Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.60.4.0787

1528-4212

Nicolás Fernández-Medina,

Hispanic-African Historical Relations

With Secondhand China. Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation, Carles Prado-Fonts adds fresh insight into how China was conceptualized and interpreted in Spain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Prado-Fonts establishes in the “Introduction,” his study melds the worlds of politics, translation, and representation to demonstrate that it “was almost impossible to imagine China from the viewpoint of Spain without a foreign mediation—particularly British or French” (6). It is this complex foreign mediation, or indirect “secondhandness,” with respect to engaging China that reveals Spain’s geopolitical ambitions and positioning during a period of unprecedented modernization and change. More than anything else, this mediation discloses Spain’s deep insecurities over its waning influence within the shifting global (and European) power relations of the period, but also its aspirations for greater socioeconomic and political engagement with cultural spheres like China. Ultimately, what is required to apprehend this process of cross-cultural encounter is a “trialectical” approach in which the various “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived” concepts of China are brought to bear on the discussion (18–19). From this angle, as Prado-Fonts convincingly argues throughout his study, we are in better position to assess “the singularities and incoherencies of imagining China from Spain under Western hegemonic discourses” (19).The book is divided into four chapters, including an “Introduction” and a “Conclusion,” and advances chronologically between roughly 1880 and 1930. In Chapter 1, the core problem of the indirect representation of China in Spain, particularly through British and French sources and translations, is fleshed out and integrated into the broader framework of Spain’s national crisis in the late nineteenth century, which became especially acute after its defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898. While China did not loom large in Spain’s national consciousness throughout the nineteenth century, there were various noted Spanish scholars, writers, travelers, and diplomats, among them Ramon Martí i Alsina, Enrique Gaspar, and Emilia Pardo Bazán, who used English and French publications on Chinese culture and society not only to critique Spain’s waning imperial influence, but also strategically reaffirm through textual appropriation and (re)interpretation its place within “a unified Western subject” (60).The question of connectivity and improved East–West communications are taken up in Chapter 2 and demonstrate to what extent China had fast become a “coeval presence in the world” by 1900 (63). For Prado-Fonts, China’s increased presence in Western sociopolitical cultures brought about new perceptions of the country that often transgressed established and stereotypical representations of China, which pushed various intellectuals and politicians on a quest to discover the “true” China. While the quest for this imagined truth “became a trope, almost a cliché, that updated the old interest for an enigmatic China that had prevailed in ethnographic context of the nineteenth century” (66), what made it so paradigmatic in the Spanish context is how it exacerbated existing concerns regarding the country’s geopolitical instability and its desire to offer more unmediated views in contemporary discussions on China. This is especially evident, as Carles Prado-Fonts shows, in Fernando de Antón del Olmet’s El problema de la China of 1901.One of Prado-Fonts aims throughout Secondhand China is to establish how the growing complexity and diversity of China’s representation in Spain during a period of national reconfiguration served to inform discussions of concepts such as nation and identity. Spanish writers oftentimes subverted trialectical logic through their representations of China and in the process “became more self-conscious of their national position as Spaniards” (102). Chapter 3 tackles the nature and effects of this self-consciousness, including how it shaped racial understandings of Spanishness and Hispanidad, in José María Romero Salas, Vicente Blasco Ibañez, Federico García Sanchiz, and Luis de Oteyza, among others. Quite unsurprisingly, as Prado-Fonts clarifies, the complexity and diversity of representing China served Spanish writers exceedingly well as a lens to interpret, critique, validate, or reject various national and racial beliefs in and about Spain. With Chapter 4, this revelation is brought to bear upon the Catalan context specifically since “Catalan intellectuals and writers were particularly active in incorporating China in their own elitist projects,” many of which sought to singularize Catalan culture and distance it from Spanish traditions and history (142).In the past decade, interest in the historical relations between Spain and China has been somewhat on the rise in the research of Xulio Ríos, José Borao Mateo, and Rafael Martínez Rodríguez. Secondhand China is a singular work in this respect not only for its diversity of scope and research materials, but also for its thought-provoking assessment of the limitations of East–West comparative epistemologies that are often given currency in our scholarly practices. Prado-Fonts reminds us throughout his study how we are “invariably subjected to translation . . . We live in translation” (186). It is with the difficulties of translatability and meaning in mind that he offers us a compelling view of Spain’s coming to terms with its vanishing imperial authority and its fractured national identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To further deepen this view, Secondhand China could have offered readers, particularly those unfamiliar with Spanish history, a bit more contextual framing of how Spain’s engagement with other countries and territories during this period (for instance, the US and Spanish protectorates in Morocco) raised very similar questions concerning mediation, modernity, geopolitical insecurity, and national identity. Even the internal politics within Spain regarding greater regional autonomy and independence prompted analogous discussions. Indeed, the issues of power and identity were everywhere evident in Spain as a host of sociopolitical movements began to consolidate in the early twentieth century. This minor point aside, Secondhand China is an excellent study that adds greatly to our understanding of China in Spain, and it will serve as a valuable reference to scholars seeking a sophisticated and penetrating account of how the (in)visibility of translation affects the very structures of cross-cultural representation.