ABSTRACT
The second chapter sketches the role of itinerant knowledge in the construction of a national discourse. It argues that intellectual cosmopolitanism propagated through travel writing occupied a central place in the construction of a coscienza d’italianità (Croce, 1943: 27) in pre-Unification Italy and in the revolutionary project of creating a “Filipino” identity contra Spanish colonisation. We here suggest that a Gramscian reading of the Filipino intellectual movement in the late nineteenth century can effectively disrupt the coloniser–colonised binary by highlighting the deployment of Western thought in service of imagining and constructing the pre- and postcolonial nation.
