In his paper, David Wicks explore the roots of Spanish language policy in thirteenth-century Castile, when Alfonso X used the Castilian vernacular to consolidate cultural authority for an aspirational empire uniting the Iberian Peninsula and Africa and bringing together a multilingual population of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Iberians. We can understand this moment as a laboratory for the language policy of the Spanish Empire from the sixteenth century forward. During this period, Alfonso X aimed to create an ethos inclusive of all three religious traditions, but under a hegemonic language (Castilian) and religion (Catholicism) of state. His program of translation reinforced Castilian’s prestige as state language. Wicks demonstrates how translations of the Hebrew bible lend universal theological validation to the prestige of Castilian as a proto-imperial vernacular language, by synthesize commentaries from all three religious traditions, and transfer their authority from Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew to Castilian, future companion of empire.

William Arighi addresses related questions of empire and linguistic hegemony by focusing on the use of balagtasan in Spanish and Tagalog and its role in shaping literary value in the early-twentieth-century Philippines. Balagtasan—a form of poetic joust invented in the 1920s by Tagalog-language poets in the Philippines—quickly became extremely popular and inspired three “duels” between two of the most prominent Spanish-language poets in Manila, Jesús Balmori and Manuel Bernabé. Unlike many Tagalog-language balagtasan, the Spanish-language balagtasan of Balmori and Bernabé were reprinted in the Spanish-language press of the time. In contrast to the early-twentieth-century metropolitan cultures in the United States and Europe, which relied on a thick force-field of social distinctions and educated populations this colonial form assumed the marginal education and reading abilities of its auditors and viewers. Nonetheless, by staging debates that used heightened speech patterns, literary allusions, and tropic figures, this genre offered a non-academic form of cultivating aesthetic judgment in a population that was rapidly urbanizing, industrializing, and encountering mass education.

In her paper, Leslie J. Harkema explores the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual movement known as Iberianism, suggesting that the intellectual origins of the movement lie in a nineteenth century Catalan diplomat’s encounter with the colonial holdings of Spain and Portugal in Asia. Iberianism proposed to unify Spain and Portugal in the form of an Iberian Federation that would also allow for greater recognition of other, peripheral cultures (primarily Catalan, but eventually also Galician and Basque). Sinibald de Mas, author of the seminal Iberianist text La Iberia, spent time in the Philippines and Macau during the 1840s, a period during which his ideas about linguistic diversity and the re-unification of the Iberian nation-states seem to have developed in tandem. Later in the nineteenth century, another Catalan writer and translator, Víctor Balaguer, would advocate for the recognition of Iberia’s diverse languages and literatures as he translated his own work from Catalan to Castilian and served as Spain’s Minister of Overseas Territories. Harkema focuses on these intellectual trajectories, demonstrating how in each case translation among Iberian languages occludes another, figurative translation between colony and metropolis.

These papers interrogate the ways in which translation is more than a simple transfer of meaning from one language to another. Together, they demonstrate how the practices and politics of translation reveal the negotiations of power that undergird the colonial project and, as such, have contributed to the construction of the Global Hispanophone.