LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

Under the Imperialist Eye: Transcultural Convergence and Dissonance in the Early Modern Spanish Pacific

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The Spanish Pacific encompasses the space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia (the Philippines and the Marianas, China, Japan, etc.) between 1521, the year marking the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan and 1815, with the end of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade. Marked by the abundance of under-explored multilingual archives, the Spanish Pacific has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years and continues to be a nodal point for a more nuanced understanding of the gender, racial, ethnic, religious, aesthetic and epistemological differences in the borderlands of the Spanish Empire, and for mapping out an early modern globalized dialogue between Europe, Asia and the Americas.

This panel invites papers that study primary materials produced by the Hispanic and non-Hispanic subjects, ranging from hagiographical sources, letters, decorative arts, and other documents and objects produced during the colonial enterprise and resulting commercial exchange. Various questions emerge from this particular geography, where diverse ethnic groups interacted with varying degrees of agency: How did the colonial subjects advocate their evangelical and political aspiration through imagining, even fictionalizing “las Indias del Poniente”? In what ways were such narratives, largely produced by the Spanish officials and missionaries, challenged and rejected by the colonized subjects? Looking beyond single-disciplinary studies and the essentialist myth of origins, how may interdisciplinary approaches to colonial archives excavate instances of transcultural encounter in which the (colonial/colonized) subjects and objects engage in conversation?

Sub Track

• Asia and LAC Relations

Session Organizer

• Yangyou Fang, Princeton University

Chair

• Yunning Zhang, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Indescribable Misery (Mis)Translated: Manila’s Chinese’ Letter to the Spanish King (1598) - Yangyou Fang, Princeton University

• Between Myth, Memory and Power: a Spanish-Portuguese handwritten chronicle on the Great East Asian War (1592–1598) - Giuseppe Marino, Autonomous University of Barcelona

• Reading the Surface of an Eighteen-Century Desk-and-Bookcase from Puebla - Yunning Zhang, University of Chicago

• Material Micro-Empire: The Four Continents Biombo - Stephanie Wong, Brown University

• “This Monster Was Noticed Among Them.” Uses of the Shanhaijing in the Boxer Codex - Miguel Llanos de la Guardia, The University of Chicago