ABSTRACT
This opening chapter frames travel writing within the colonial project, zeroes in on the corpus, and discusses the state of the art in the study of Italian travel and that of colonial travel to the Philippines. Here, we ease the reader into the scholarly lacunae that the study seeks to fill in. This book’s contribution to the critical studies of travel shall be the opening of an analytical middle ground, highlighting the ambivalence of Italian chroniclers while acknowledging their participation in epistemological practices subsumed within the broader enterprise of conquest. Put simply, this study explores how the “Italian” chronicler, documenting their travels in the Age of Exploration, shifts his positionality from Othered to Othering.
