In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai argues that globalization is a contemporary phenomenon, a rupture from the past and what he calls a «Global Now» enhanced –in part– by recent technological innovations, the eruption of electronic media and what he defines as «new sources and disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds» (3). But can this definition be so totalizing as to impede other theorists to dig back in time and realize that globalization is not an extant episode in history?
This seems to be Paul Jay’s argument. In Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, the English professor advocates for a revision of history and the phenomenon of globalization, and confronts Appadurai’s take on it with other scholars such as Roland Robertson which, in Paul Jay’s words, argues that globalization «predates modernity and has been evolving since at least the fifteenth century» (36). And so he provides the five phases of globalization according to Robertson which consists of the following: «germinal» (1400 – 1750), «incipient» (1750 – 1875), «take-off» (1875 – 1925), «struggle for hegemony» (1925 – 69) and «uncertainty» which, according to Robertson «runs from 1969 to the present» (36).
With this is mind, let us go back to the year 1492, the year in which Spain consolidated itself as the new powerhouse with the discovery of the New Continent and becomes the first global empire in the history of human kind (it gained for itself colonies in all five continents), making Spanish the lingua franca, which eventually would be spoken by one hundred million people.
If globalization is defined as the back and forth of goods and ideas, then we can agree with Robertson and Paul Jay and even argue that the first world encounter with globalization, or the «germinal» stage, takes place when Spain connects the world by means of language and the opening of new routes for the traveling of products such as the cocoa bean, a native seed of Mesoamerica and parts of South America, unknown until then in Europe, and coffee reaches the New Continent from Arabia via Spain.
Literature also had its share in it. Spanish literature begins to be translated in an unprecedented way and we find iconic novels translated almost immediately to other European language such as Amadís de Gaula and La Celestina. But the literary piece that would be most benefited by this germinal stage of globalization would be Cervantes’ Don Quixote, written in 1605 and translated into English by Thomas Shelton in 1612, into French in 1614 by César Oudin, into Italian in 1622 by Lorenzo Franciosini and into German in 1648 by Pasch Basteln.
Prompted to reflect on how the idea of globalization being not a recent phenomenon but one that has been going on since what scholars now call the Early Modern Period, it’s impossible not to see literature, specially literature from the Golden Ages, that is, Spanish literature from the 16th and 17th century with different eyes. In those centuries, Spanish letters traveled in an unheard-of velocity and the transnational view helps observe this uniqueness with ample theoretical tools.
Even more: The «take-off» stage, which coincides with the Industrial Revolution, can be seen as the other global moment of Spanish Literature, this time coming from Latin America but greatly influenced by French poetry. Spanish Modernism will not only have a great impact in the now independent colonies but also in Spain in writers such as Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Here we see a triangular communication between France, Latin America and Spain that best describes that traveling of ideas that transnational theorist insist as being a trademark of globalization.
As a student of Spanish Medieval and Golden Age literature it has been revealing to be able to pin down the global phenomena implied in the diffusion and expansion of the Spanish language and its literature through the transnational and global lens. Such tools can help make conjectures as to why such peculiarities took place in two eras that are often seen as distant, unconnected and uncommunicated with the rest of the world. But as Paul Jay sustains, «it is a mistake to approach globalization itself as a contemporary phenomenon and that it makes much more sense to take a historical view in which globalization is dated as beginning in at least the sixteenth century and covering a time span that includes the long histories of imperialism, colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism». (3).