(Re)writing the empire: The Philippines and Filipinos in the Hispanic cultural field, 1880--1898

This study considers the impact of imperialism, travel and travel writing on the Hispanic cultural field in the decades immediately preceding the imperial desastre of 1898. In particular, it traces the consequences of the integration of Filipino intellectuals into the metropolitan literary system based in Madrid. Traditionally, cultural histories of the pre-1898 period of Hispanic culture, and especially literary histories, have emphasized the "nation" as the principal unit of cultural analysis. This study attempts to recover an overlooked yet dynamic imperial cultural field in which literature was produced, distributed and consumed both in the metropole (Spain) and in the remaining and former colonies of Spain (Cuba, Puerto Rico and, especially the Philippines). This study focuses on travel writing insofar as it constitutes a strategic imperial literary form since in the trajectories it follows and the communities of readers it addresses, travel writing reveals how an imperial "geographic imaginary" could be used to reinforce or undermine the meaning of spatial relations in what geographer David Harvey has called the "interpretive grid of modernity." To tease out the role of imperial thinking in the cultural and political lives of intellectuals from the metropole and from the imperial periphery, this study focuses principally, but not exclusively, on the Filipino novelist and anticolonial writer Jose Rizal and on the metropolitan novelist and literary critic Emilia Pardo Bazan. In the case of the former, I consider his efforts to decolonize cultural and political relations between the metropole and the Philippines and consider the importance of travel and writing by him and his "colonial" contemporaries to that end. This study considers Emilia Pardo Bazan's writing as a case study in what I call "imperial fantasy" and whereby I trace the psychological importance of the imperial periphery to the meaning of metropolitan "national" identity especially in the turbulent circumstances of the rapid expansion of Eurocolonial rule around the globe.