Writing China from the rest of the west: travels and transculturation in 1920s Spain

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on the representation of China in the West generally assumes a direct interaction characterized by a colonial dynamics. This article shows what happens when a third agent – neither colonizer nor colonized – enters the picture and looks at two responses from Spanish texts written during the 1920s: whereas Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s China chapters in his well-known La vuelta al mundo de un novelista [1924] dissolve the Spanish position into the voice of the colonizer, Federico García Sanchiz’s La ciudad milagrosa [1926] uses an external perspective to articulate a more critical view of the Western presence in Shanghai that is nevertheless subjected to a formal style that homogenizes the narrative. I argue that both works have trouble offering a coherent representation of China that is driven by their Spanish positionality. This proves not only the ambivalence of (Spanish) representations of China in the twentieth century but also the strength of the discourse generated by colonial powers, which ends up expanding its actual scope: here, domination was not only exerted in China, but also, discursively, within the West itself. This ultimately shows that we must not completely denationalize the study of cross-cultural representations.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Spain
• representation
• transculturation
• Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
• Federico García Sanchiz

Acknowledgements

I thank David Martínez-Robles, Xavier Ortells-Nicolau and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Carles Prado-Fonts is Associate Professor in the Estudis d’Arts i Humanitats at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. He works on modern and contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literatures and representations of China in the West. His articles have been published in journals such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Hispanic Review and CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. He is currently working on a book project on indirect translations and representations of China in Spain. Email: [email protected]

ORCID

Carles Prado-Fonts http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0648-9495

Notes

1 Although in strict geographic terms Spain could be placed on the Western side of the binary established by Hall’s terminology, its political position in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is certainly more ambivalent. It could in fact be considered “the Rest” within this general West. With this singularization, I want to pay attention to the configuration of this homogeneous West: while we tend to keep it unified for practical purposes, “the West” actually includes a vast array of diversity and unbalanced power relations among its agents.

2 See bibliographic lists at: ALTER research group 2017.

3 I am following the notion of transculturation, outlined in Tymoczko (2007, 120–127), as

a mode of cultural interface” that “includes such things as the transmission and uptake of beliefs and practices related to religion, social organization, and government from one people to another, as well as the spread of artistic forms, including music, the visual arts, literary forms, and even tale types. (120)

4 I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing these biographical points to my attention.

5 On 12 January 1924, the North China Herald reported that Blasco Ibáñez was visiting Beijing as a “famous Spanish novelist” and announced a reception held at the Spanish legation.

6 Since the English versions of Blasco Ibáñez’s text published in 1926 and 1927 are partial and do not include all the original chapters, all translations are mine. I have consulted the following contemporary edition: Blasco Ibáñez (2011).

7 Joan Crespi i Martí’s La ciutat de la por (1930) is a case in point, with detailed depictions of Canton, even though the author never traveled there.

8 In fact, the competition between García Sanchiz and Blasco Ibáñez was publicly stated – in more general terms – by the media (“La vida inquieta” 1926).

9 This probably explains the circulation of both works. Whereas García Sanchiz’s remained circumscribed within the Spanish market, Blasco Ibáñez’s was (partially) translated into English and French: La vuelta al mundo de un novelista was translated by Arthur Livingston and Leo Ongley as A Novelist’s Tour of the World, published in London (1927), and by Renée Lafont as Le voyage d’un romancier autour du monde (1928).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article has been funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España as part of the project “Interacciones entre España y China en la época contemporánea: 1898–1949” (HAR2012-34823), by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad as part of the project “Archivo China España: Un análisis cuantitativo de las interacciones entre España y China (1850–1950) y su impacto en los estudios coloniales e interculturales” (HAR2016-79995-P), and by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation as part of the project “Sino-Spanish Encounters in Taiwanese and European Archives: 1839–1939” (CCKF 2015–2018). All of them carried out within the ALTER research group.