Reaching Extremo Oriente: Spanish Round-the-World Travelers in Imperial Japan, 1898-1936. [book project]
In this book project I study how Spanish travelers’ impressions of traditional and modern Japan, and of its expanding colonial empire (Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan), function as a screen for reflecting on Spain’s imperial past and the nation’s reintegration into the cultural, political and economic structures of modernity. Through the close reading of a selection of travel books published between 1898 and 1936 by Spanish and Catalan authors who traveled to Japan as part of round-the-world voyages, I suggest the ways in which this understudied body of work might enrich understandings of the dual and contradictory feelings of cosmopolitan euphoria and post-imperial melancholia that characterized Spanish society in the first third of the twentieth century.