22 research outputs found
Longings for Manila: Projections of Imperialism and Decline in the Poems of J. Slauerhoff
Get PDFThe Dutch poet Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898–1936) featured Manila in three poems written in the late 1920s. These poems present the city as the decaying remnant of a deceased empire. Manila appears as a memory site of Spain’s bygone world dominance, resonates with the discourse of the “decline of the West,” and bears parallels to an image of a decaying Dutch empire. The city functions as a screen against which cultural images derived from the author’s personal European context are projected: cultural pessimism and colonial decline
The City as Nation: Nick Joaquin\u27s Manila, My Manila as Nationalist History
No full textThis article discusses Nick Joaquin’s Manila, My Manila (1989/1999) as an example of how his historiographical work tends to be more conventional in terms of the nationalism that dominates Philippine historiography, and has a more complex relationship to this discourse than existing analyses tend to suggest. While his veneration of the Spanish colonial period is indeed unconventional, his book leaves the main problem of nationalist discourse untouched as it maintains the essentialist notion of an identifiable national community projected backwards into time. The book fails to capitalize on the potential for disrupting national paradigms that city narratives offer. Rather than breaking up narratives of nationalism, it creates a new one, homogenizing Philippine history around a linear history of the city. It imagines Manila as the continuously endangered seed of the nation, which miraculously overcomes the multitude of threats thrown its way. While the narrative glosses over the inherent diversity of the nation, it also exposes an essentialist, teleological, and metaphysical historical vision. The ambiguity of Joaquin’s vision, and of his relationship with the tradition of Philippine historiography, then, lies in his outward rejection of the essentialism inherent to nationalist notions on the one hand, and the determinism governing his homogenizing narratives on the other
The City as Nation: Nick Joaquin\u27s Manila, My Manila as Nationalist History
Get PDFThis article discusses Nick Joaquin’s Manila, My Manila (1989/1999) as an example of how his historiographical work tends to be more conventional in terms of the nationalism that dominates Philippine historiography, and has a more complex relationship to this discourse than existing analyses tend to suggest. While his veneration of the Spanish colonial period is indeed unconventional, his book leaves the main problem of nationalist discourse untouched as it maintains the essentialist notion of an identifiable national community projected backwards into time. The book fails to capitalize on the potential for disrupting national paradigms that city narratives offer. Rather than breaking up narratives of nationalism, it creates a new one, homogenizing Philippine history around a linear history of the city. It imagines Manila as the continuously endangered seed of the nation, which miraculously overcomes the multitude of threats thrown its way. While the narrative glosses over the inherent diversity of the nation, it also exposes an essentialist, teleological, and metaphysical historical vision. The ambiguity of Joaquin’s vision, and of his relationship with the tradition of Philippine historiography, then, lies in his outward rejection of the essentialism inherent to nationalist notions on the one hand, and the determinism governing his homogenizing narratives on the other
Tropical Faustian: Nick Joaquin’s Spenglerian Imagining of Colonial History in the Post-Authoritarian Philippines
Get PDFThis article discusses how Philippine writer Nick Joaquin applied the ideas of Oswald Spengler in his historiography; notably the collection Culture and History (1988); his contribution to the post- authoritarian renegotiation of a national history fraught with colonial conflict and loss. This article argues that Joaquin adapted Spengler’s ideas; proposing the presence of a “Faustian” Filipino soul formed during the Spanish-colonial period; to a contradictory effect. It allowed him to assert a national identity that challenged the dichotomous ways in which Philippine history was conventionally conceived; but it also reintroduced Eurocentric and homogenizing schemes; reinforcing existing hegemonies in the postcolony
<Book Reviews>Yoshiko Nagano. State and Finance in the Philippines, 1898-1941: The Mismanagement of an American Colony. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015, 272pp.
No full textMark Rice. Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015. 220 pages.
Get PDFExcerpt: Dean Worcester, secretary of the interior in the Philippines from 1901 to 1913, established an extensive archive of photographs and films made in the American colony. Through photography, Worcester supported his claim that the Philippines and its inhabitants were not ready for independence—and would not be so in the near future either. His photographs focused largely on non-Christian “tribes” in order to show that these groups needed both the guidance of the Americans and their protection against the Christianized lowlanders
Philippine Modernities and Their Contradictions: Cultural Responses, Contentions, Imaginaries
Get PDFImpressive in its scope, Philippine Modernities: Music, Performing Arts, and Language 1880-1941, edited by University of the Philippines musicologist José S. Buenconsejo, reminds of the various, multiple, and complex ways that Philippine culture and arts were entangled in processes of modernity. A good number of the essays collected in the volume offer insights into the complexities, conflicts, and ambiguities that ensued as colonial Philippine culture and society underwent developments related to modernity. But the volume does not entirely fulfill this potential as many of the essays resort to dichotomous views of local and foreign, homogenizing notions of nation, and a one-way concept of the relationship between economic and cultural developments. Modernism, as a set of styles that express and constitute modern mentalities, receives little attention, as do analyses from alternative perspectives like class, gender, and ethnicity. Nevertheless, the book is an important contribution to the growing body of research on Philippine (post)colonial culture
Incompetent Masters, Indolent Natives, Savage Origins: The Philippines and Its Inhabitants in the Travel Accounts of Carl Semper (1869) and Fedor Jagor (1873)
No full textThis chapter discusses the travelogues of two German anthropologists exploring the Philippines around 1870: Carl Semper (1868) and Fedor Jagor (1873). It analyses how these texts describe and categorise the various groups living in the Philippines, and how they value the impact of colonialism. Presenting several aspects of the country for a general public, these texts stand at the crossroads of travel writing and scholarly literature.These accounts provided a basis for the thriving German scholarly discourse on Philippine peoples, cultures and languages in the late nineteenth century. The archipelago received particular German attention, in a context of the waning of Spanish colonial power, which drew the Philippines into the focus of German imperialist ambitions. The analysis will view the travelogues as part of a scholarly discourse which carried Eurocentric colonial projections, but also fed Philippine nationalism
Ranilo Balaguer Hermida. Imagining Modern Democracy: A Habermasian Assessment of the Philippine Experiment. New York: SUNY Press, 2015. 348 pages.
Get PDFExcerpt: Ranilo Balaguer Hermida offers a fine analysis of the Philippine constitutional order from the perspective of Jürgen Habermas’s theories of law and democracy. At first sight, the concept of the book may seem rather slight—applying one particular theorist to one particular case study has the danger of offering either an unsatisfactory exemplification of the theory or a one-sided approach to the case at hand. But Hermida convincingly shows the relevance of Habermas to the Philippine case, and his analysis offers insights into and illustration of the latter
