In 1898, the US seized the last remaining territories of the Spanish Empire in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, putting an end to more than 350 years of Spanish colonialism. The Philippines fought against the US in the Filipino-American War from 1898 until 1902, but the US annexed the archipelago, which remained under US control until 1946. Somewhat paradoxically, it was during the American occupation of the Philippines that Spanish flourished as a literary language among Hispanised elites, who used it to communicate an anti-colonial and pro-independence message, free from both Spanish censorship and American surveillance. Through proliferating periodicals, magazines and publishing houses, Spanish-speaking authors expressed their literary creativity and nationalist aspirations. In prompting Filipino nationalism in Spanish during the period of US rule, a generation of writers sought to resist being assimilated to the language and culture of the new coloniser. What is more, they asserted a sense of belonging to a global Hispanic community, with whom the Philippines shared a colonial history. Attending to this literary tradition, which has now started to receive critical attention, offers new interpretations of both the Spanish and US colonial projects from an Asian perspective. Indeed, the contemporary study of Hispano-Filipino literature has remapped colonial and literary histories. It brings into focus various histories of anti-colonial resistance and alliance—such as that between Cuba and the Philippines—and diverse transpacific networks and influences—such as the Manila Galleon trade route, which connected Mexico and the Philippines for over 300 years. To study Philippine literature in Spanish, therefore, is to study of a global network of Hispanic cultures.
Recent research on Philippine literature in Spanish, much like on other literatures from former Spanish colonies (Equatorial Guinea and Morocco), is no longer the study of peripheralised traditions in relation to a canon of literature in Spanish.1 Whereas in 2012 David Sentado could describe Hispano-Filipino writing as “zombie literature”, it is now seen as a central node in the “Global Hispanophone”. This rubric echoes the more established concept of the Global Lusophone, Francophone and Anglophone traditions (Lifshey 2012). Until recently, the study of Hispanophone literatures has been largely concerned with texts stemming from the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. This indicates that the Hispanic Literary World is, in the words of Franco Moretti, “one but uneven” (2000). And yet, both historically and today, the central canon of Hispanic literature has been accompanied by lesser-known literary traditions, located around the world. Against this backdrop, recognising peripheral literatures in Spanish serves to reconfigure the Hispanic Literary World. One of this book’s aims is to locate Philippine literature in Spanish within this literary world by attending to its relationships with other literatures, mostly from Latin America. Mojarro (2018a) affirms that Hispano-Filipino literature has to be understood as a prolific but forgotten extension of Spanish-American literature, with which it shares many features. These connections, he suggests, can be brought into focus through comparative study. In this way, Mojarro indicates the need to see Hispano-Filipino literature both as embedded in a particular historical conjunction of global connections (from which its postcolonial themes and nationalist concerns emerge) and as an independent corpus with its own characteristic literary aesthetics. Adhering to a comparative approach, informed by theories of world literature and by means of cultural analysis, this book recovers a neglected archive of Philippine literature in Spanish. It analyses Hispano-Filipino works in dialogue with other texts and a range of cultural and literary theories. Although these theories are presented individually in each chapter, they all fall under the general framework of transculturation (which I go on to explain below).
In terms of its specific corpus, this book explores the work of journalist, poet and novelist Jesús Balmori (1887–1946), author Adelina Gurrea Monasterio (1896–1971), doctor of medicine and travel writer Paz Mendoza Guazón (1884–1967), and journalist, writer and Spanish teacher Antonio Abad (1894–1970). My analysis of these writers’ works lays bare their shared concern with the past, present and future of the Philippines in the first half of the twentieth century, when the archipelago was an emerging nation situated at the intersection of various cultures. On the one hand, this reveals the global entanglements of Philippine culture and its attempt construct a national imaginary by differentiating itself from, but also assimilating to, other cultures. On the other, it illuminates the contemporaneity of this corpus’s concerns with nationalism and identity in an age of modern globalisation.
