Philippines at the crossroads: mapping the international presence in the Philippine literary field in Spanish between 1872 and 1945.

The Philippines, the only country in Asia with a major cultural production in Spanish, is geographically and has been historically a spot of intersection among routes between Asia and the Spanish Speaking world. This strategic position has had two consequences: (1) the multicultural composition of its national identity and cultural production, (2) that the country has been overshadowed as place of its own, to be only a transit point in international relations. By forgetting Philippine production, Hispanic studies have left behind a missing link that can contribute to explain the phenomenon of Hispanismo after 1898, and to trace the steps of cultural actors and mediators in the Spanish speaking world after the loss of the colonies, at the beginning of the new regime. This research aims to (1) map the literary field of the Philippines between 1872 and 1946 with special emphasis on the different ways of presence of international geo-cultural areas in it (2) to place the Philippine Studies in a wider interregional context of Hispanic Studies and Asian Studies. This is to be done using digital methodology, that allows considering a wide amount of data, to draw the literary field as Pierre Bourdieu considers it, with the international implications hinted by Pascale Casanova. In this way, we will be also bridging a traditional gap between Digital methodologies and critical applied research. The expected outcomes are: a database of cultural actors in the Philippine context, three articles to be published in journals, one international conference to be held in the University of Antwerp and a batch of digitized magazines and newspapers to be added to the repository being constructed by a VLIR-UOS funded project. This project should also set the grounds for future collaborations with other groups mapping the circulation of culture in the Spanish speaking world and Asia between the end of 19th and beginning of 20th centuries.

Keywords:DIGITAL HUMANITIES, PHILIPPINE LITERATURE, HISPANIC-ASIAN STUDIES

Disciplines:History, Language studies, Literary studies, Theory and methodology of language studies, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Theory and methodology of literary studies, Other languages and literary studies