versos constituyen, nos atrevemos a decir, el primer libro de poemas escrito y publicado en castellano por un ‹lipino. Tal es Flores ‹lipinas, que Zaragoza dedicaba a su novia en la contraportada y que veía la luz en Madrid en 1864. . . . Podemos considerar a este Zaragoza, pues, como primer literato ‹l-hispano” [“We know nothing of this mysterious Miguel Zaragoza whose verses constitute, we dare to say it, the ‹rst book of poems written and published in Castilian by a Filipino. Such is Filipino Flowers, which Zaragoza dedicated to his fiancée on the back page and which saw light in Madrid in 1864. . . . We can consider this Zaragoza, then, as the ‹rst Fil-Hispanic literatus”] (“Miguel Zaragoza”). If this conclusion is accurate, then the chronological primacy always awarded to Paterno for Sampaguitas needs to be revised, but otherwise the story of the emergence of Filipino literature in Spanish would seem to remain effectively the same. All accounts of the trajectory of that tradition, both those contemporary to Paterno and ever since, have taken Sampaguitas as its starting point in terms of published books of Filipino creative writing in Spanish. Perhaps further investigations will concretize the 275 identity of Zaragoza and show that Filipino Flowers was indeed known by later writers and that the putative beginnings of Filipino literature in Spanish merit a substantial modi‹cation. 2. Teo‹lo del Castillo y Tuazon and Buenaventura S. Medina Jr. concur that Paterno “was the ‹rst Filipino poet in Spanish to publish his poems in book form” but note that two earlier nineteenth-century Filipinos, Don Jose de Vergara and Don Juan de Atayde, occasionally wrote verse in Spanish as a hobby (135–37). Some individual poems in Spanish by contemporaries of Paterno also appeared before the publication of Sampaguitas in 1880, with Ben Cailles Unson even af‹rming that José Rizal’s “oda, ‘A la juventud ‹lipina,’ publicada en 1879, la primera obra hispano‹lipina de realce, marca el nacimiento de la verdadera literatura ‹lipina en español” [“ode, ‘To the Filipino Youth,’ published in 1879, the ‹rst Filipino-Hispanic work of signi‹cance, marks the birth of the true Filipino literature in Spanish”] (275). 3. John Schumacher and Resil Mojares both conclude in their various texts that the general goal of Paterno in all his sociohistorical writings was to show the premagellanic indigenous cultures of the Philippines as essentially protoChristian and proto-Spanish. A comparison awaits to be developed here between Paterno’s histories of the pre-Hispanic Philippines and those of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega of Peru, whose ideological goals in Los comentarios reales (The Royal Commentaries) of 1609 and La historia general del Perú (The General History of Peru) of 1617 were approximately the same. Like Paterno, Garcilaso was the ‹rst mestizo author of his land to channel his education in both European and indigenous culture into written histories of the latter. Garcilaso was born to an Incan mother and Spanish father; Paterno was of Tagalog-Chinese heritage, which is considered mestizo in the Philippines. 4. Torres lauds Paterno as an underappreciated founding father of the Philippines whose example could be of continuing relevance: “Hombres de su carácter son los que hoy necesita el mundo turbado por la gigantesca lucha entre el Comunismo y la Democracia” [“Men of his character are those who are needed today in a world disturbed by the gigantic ‹ght between Communism and Democracy”] (5). This posthumous use of Paterno as an unlikely standardbearer for Filipino anticommunism surfaces as well in the only other known text to praise him hyperbolically, a high school or possibly college language textbook entitled Español 4...