“Scripting the Global Hispanophone in the Iberian Colonial World,” is a joint collaborative proposal between the Global Hispanophone and the Colonial Latin American Forums. It aims to introduce new scholarship that sheds light on Spain’s colonial legacy forged by its push and competition for a global empire.

The session will center on questions of language and identity, discursive and ideological appropriations and manipulations of key notions related to the construction and representation of identities, nation/empire building, and otherness in distant colonial regions that are seldom studied. Examining the Global Hispanophone world within historical, geographical and literary comparative frames helps us understand further the contours and legacy of the Iberian world’s colonial enterprise redefining Spain’s early modern imperiality.

The presenters have been carefully chosen according to multiple criteria, including diversity, region, career stage, institutions, critical approaches, and the geographical and chronological contexts. They will each have 14 minutes to present. The panel includes two doctoral students, one postdoctoral fellow, and one associate professor. Presentations will approach the inscription of Spain’s global colonialism from transoceanic, transhistorical, and comparative perspectives enriched by archival research, close reading, and comparative alignments. The first four minutes will be devoted to introducing the panel, and the last 15 to the Q&A.

Ahmed Idrissi Alami, Purdue U

Reinventing Imperial Report through Postcolonial Testimonio

The foundational event of the emergence of Spain as an imperial power is tied to its expansion as a transatlantic power after the annexation of Al-Andalus and the expulsion of the Arabs and Moriscos during the 16^th and early 17^thcenturies. This presentation explores how historical events acquire new meanings through an act of narrative reclaiming that uses La relación (1542) by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, to recount the failed expedition through Estebanico or Mustafa, one of the four survivors and the only black Arab North African in the expedition. I argue that Laila Lalami’s The Moor Account (2014) reinvents the colonial Spanish text by rhetorically exploiting discursive conventions of the testimonio genre to reimagine the global Hispanophone through juxtaposed geographies of North Africa, Sevilla and the New World.

Carlos Yebra López, U College London

A Decolonial Reading of Chavacano as a Site of Global Hispanophonia

This contribution draws upon Michel DeGraff’s discussion of Creole exceptionalism (2005) to critique the modern linguistic articulation of Chavacano as part of the Global Hispanophone (Calderwood, 2019) In particular, it analyzes how modern colonial discourses apropos (de)creolization shaped its articulation in its early (1565-1718), middle (1718-1821), and late (up to 1898) periods. First, it examines early evidence attesting to the adjective chabacano in Spanish, which dates back to 1545. Then draws attention to the earliest documentary evidence on language contact, which dates back to 1718 and refers to the indirect testimonies of padre Murillo in 1749 and the Augustine Fray Martínez de Zúñiga in 1806.

Mario Alexis Hernando Cubas, Johns Hopkins U

Neo-Roman Republicanism at the ‘Genesis’ of a Transatlantic World: Good Government in Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala through John Milton

The paper discusses the transatlantic exchange of the ‘Republican tradition’ in regard to nation and empire-building in Early Modern colonial policies. The intervention implicates Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno (1615) to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), specifically, in the conceptualization of “Good Government.” Concretely, it argues that Guamán Poma’s critique of empire draws on stoicism and neo-Roman concepts, particularly a strain of neo-Roman thinking that privileged the Biblical narrative of the Fall of Adam to define virtue and to recognize the origin of human vice and tyrannical government. The presentation shows how they converge into an emergent global history of modernity shaped by the same universe of imperial and colonial contingencies.

Yangyou Fang, Princeton U

“Mala gente que andaba a robar reinos ajenos:” the Collapse the Spanish Colonial Narratives in the Failed Conquest of China

What was the dynamic between the Spaniards and the Chinese in early encounters in Ming China? In attempts to politically and spiritually control the Pacific, colonists, and missionaries reused rhetorical models of Spanish conquests in the Americas, especially in the 1st encounters with Ming China. This presentation examines first-person narratives by Francisco de Sande, the Governor-General of the Philippines (1575–1580), and Alonso Sánchez, a Jesuit missionary. Their ethnographies of Chinese natives as idolaters need to be read as juridical-theological justifications for the conquest. However, as I argue, a close reading of the sources shows that the rhetoric mostly met frustration and hostility in the face of a drastically different and highly sophisticated civilization.