The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish

In The Magellan Fallacy, Adam Lifshey engages in a “tour de force” through a comparative study, at times, of African and Asian literature written in Spanish. The book focuses on the literature of the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea respectively, two geographically and culturally distant and different literary production, tradition, and experiences that intersect through the use of a global and imperial language at the time: Spanish. His is an interesting approach to the development of the literature of Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines, the only Spanish-speaking countries in their regions of the world. In the case of the Philippines, Spanish ceased being the primary language of interaction in the public and official space of transaction in 1898, whereas in Equatorial Guinea, it became one of the official languages of the country after the independence of the then territory of Spanish Guinea. The study proposed by Lifshey, far from claiming...