Writing the Nation: Transculturation and nationalism in Hispano-Filipino literature from the early twentieth century

This PhD thesis explores a fairly unknown corpus of literature written by Filipino authors in Spanish in the first part of the twentieth century. Spanish speaking Filipinos from this period were caught in a transition between colonial powers: the end of 300 years of Spanish colonialism in 1898 led to another 50 years of US rule (1946) including a brief occupation by Japan during WWII. The aim of this dissertation is to understand the complex processes of transculturation that such colonial history has produced in the imaginaries of Filipino literature written in Spanish with regards the construction of national identity in the wake of independence. I use the binary attachment/detachment as a productive tool to understand the processes of transculturation that the texts reveal towards the Hispanic, European, American and Asian cultures that fuel them. Hispano-Filipino literature can be seen as an indicator of transcultural nationalism whose national consciousness is mediated at once by local, national and global histories. The analysis of this under researched literature, contributes to rethink Spanish colonialism from a new discursive space, the Hispanic Philippines, while it engages in debates about emerging nationalism(s) and World Literature