Intercolonial Intimacies: Relinking Latin/o America to the Philippines, 1898-1964 [Hardcover]

As a nation, the Philippines has a colonial history with both Spain and the United States. Its links to the Americas are longstanding and complex.Intercolonial Intimaciesinterrogates the legacy of the Spanish Empire and the cultural hegemony of the United States by analyzing the work of twentieth-century Filipino and Latin/o American writers and diplomats who often read one other and imagined themselves as kin. The relationships between the Philippines and the former colonies of the Spanish Empire in the Americas were strengthened throughout the twentieth century by the consolidation of a discourse of shared, even familiar, identity. This distinct inherited intercolonial bond was already disengaged from their former colonizer and further used to defy new forms of colonialism. By examining the parallels and points of contact between these Filipino and Latin American writers, Paula C. Park elaborates on the “intercolonial intimacies” that shape a transpacific understanding of coloniality and latinidad.

“Park’s fascinating study makes a major contribution to the emerging field of transpacific studies by adding the often-neglected Pacific Latin American region in its anti-imperialist dialog with the Philippines. Avoiding romanticization, she offers a genealogy of how, from 1898 to 1964, both Filipino and Latin American intellectuals addressed, through appropriated discourses of Latinidad and Hispanidad, transpacific links among former Spanish colonies in order to collectively resist US imperialism.”—Ignacio López-Calvo, University of California, Merced
 “No other scholarly work situates the contending discourses of Latin Americanmodernismo,Hispanismo, and the (Anglo)Sajonismoof US colonial policies of ‘benevolent assimilation’ in Philippine literature and politics, as comprehensively and eruditely as Park’sIntercolonial Intimacies. Drawing on cololC"