Colonial Philippines in Italian Travel Writing

"Italians" Interpreting Difference
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-72230-6
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 92 Seiten, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 131 g

Reihe: Routledge Focus on Literature

The first comprehensive review of all extant "Italian" chronicles set in the Philippine Islands, this book juxtaposes "Filipino" Otherness with the unique condition of "Italian" ambivalence and alterity within Europe.

This book's contribution to the critical studies of travel is the opening of an analytical middle ground, highlighting the ambivalence of Italian chroniclers while acknowledging their participation in epistemological practices subsumed within the broader enterprise of conquest.

Beyond the role of travel writing in colonial episteme, the book also situates the act of writing about one’s travels in instances of national character building (in Italy’s case) and in attempts of constructing a national historiography (in the Philippines' case). This manner of nuancing literary productions by the West while navigating its implications in the East, specifically, how pre-Unification “Italian” travel informed nationalist constructions in the Revolutionary Philippines, could enrich our understanding of and refract monolithic conceptions of metropole-periphery relations.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Melchor, Jillian Loise

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Italienische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Ost- & Südostasiatische Literatur
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The place of ("Italian") travel writing in the colonial project

2. The place of travel writing in the mapping of national discourse

3. The "Italian" chroniclers’ motives for travel

4. The "Italian" chronicles’ journey towards publication

5. The "Filipino" native according to the "Italian" chronicler

Conclusion

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jillian Loise Melchor is Assistant Professor and Italian Section Coordinator of the Department of European Languages of the University of the Philippines Diliman. She was a former faculty member of the Division of Humanities of UP Visayas where she taught Spanish, literary translation, and cultural studies. Her master’s degree in multilingual cultural studies was funded by the Erasmus Mundus academic council and was obtained from the Universities of Sheffield (UK), Bergamo (Italy), and Santiago de Compostela (Spain). She is currently doing her doctoral research on the decolonisation of creole language heritage as an EDUFI (Finnish National Agency for Education) fellow at the University of Helsinki's Department of Languages. She is a published literary translator and has international, peer-reviewed publications examining the link between language and power in fields such as multilingual heritage, language education policy, and postcolonial linguistics.