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

Introduction

Introduction Magellan sailed the ocean blue but never made it home. A Portuguese captain who commanded under the Spanish ›ag, he arrived in 1521 at what later would be called the Philippines. The archipelago was unknown to Europe and so Magellan claimed it for Spain. He died a month after contact. The reason he died is that Lapu Lapu, an indigenous king on a small island, resisted evangelization and Magellan decided to press the point through war. The foreign captain launched an amphibious attack on the local sovereign and, in short, lost. The narrator who would carry news of the defeat back to Europe was Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian tourist who survived the inaugural circumnavigation thanks to, among other things, the luckiest poisoned arrow in the forehead in history. The dynamics of Magellan and Lapu Lapu are symbolically compelling, with the world-historical European, whom many people mistakenly think to have been the ‹rst to travel around the world, felled by an individual of profound insularity. This originary victory of the local over the global, however, is complicated by the fact that Magellan’s ship did complete the circumnavigation without him and that Spanish claims to the archipelago held until 1898. Moreover, it is the voice of Pigafetta that tells us of Lapu Lapu, not vice versa. The death of Magellan marks the birth of modernity, for it is his voyage, half-completed by him, subverted dramatically by Lapu Lapu, and ‹nished for the moment by Pigafetta, that intertwines provincial and planetary powers into an irreducibility that is the de‹nitive hallmark of the world today. The Magellan fallacy is the conviction that captains can control the consequences of globalization. They cannot. Narrations of the world are always written with one intent of domination or another, yet all elude the command of their navigators, they who are authors and readers alike. We are all heirs of Magellan and Lapu Lapu and Pigafetta, we all bear their mark every day. And we all commit the Magellan fallacy whenever we will the world in our image, which is to say, whenever we set our sails, whatever their silhouettes, to the winds. Lapu Lapu defeated Europe in the form of Magellan in what was, from a Western perspective, an utterly peripheral space, a minor and previously unknown island whose antipodality seemed both literal and ‹gurative. When three and a half centuries later a generation of young Filipino intellectuals began arriving in Spain, they followed, metaphorically, the path of Pigafetta. These men, though from the most distant of colonies, possessed substantial European educations. Unlike Lapu Lapu, they negotiated the transnational forces affecting the identities of their homelands not on archipelagic beaches but in the heart of Madrid and Barcelona, and not with lances but with prose. They perceived the Philippines to be part of Spain and therefore part of Europe, notwithstanding the evident reality that Spain did not treat its colonial subjects as it would Europeans. Men such as Pedro Paterno and José Rizal consequently took up their pens in the 1880s to illustrate that Europe was a transgeographical concept that could be realized fully back in the Philippines. In so doing, Paterno broke new ground by publishing the ‹rst Filipino book of poetry in Spanish, the ‹rst Filipino novel in Spanish, the ‹rst Filipino opera in Spanish, and so on. By de‹nition this makes him radical, yet history primarily remembers him as a fatuous bon vivant. Meanwhile, Rizal, despite never embracing independence for the archipelago, was executed by colonial authorities in 1896 for the alleged subversiveness of his two novels. When the United States defeated Spain in a war in 1898 and became the new foreign power in the Philippines, Spanish became a language whose literature was apparently destined for near extinction in Asia. Nonetheless, the tradition continued to develop vibrantly for many decades more. New literature in it still emerges today in a different sense, for many twentiethcentury Filipino texts in Spanish come to light whenever anyone decides to look for them. For instance, Félix Gerardo, an astonishing short story writer likely from the central island of Cebu, may be the greatest pre–World War II ‹ctionalist of globalization whom no one has ever read. His narratives were discovered only in 2007. Gerardo was one of the last Filipinos to produce a major creative work in Spanish before armageddon arrived. Japan bombarded and then occupied the archipelago from 1941 to 1945 and, in the process, obliterated the primary Spanish-speaking...