| Abstract |
"Although the tendency to depict America as a part of Asia is most often associated with the print cartography of Renaissance humanists living and working north of the Pyrenees, it was actually the Spanish-speaking world that was most committed to mapping the New World in terms of transpacific connectivity: that is, the notion that North America was actually an extension of East Asia, and that the South Sea (today's Pacific Ocean) was actually much narrower than it in fact is. Columbus's dream of reaching the East by sailing west did not fade as America began to take form in the European imagination. On the contrary, it nourished continued efforts to press westward from New Spain, culminating in the establishment of a Spanish colony in the Philippine Islands during the 1560s, and speculation about continued conquest-both temporal and spiritual-on the continent of Asia. Throughout this westward push, the space between Mexico and Malacca was most often theorized not as America or the New World, but quite simply as las Indias, an eminently flexible concept that served to keep Spain's transpacific ambitions alive, even as various empirical realities regarding the true geography of the vast Pacific Basin slowly came into sharper focus over the century. These and other theories kept the New World connected to Asia in a variety of ways, subtending Spain's dreams, ultimately failed, of a transpacific empire. Padrón here outlines the contours of a largely forgotten geopolitical imaginary whose existence and salience has only become visible from the perspective afforded by the twenty-first century, the Pacific Century"-- Provided by publisher. |
