Colonial Philippines in Italian Travel Writing: "Italians" Interpreting Difference

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.

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 research on decolonizing creole language heritage under the doctoral programme in language studies of the University of Helsinki (Finland) while preparing the manuscript for a forthcoming monograph on Italian travel writing about the Philippine Islands. 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.