Transnational Philippines
Cultural Encounters in Philippine Literature in Spanish
A study of Philippine literary production that attempts to break the nation’s isolation from broader Spanish literature
Description
Transnational Philippines: Cultural Encounters in Philippine Literature in Spanish approaches literature that has been forgotten or neglected in studies on other literatures in Spanish due, in part, to the fact that today Spanish is no longer spoken in the Philippines or in Asia. However, isolation has not always been the case, and by omitting Philippine literature in Spanish from the picture of world literatures and Spanish-language literatures, the landscape of these disciplines is incomplete. Transnational Philippines studies how this literary production stemmed from its relationship with other cultures, literature, and arts. It attempts to break this literature’s isolation and show how it is part of the broad literary system of literature written in Spanish.
Yet Transnational Philippines also questions the constraints of traditional literary genres in order to make room for Philippine texts and other colonial and postcolonial texts, so that those texts can be taken into consideration in literary studies. Its chapters elaborate on the problems surrounding the cultural and identity relations of the Philippines with other regions and the literary nature of Philippine texts. By addressing the need for a postnational approach to Spanish-language Philippine literature, the book challenges the Spain/Latin America dichotomy existing in Spanish language literary studies and leans toward a global conception of the Hispanophone.
Axel Gasquet is Professor of Spanish American literature and Civilization at the University Clermont Auvergne (France) and chief researcher of CNRS.
Rocío Ortuño Casanova is Associate Professor at the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) and is affiliated to the University of Antwerp.
Reviews
“Transnational Philippines is a much-needed contribution to the subfield of Spanish-language Filipino literature and culture. This is an emerging subfield and a book like this represents a major contribution toward solidifying it and toward encouraging the teaching of Spanish-language Filipino literature in college courses.”
- Ignacio López-Calvo, University of California Merced
“Transnational Philippines performs a valuable work of recovery and reinterpretation for, and on behalf of, Philippine, Spanish, Hispanophone, and world literature. Traversing continents and oceans, languages and cultures, and political borders and identities, this wide-ranging volume makes a compelling argument for the creativity, intellectual fecundity and variety, and theoretical importance of thinking and writing from the margins.”
- Caroline S. Hau, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University