A Triumph of the Ass

I was going to make this post about our recent trip to Valencia, but I've been doing a lot of posting about our trips and very little about other things.  So, briefly, we went to Valencia by invitation of the folks who run the UVA study abroad program there, and had a spectacular time.  I was invited to give a lecture to the students, and then we spent time seeing the city with our various hosts.  They treated us like royalty, making the whole weekend quite memorable.  It was especially nice to see our old friends Agustín and Tammy, who had us for a paella at their apartment facing the Mediterranean.  Zoë and Santiago came back to Madrid on Sunday, while I continued on to Barcelona to give a lecture at the University of Barcelona.

But I keep getting these remarks from people saying that it looks like I'm on an extended vacation.  This is natural, since I have barely, if ever, mentioned my work on this blog.  Yes, we travel a lot, and I have no guilt about it whatsoever, because I figure any travel I do in Spain is a form of professional development.  But we also spend a lot of time in Madrid, where I put in long hours at the Biblioteca Nacional and other libraries and archives.  I thought I would tell you a bit about what all that is about.

Take a look at this map:

This is the closest thing that we have to an official map of the Spanish Empire, from the century or so when that empire was first created (i.e. 1492 - 1600).  In it's original form (this is a slightly modified, later copy) it was published in 1601 as part of an official history of the Spanish discovery and conquest of the Indies sponsored by the Spanish government.  Notice that I did not say "discovery and conquest of the Americas," because, as you can see from this map, the Spanish concept of the "West Indies" included a bunch of transpacific territories that we usually think of as the East Indies, as well as the Americas.  The map includes two vertical lines, one of the colored red and cutting through Brazil, and the other grey and cutting through East Asia.  Everything between these lines is what Spain considered to be its empire, including such places as the Philippines, New Guinea, China, and Japan.

I am writing a book that traces the fortunes of this concept.  I think it's an important one because of the way it helps us think differently about the geographies that were at work in early modern imperialism.  Over the course of the last few decades, a lot of scholars have been talking about the Atlantic world, the whole political, social, economic, and cultural network that arose out of the European encounter with the Americas and Africa.  This map reminds us that early modern imperialism, particularly Spanish imperialism, was transpacific as well as transatlantic.  Spain had ambitions regarding Asia, and once it established itself in the Philippines, it began to trade with China and other countries by way of the market in Manila.  Other scholars have studied the development of this Pacific world in economic terms, and I am trying to study it in cultural terms.  I am trying to figure out what the concept of the "Indies" meant for early modern Spaniards, and how it managed to encompass the Pacific and Asia along with the New World.

My progress so far has been a triumph of the ass.  I wish I had made this expression up, but I actually heard it on NPR, who said that's what writing a book was, a triumph of the ass.  Books happen because authors spend a lot of time sitting on their ass reading and writing and revising and writing and revising.  They do it for hours.  They do it when they don't particularly feel like doing it.  And that's what I've been doing when I haven't been on the road to cool places with the fam.  I've been sitting on my ass, reading letters, travel narratives, histories, plays, secondary sources of all kinds, and writing, writing, writing, writing.  So far, over 250 pages of writing, of which I think 120 or so are usable.  God, I hope 120 pages are usable . . . If not, it's more ass time for me.