front cover of The Magellan Fallacy
The Magellan Fallacy
Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish
Adam Lifshey
University of Michigan Press, 2012
Winner of the 2015 A-Asia/ICAS Africa-Asia Book Prize, a global competition, for the best book in English, French, or Portuguese on any topic linking Asia and Africa.

The Magellan Fallacy argues that literature in Spanish from Asia and Africa, though virtually unknown, reimagines the supposed centers and peripheries of the modern world in fundamental ways. Through archival research and comparative readings, The Magellan Fallacy rethinks mainstream mappings of diverse cultures while advocating the creation of a new field of scholarship: global literature in Spanish. As the first attempt to analyze Asian and African literature in Spanish together, and doing so while ranging over all continents, The Magellan Fallacy crosses geopolitical and cultural borders without end. The implications of the book, therefore, extend far beyond the lands formerly ruled by the Spanish empire. The Magellan Fallacy shows that all theories of globalization, including those focused on the Americas and Europe, must be able to account for the varied significances of hispanophone Asia and Africa as well.


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front cover of Subversions of the American Century
Subversions of the American Century
Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States
Adam Lifshey
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Subversions of the American Century: Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States argues that the moment the United States became an overseas colonial power in 1898, American national identity was redefined across a global matrix. The Philippines, which the United States seized at that point from Spain and local revolutionaries, is therefore the birthplace of a new kind of America, one with a planetary reach that was, most profoundly, accompanied by resistance to that reach by local peoples.

Post-1898 Filipino literature in Spanish testifies crucially to this foregrounding fact of American global power, for it is the language of that tradition that speaks directly to the reality of one empire having wrested land from another. Yet this literature is invisible in American Studies programs, Asian Studies programs, Spanish and English departments, and everywhere else. Subversions of the American Century will change that. After Subversions, students and scholars in various American Studies disciplines as well as Asian, Spanish, and Comparative Literature fields will find it necessary to revisit and revamp the basic parameters by which they approach their subjects.

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