Transcultural Nationalism In Hispano Filipino Literature

This book studies a selection of works of Philippine literature written in Spanish during the American occupation of the Philippines (1902-1946). It explores the place of Filipino nationalism in a selection of fiction and non-fiction texts by Spanish-speaking Filipino writers Jesús Balmori, Adelina Gurrea Monasterio, Paz Mendoza Guazón, and Antonio Abad. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws from Anthropology, History, Literary Studies, Cultural Analysis and World Literature, this book offers a comparative analysis of the position of these authors toward the cultural transformations that have taken place as a result of the Philippines' triple history of colonization (by Spain, the US, and Japan) while imagining an independent nation. Engaging with an untapped archive, this book is a relevant and timely contribution to the fields of both Filipino and Hispanic literary studies.

As a nation, the Philippines has a colonial history with both Spain and the United States. Its links to the Americas are longstanding and complex. Intercolonial Intimacies interrogates the legacy of the Spanish Empire and the cultural hegemony of the United States by analyzing the work of twentieth-century Filipino and Latin/o American writers and diplomats who often read one other and imagined themselves as kin. The relationships between the Philippines and the former colonies of the Spanish Empire in the Americas were strengthened throughout the twentieth century by the consolidation of a discourse of shared, even familiar, identity. This distinct inherited intercolonial bond was already disengaged from their former colonizer and further used to defy new forms of colonialism. By examining the parallels and points of contact between these Filipino and Latin American writers, Paula C. Park elaborates on the “intercolonial intimacies” that shape a transpacific understanding of coloniality and latinidad.

On the Subject of the Nation looks at fiction and nonfiction produced since the martial law era in light of two historical developments that have definitively shaped Philippine experience: revolution and migration. The volume examines the critical interfaces between the personal and political that frame the utopian visions of Bai Ren's fictional autobiography about the education of Filipino-Chinese sojourners, Robert Francis Garcia's firsthand account of the communist purges, Cesar Lacara's memoirs of a veteran revolutionary, Zelda Soriano's feminist narratives, Peter Bacho's novelistic dissection of Filipino-American identity crisis and Rey Ventura's ethnography of illegal migrant workers in Japan. They illuminate the ongoing transformation and redefinition of the Philippine nation-state while highlighting the ways in which the individual and collective experiences, struggles, dreams, and aspirations of Filipinos serve to rethink and reinvent notions of belonging, sacrifice, learning, labor, and love that underpin the theory and practice of nation-making.

This book is published in conjunction with Intertwined: Transpacific, Transcultural Philippines, Ayala Museum's inaugural exhibition for its newly renovated space opened in 2021. It is authored by the exhibition curator Florina H. Capistrano-Baker, Ph.D. and features essays by contributing scholars and field experts—Sandra Castro; Michael F. Manalo, M.Arch; Maria Cristina Martinez-Juan, Ph.D.; and Iván Valdez-Bubnov, Ph.D. Intertwined provides important scholarship on Filipino heritage and transpacific studies. The publication also serves as the catalogue of the exhibition. The exhibition and its joint publication open up visual and verbal conversations on the complexities and contradictions of Filipino art and identity. By illuminating the Filipino’s transcultural heritage resulting from pre- and post-colonial maritime exchanges with diverse cultures in Asia, America, and Europe, Filipinos can gain a better understanding of our culture and take pride in the excellence we've shown throughout history in the arts, diplomacy, entrepreneurship, and the global economy.

In The Promise of the Foreign, Vicente L. Rafael argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century. Acts of translation entailed technics from which issued the promise of nationhood. Such a promise consisted of revising the heterogeneous and violent origins of the nation by mediating one’s encounter with things foreign while preserving their strangeness. Rafael examines the workings of the foreign in the Filipinos’ fascination with Castilian, the language of the Spanish colonizers. In Castilian, Filipino nationalists saw the possibility of arriving at a lingua franca with which to overcome linguistic, regional, and class differences. Yet they were also keenly aware of the social limits and political hazards of this linguistic fantasy. Through close readings of nationalist newspapers and novels, the vernacular theater, and accounts of the 1896 anticolonial revolution, Rafael traces the deep ambivalence with which elite nationalists and lower-class Filipinos alike regarded Castilian. The widespread belief in the potency of Castilian meant that colonial subjects came in contact with a recurring foreignness within their own language and society. Rafael shows how they sought to tap into this uncanny power, seeing in it both the promise of nationhood and a menace to its realization. Tracing the genesis of this promise and the ramifications of its betrayal, Rafael sheds light on the paradox of nationhood arising from the possibilities and risks of translation. By repeatedly opening borders to the arrival of something other and new, translation compels the nation to host foreign presences to which it invariably finds itself held hostage. While this condition is perhaps common to other nations, Rafael shows how its unfolding in the Philippine colony would come to be claimed by Filipinos, as would the names of the dead and their ghostly emanations.