title: Imperial imaginings
title: Spanish narratives on the late nineteenth-century Philippines
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Sudibyo, Adelheid Bethanny
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2025
Subjects: Modern Spanish Literature
nineteenth-century Spain
Peninsular Literature
Spanish Philippines
public abstract
Iberian Studies

description: This dissertation contributes a transnational and interdisciplinary approach to Iberian Studies. Joining other scholars studying the Global Hispanophone context, I bring regard for lesser-known authors that participated in the intellectual discussions on late Spanish imperialism. I analyze colonial representations and discourse employed by Spanish authors who were concerned about Spain’s imperial ventures in the Philippines during the years leading up to the Spanish American War. I argue that the Philippines, as a literary trope, became a tool for each author to confront the anxieties caused by colonial loss, negotiate Spain’s position as a modern imperial nation, and project their own respective vision of the Spanish-Filipino colonial project. The Philippine Islands were an increasingly popular topic of debate during the second half of the nineteenth century. As Southeast Asia grew to become a colonial hub for modern empires, Spain was required to safeguard and re-ignite the public’s interest in its furthest former territory. As a result, various texts—from travel writing, official reports, to novels—were published during the last few decades of the nineteenth century and a public exhibition dedicated to the Philippines was held in Retiro Park, Madrid, in 1887. I have chosen a selection of narrative fiction from this particular corpus to analyze the ways in which Spanish authors—most of whom possessed firsthand experience in the Philippines—depicted the Philippines and contributed to the collective transpacific imagination. Conducted through a feminist postcolonial framework, my analysis specifically considers the intersection of religion, race, and gender in narrative fiction and visual materials (paintings and photographs) that were circulated in the Spanish metropole during the 1887 Exposición general de las islas Filipinas. The project is organized into four different parts. Firstly, it examines writings on interracial marriages in nineteenth-century Manila depicted in Antonio Chápuli Navarro’s Pepín (1892) and Antonia Rodríguez de Ureta’s Pacita ó la virtuosa filipina (1885). The second chapter moves to the Filipino Muslim South (moros) and studies representations of Spanish-Islamic confrontations in the second volume of Patricio Montojo’s León Aldao (1886) and Antonio García del Canto’s two-volume novel Los piratas de Filipinas (1888). The third chapter examines how two authors—Josefa Estévez de García del Canto and Patricio Montojo—utilized representations of other Asian territories outside of the Spanish Philippines to confront imperial decline in their respective novels: Memorias de un naúfrago (1888) and the first volume of León Aldao (1886). Lastly, I end this project in Spain and examine representations of the Philippines in a chapter of Benito Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta (1887) and a short story featured in La ilustración artística (1898).