As a nation, the Philippines has a colonial history with both Spain and the United States. Its links to Latin/o America are longstanding and complex.
Intercolonial Intimacies interrogates 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 each 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.
Parks fascinating book makes a major contribution to the emerging field of transpacific studies by adding the often-neglected Pacific Latin American region in its anti-imperialist dialogue 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 Spanish American modernismo, Hispanismo, and the (Anglo) Sajonismo of US
colonial policies of benevolent assimilation in Philippine literature and politics as comprehensively and eruditely as Parks Intercolonial Intimacies. Drawing on colonial history and literature, Latin American
cultural theory, (US) empire studies, and the multiple legacies of worldsystems theory, Park reawakens the forgotten ties between writers and intellectuals speaking across oceans and prepares us to grasp at once the Latin(x) contribution to transpacific studies and the Philippine
contribution to Hispanophone literature. John D. Blanco, University of California, San Diego
About Author/s
Paula C. Park is assistant professor of Latin American studies and Spanish at Wesleyan University
