Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation

With Secondhand China. Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation, Carles Prado-Fonts adds fresh insight into how China was conceptualized and interpreted in Spain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Prado-Fonts establishes in the “Introduction,” his study melds the worlds of politics, translation, and representation to demonstrate that it “was almost impossible to imagine China from the viewpoint of Spain without a foreign mediation—particularly British or French” (6). It is this complex foreign mediation, or indirect “secondhandness,” with respect to engaging China that reveals Spain’s geopolitical ambitions and positioning during a period of unprecedented modernization and change. More than anything else, this mediation discloses Spain’s deep insecurities over its waning influence within the shifting global (and European) power relations of the period, but also its aspirations for greater socioeconomic and political engagement with cultural spheres like China. Ultimately, what is required to apprehend this process...