Transnational Philippines : Cultural Encounters in Philippine Literature in Spanish

Abstract

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.