Cracks in the Glass Ceiling: Spain, East Asia, and the Limits of Early Modern Eurocentrism

As new knowledge about East Asia and its peoples made its way back to early
modern Europe antiquated accounts of Cathay and Cipango stemming ultimately
from the writings of Marco Polo came to be replaced with images of Japan and China
that look familiar to us today. Some of this new knowledge arrived by way of the
Indian Ocean basin, with the Portuguese and the Jesuits who relied on Portuguese
shipping. Some of it arrived by way of the Philippines, the Pacific, Mexico and the
Atlantic. The route of travel mattered. Those routes were the products of distinct
historical experiences that shaped the ways these countries were perceived. As
the endpoints of the Portuguese and Jesuit itinerary, China and Japan loomed as
potential trading partners and mission territories. As the endpoints of that Spanish
and mendicant itinerary, these same countries were more readily configured as
potential objects of conquest, military as well as spiritual. The example of Spain's
experience in the New World, which lay athwart the historical trajectory of Spanish
expansion westward just as it bridged the shipping routes between the Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans, seemed to affirm European superiority over non-Europeans in every
regard, and suggested that the pattern of military conquest and political subjugation
characteristic of the New World encounter could be continued on the far side of
the Pacific. The Spanish imperial imagination could not help but imagine these
countries, China in particular, as new Mexicos and new Perus awaiting a new Cortés
or Pizarro.

But the cultures that Europeans encountered there, particularly China and
Japan, were more sophisticated, more prosperous, more populous, and better
armed than anything that had been encountered in America. Fantasies of conquest
thus found themselves in uneasy tension with anxieties about its very possibility,
and begrudging acknowledgements of superiority. There were also moments of
recognition, in which the exotic Asian other became uncannily familiar, in ways
that tended to upset the European sense of self. This lecture explores the tense
interplay, in Spanish transpacific writing about China and Japan, between those
imperial fantasies on the one hand, and those anxious and uncanny recognitions
on the other, tracing the way they could crack the glass ceiling meant to keep non-
European others in their place.

Ricardo Padrón is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Italian,
and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. He is interested in all aspects of the
Hispanic imperial imagination, but particularly in its spatial and cartographic
manifestations. His first book, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and
Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago 2004) explores conflicting spatialities in
the cartographic literature (maps, histories, epic poetry) of Spain's encounter with
the Americas, arguing for the persistence of a medieval spatial imagination in early
modern Hispanic imperialism. His new book project, Reorienting the Indies: Spain,
the Pacific, and the Globe, 1520-1620, traces the mise en carte of what early moderns
called "The South Sea," with particular attention to the ways in which it articulated
Hispanic imperial ambitions with an emergent early modern globalism. Professor
Padrón is also interested in lyric poetry, having published on the work of Garcilaso
de la Vega, Fernando de Herrera, and Luis de Góngora, as well as in the cartography
of imaginary worlds. His work has been supported by grants from the American
Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.