In putting my overarching concept of transculturation in dialogue with this corpus of literary texts, I take the term to figure what Mieke Bal has called a travelling concept (2002). As such, the notion of transculturation at stake in this book can be modified and resignified in relation to particular cultural objects. Broadly speaking, transculturation describes changes brought about in one culture by the introduction of elements belonging to another. Fernando Ortiz, the Cuban anthropologist, first used the term transculturation in 1940 as a means of combining previous ways of conceptualising transformations brought by contact between cultures, largely as a result of colonisation. According to Ortiz, transculturation complicates and expands the rather unidirectional and reductive idea of acculturation (assimilation) by drawing on other terms such as deculturation (loss) and neoculturation (innovation). Ortiz’s concept was foundational for Latin American literary studies into the 1990s. Indeed, it powerfully informed the work of Ángel Rama (1982) and Mary Louise Pratt (1992). Some Latin American scholars, however, have suggested that the term’s meaning has been exhausted, claiming that transculturation is now a never-ending process that occurs everywhere, all of the time. Instead, they present transculturation as an ideological discourse, which has appealed to ideals of tolerance and multiculturalism in particular periods of Latin American political history (Moreiras 2001). Despite its alleged exhaustion, when put in dialogue with Philippine literature in Spanish, the concept of transculturation makes it possible to trace and understand the dynamic, multidirectional flows that have shaped literary practice and ideological discourse among Spanish-speaking Filipinos.
In this book, I understand Filipino transculturation not only as the outcome of colonial imposition, but also in terms of an active desire for cultural transformation among the colonised to be put to anti-colonial ends and to affirm a new cultural identity. Indeed, Philippine literature in Spanish engages with a number of other cultures beyond the coloniser’s in a period of modern globalisation. Drawing on Ortiz, Rama and Pratt’s ideas about transculturation, I look at the agency that processes of transculturation accord to the subjugated culture. Rather than passively incorporating what is imposed on them, Filipino (post)colonial writers actively and creatively rework and reimagine received ideologies. With this in mind, I trace the forms of transculturation—encompassing assimilation, loss, innovation—that appear in selected literary texts. I explore how the Philippines has been constantly transformed, whether according to the model of its various colonisers’ cultures or other global actors (such as Mexico, Cuba and Japan). Each of these global cultures interacts with one another in Hispano-Filipino literature so as to form a distinct national imaginary of the Philippines—which is inevitably transcultural.
During the American occupation, the community of Spanish-speaking Filipinos represented one of the subjugated cultures. Nevertheless, their position at the top of the colonial hierarchy is of particular interest with regard to their role as passive (transcultured) but also active (transculturating) agents of the Philippines’ cultural landscape. Their agency was manifested in the flourishing of literary and journalistic publications in Spanish in the first part of the twentieth century, a period known as the “golden age” of Philippine literature in Spanish. This book shows how the transculturation of Philippine culture (as it was experienced, promoted and expressed by the Spanish-speaking Filipino elite) produced a range of contrasting and ambiguous sentiments, including feelings of bereavement, affirmation and betrayal with respect to the cultures with which they were in contact. The selected corpus navigates and negotiates its attachments to, and detachments from, diverse cultural points of reference, above all the Hispanic heritage derived from language and mestizaje, US market culture, an admiration of Japan as ideal modern Asian nation and the indigenous Filipino cultures (which are often represented only superficially). From a theoretical perspective, my analysis shows how these early and mid-twentieth-century Filipino texts in Spanish expand and complicate signal concepts and themes in postcolonial studies. Indeed, these writings develop notions of orientalism, identity, language, translation and transcultural nationalism in new and often unexpected directions. In so doing, Hispano-Filipino writers not only work towards intercultural translation, but turn transculturation into an active, future-oriented process of cultural and social change, which they put at the service of nation building.
Selected Texts and Authors
Jesús Balmori (1887–1946) is one of the most interesting authors of this period. He was a journalist, a poet and fiction writer. Under the pseudonym of Batikuling, he wrote columns for La Vanguardia and The Excelsior that reacted to events and satirised the US government and Spanish-speaking Filipinos who assimilated to the American way of life. Balmori’s work has been discussed by early critics of Hispano-Filipino literature, such as the Spanish intellectual Wenceslao Retana (1862–1924) and, more recently, by Isaac Donoso (2010) and Adam Lifshey (2011, 2016). In addition to two other novels, he wrote Los pájaros de fuego, una novela filipina de la guerra (Birds of Fire, a Filipino War Novel) during the Second World War. To me, this is a unique account of years leading up to the Japanese raid of Manila in 1945. The novel was not published until 2010, when Isaac Donoso produced an annotated edition as part of the Cervantes Institute’s literary revival project, Colección de Clásicos Hispanofilipinos. The novel tells the story of an aristocratic family of Spanish descent living in Manila in the period before the Japanese occupation (1942–1945). I discuss Balmori’s novel in Chapter 5. Additionally, I analyse examples of Balmori’s poetry in Chapter 2, focusing on three poems contained in the collections Rimas Mala...
