Subversions of the American Century

Adam Lifshey’s Subversions of the American Century: Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States assembles a literary tradition that has escaped sustained critical attention in Philippine studies, Hispanic studies, and American studies: Filipino literature in Spanish. By focusing on Spanish literature written in the Philippines under US colonial rule in the early twentieth century, the author makes this peripheral body of texts central to literary studies, thus issuing a historiographical challenge to the ways that the late nineteenth-century nationalist “Propaganda Movement” adumbrates most understandings of the Philippine Hispanic. Lifshey’s focus on Spanish Filipino literature produced in response to American transpacific expansion prompts an unexpected yet necessary conversation with American studies. Lifshey claims that “the corpus of Filipino literature in Spanish produced under American hegemony” (14) is American literature, rendering “the concept of ‘Filipino American’ redundant” (13). Although the book’s stated primary contribution is to American studies, Lifshey himself is a member of Georgetown University’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. In the study of Spanish and Portuguese literature, the geopolitical organization of knowledge has historically depended on the epistemological balkanization of the Hispanic world into Iberia and Latin America, obscuring articulations of Hispanic culture that do not fall within this rubric. As his book title suggests, Lifshey's project subverts such a paradigm to consider other kinds of Asiatic Hispanic identities and texts. In a stunning, albeit implicit move, the book demonstrates how literary erasures also occur simultaneously at the intersection of competing imperialisms (Spain and the United States) and scholarly fields of inquiry that respond to, are critical of, and are emblematic of such colonial projects (Hispanic studies and American literature). By subverting the "American Century," Lifshey raises a number of productive and provocative questions: How are our epistemological rubrics affected by the protracted conditions of multiple intersecting colonialisms whose points of contact are often disavowed in American studies? How are such disavowals constitutive of efforts to produce and sustain critiques of "American Empire"? And, even more pointedly, why do American studies scholars overlook Filipino literature in Spanish written under US occupation, when cultural hybridity, linguistic mixture, coeval and overlapping sign systems have been a hallmark of the mutable signifier "America"?

American literature · Art · Colonialism · Hegemony · Historiography · Literature · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philippine History and Culture

• Translation and interpreting in the early modern Philippines

  Marlon James Sales•Perspectives•2017

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