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.

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 her doctoral research on the decolonisation of creole language heritage as an EDUFI (Finnish National Agency for Education) fellow at the University of Helsinki’s Department of Languages. 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.