Centering Panama in Global Modernity: The Search for National Identity and the Imagining of the Orient in Rogelio Sinán's "Sin novedad en Shanghai"

Since its independence from Colombia in 1903 backed by the United States government, which resulted in a treaty that granted the US free rein to build, administer and control what would be known as the Panama Canal, Panama’s quest for modern nationhood has been severely called into question. More often than not it is posited as an artificial state with little organic unity and limited sovereignty: a state that is literally made in the USA. Panamanian intellectuals, such as Rogelio Sinan, responded to these discourses on the Panamanian nation-state by actively constructing a Panamanian national identity, and by calling attention to the central significance of Panama in the twentieth-century world of global modernity. Questioning the widespread narrative of Panama as a peripheral North American neo-colony that was at best a marginal actor in international history, Sinan positioned Panama at the center of the modern world where World Wars, international migrations and global capitalism connected. By exploring Sinan’s short story “Sin novedad en Shanghai” that takes place in East Asia during World War II, this study argues that the writer’s deployment of the Orient—as a geopolitical, cultural, symbolic and imaginary space—allows him to reposition Panama. In its symbolic relation to this Orient, Panama emerges not as the backwaters of global modernity, but at its center—a cosmopolis between the Orient and the Occident that reveals a microcosm of the modern world. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol37/iss2/5 Centering Panama in Global Modernity: The Search for National Identity and the Imagining of the Orient in Rogelio Sinan’s “Sin novedad en Shanghai” Junyoung Veronica Kim The University of Iowa Le ha llegado el momento a Panama de proyectarse mas alla del Continente de America y de Europa. Debera abocarse, desde ahora, a la conquista de los ‘tigres de Asia’. Asi, avanzariamos en nuestro compromiso historico de unir al mundo a traves del Canal de Panama y ... consolidariamos nuestra tradicion como puente del mundo y centro del comercio hemisferico y mundial. (Qtd. in Ana Elena Porras) Panamanians must aspire to be universal if we want to survive as a people and as a nation in a globalized world, but we can achieve that only if we are authentic. (Guillermo Castro H. “Afterword” of Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama) Introduction: Inter/national Imaginaries of Panama Since Panama’s independence from Colombia in 1903 backed by the United States government, which subsequently resulted in a treaty that granted the US free rein to build, administer and control what would be known as the Panama Canal, Panama’s quest for modern 1 Kim: Centering Panama in Global Modernity: The Search for National Ide Published by New Prairie Press 62 ST&TCL, Volume 37, No. 2 (Summer 2013) nationhood has been met with skepticism and ambivalence. More often than not, it has been posited as an artificial state with little organic unity and limited sovereignty: a state that was literally “made in the U.S.A” (Porras 21). This discourse on Panama, originally constructed by politicians and historians from nations involved in the history of the Panama Canal—such as Spain, France, Colombia and the United States—asserts that Panama is not a real nation since Panamanians neither share a common national culture nor have a sense of national belonging.1 Since Panama lacks an authentic national culture, there is no legitimate basis on which to construct a Panamanian nation-state. Within this discursive framework, Panama’s experience of US neocolonialism and imperialism is seen not as a complex historical outcome of global geopolitics, but rather as a consequence of the Central American nation’s own deficiencies and limitations. This reasoning goes hand-in-hand with the global imaginary that represents Panama as a mere geographical medium whose value is measured by its utility as a land and ocean-crossing instrument for the US and other global powers. Panama, synecdochally, is reduced to the Canal Zone, while its sole significance is attributed to its role as host country for the Canal. Panama’s supposed lack of authentic national culture provides the raison d’etre ‘reason to be’ for its ambivalent status as a modern nation-state, and for its peripheral role as a transit site for the protagonists of global capitalism.2 Ever since the creation of the Republic of Panama, this discourse delegitimizing and marginalizing the Panamanian nation-state based on declarations of Panama’s inauthenticity has become the hegemonic lens by, through and from which Panama’s national project and history have been narrated.3 In their search for national paradigms in the midst of US neocolonialism and rising global capitalism, Panamanian intellectuals have had to engage with and respond to this dominant discourse: is there an authentic, unique and autochthonous Panamanian culture that all the different social and ethnic segments of its population share? Could this cultural trait be enough to successfully imagine a national community whose role in global modernity would be more than that of a peripheral US neocolony and an interoceanic transit route? Only by answering these questions that underlie the dominant narrative on Panama 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 37, Iss. 2 [2013], Art. 5 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol37/iss2/5 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1805