Although it might come as a surprise that the first global best seller about China was written in Spanish, Historia de las cosas mas notables, ritos y costumbres del gran Reyno de la China (The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof) by Juan González de Mendoza is just one of the many cultural products that bear testimony to the rich and extensive connections between China and the Hispanic world. After the establishment of the Spanish Empire in the Philippines in 1565, the Manila Galleon started navigating across the vastness of the Transpacific Acapulco-Manila route. For more than two centuries not only silks, teas and porcelains circulated through it, but also people, cultures, texts, ideas and beliefs.
Entering the first decades of the 19th century, the Spanish American wars of independence put pressure on the transformation of the connections between Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Moreover, the abolition of slavery on the continent contrasted with the absence of labour and the desperate desire to pick up the pace in the race for modernization, which made China an increasingly enticing destination not only for Europeans, but also for Latin Americans. With the arrival of the 20th century, the cultural and literary connections between these three regions acquired a new place and role. Despite the fact that for China, the Western modern model was never on the map of aspirations, the historical events that took place during the first decades of that century, and which led to the collapse of China’s millenary dynastic system, made modernity an inevitable destiny. On the contrary, for the Latin American case, the European model of modernity was a dreamy aspiration since the independencies, but the evident crumbling of the principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité and the general sense of hesitation in relation to European civilization as a compass for the rest of the world, became most clear with the outbreak of the First World War. Therefore, China and Latin America shared throughout these decades a deep spiritual crisis which Spain also experienced, but from the perspective of a profound imperial nostalgia.
In the face of such a spiritual crisis, their intellectual and artistic circles were called to devise a new secular mythology which allow them to understand their new circumstances. The demand for new experiences acquired through traveling, and the interest in cultures outside the limits of the traditional cartographies, made the circulation of literary texts and other cultural artifacts related to China, a very popular commodity. Thus, this seminar will explore the ways in which Latin America and Spain have imagined, interpreted, written and translated China during the first decades of the past century. Participants will address questions such as: how did knowledge and imageries of China circulated among intellectual circles? Did China provide alternative poetic and political sensibilities to the Latin American travel writer? In the midst of their geopolitical circumstances how did Spaniards and Latin Americans position themselves in relation to China and the Chinese?
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14.00- 15.30 |
Carles Prado-Fonts (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) |
Secondhand China: translation, mediation, taphonomy Based on Carles´s recently published book: Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politcs of Translation (2022) In this presentation I will address the triangular relation between China, Spain, and hegemonic Western languages between the late-nineteenth century and the 1930s. While during this period China became an extremely popular topic in Western literature and culture, most of the knowledge about China that arrived in Spain was mediated through English, French, or German sources. This mediation was always exerted in translation, but its impact goes beyond works explicitly marked as “translations” themselves: the images of China that appear in Spanish and Catalan novels, essays, illustrated magazines, and newspapers were translated representations of China that had previously been published in other Western languages. Archival work testifies that it was almost impossible to think about China in Spain without this kind of foreign-language mediation.
In this presentation I will show some of the causes and effects of this trialectical interaction that simultaneously connected and disconnected two cultural contexts—China and Spain—that at the time shared many historical predicaments and carried many potential solidarities. I will suggest that the mediated understanding of China in Spain illustrates how the ways in which we make sense of the world are subjected to certain mindsets about other, distant cultures imposed by hegemonic languages. Translation can therefore been understood as a practice that naturalizes the asymmetries existing in a trialectical world and turns them into an illusion of a binary, direct cross-cultural engagement. I will end up advocating for a "taphonomical approach" that helps unveiling this kind of hidden, asymmetrical agencies.
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15.40-16.10 |
Ana María Ramírez Gómez (University of Oslo) |
From Dynasty to Republic: (Re)Writing China from the Latin American traveller to the Latin American reader. |
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16.10-17.00 |
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General round of discussion / Q&A |
The seminar is open to the public and organized in connection with Ana María Ramírez Gómez’s midway assessment. The seminar will be held in English.
Interested participants should send an email to a.m.r.gomez@ilos.uio.no and indicate whether they would like to participate in person or online