Date: 2008-12-29
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Washington, D.C. -- Adam Lifshey, assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University, will present his paper, “The First Asian Novel In Spanish: Potential Readings of Pedro Paterno's ‘Ninay,’” on Dec. 28 at the Modern Language Association annual convention, held this year in San Francisco.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Washington, D.C. -- Adam Lifshey, assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University, will present his paper, “The First Asian Novel In Spanish: Potential Readings of Pedro Paterno's ‘Ninay,’” on Dec. 28 at the Modern Language Association annual convention, held this year in San Francisco.
Lifshey’s presentation will be part of a panel he organized on the transnational origins of Philippine literature.
Discussing the complexities of ‘Ninay’ (1885), written in Spanish while Paterno was living in Spain and later translated into Tagalong (1907), Lifshey considers diverse ways to frame this previously unstudied work as a “deterritorialized artifact—one that is both Asian and European
“How can we discuss a landmark text -- the inaugural Asian novel in Spanish -- when it was written in Spain, a world away from the Philippines, and in a language unknown by the vast majority of Filipinos?” asks Lifshey. “How can we approach a fundamentally transnational artifact, a product of myriad global forces and vectors that nonetheless launches a national tradition?”
The professor says readers of the novel tend to dismiss it as an excuse for a literary exploration of indigenous Filipino customs, but that “even this conclusion suggests powerful transnational tensions given the foreign land and tongue in which it was produced.”
The first Filipino novels in any language were written in Spanish by reformist expatriates in Europe at the end of the 19th century. Those texts, Pedro Paterno's “Ninay” (1885) and José Rizal's “Noli me tangere” (1887) and “El filibusterismo” (1891), established the only Asian literary tradition in Spanish. Shortly after their publication, however, an 1898 war between Spain and the United States resulted in a new colonial master and the imposition of a different foreign language on the archipelago: English. As a result, the first Southeast Asian literature in English began to emerge. Furthermore, the global dispersal of Filipinos themselves today -- 10 percent of the Philippine population lives and works abroad -- resulted in further “deterritorializations” in the form of Filipino-American literature.
Meanwhile, throughout all of these transnational dynamics, literary traditions in indigenous Filipino languages such as Tagalog continued developing and hybridizing in diverse and fascinating ways, including via the incorporation of influence from the significant Chinese immigrant population.
Due to these factors, Lifshey believes that all Filipino literature cannot be restricted to traditional linguistic or national identities. He argues that Filipino literature is a pivotal test case for any theoretical framing of the transnational, since the country and its aesthetic output are unimaginable without considerations of the dynamics of globalization.
“Our panel offers the rare opportunity to juxtapose analyses of Filipino texts written in three different languages -- Spanish, English and Tagalog -- in order to provoke discussion not only of Philippine literature but also of the larger conceptual questions at hand concerning the nexus of modernity, post-colonialism and the transnational,” says Lifshey.
Professor Lifshey is interested in Latin American literature of all time periods, places and genres. His research is mostly comparative in nature as he works within hemispheric, transatlantic, transpacific and global contexts. He specializes in Asian and African literature written in Spanish, principally in the fiction of the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea. He also works on folk music by such singer-songwriters as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Mark Knopfler.
About the Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, the association’s journal of literary scholarship, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years. Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association’s annual convention each December. The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.
About Georgetown University
Georgetown University is the oldest and largest Catholic and Jesuit university in America, founded in 1789 by Archbishop John Carroll. Georgetown today is a major student-centered, international, research university offering respected undergraduate, graduate and professional programs in Washington, DC, Doha, Qatar and around the world. For more information about Georgetown University, visit www.georgetown.edu.
Lifshey will present his paper on Dec. 28, (12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Yerba Buena Salon 11, Marriott) as part of panel 278. Philippine Literature in Transnational Frames.