ABSTRACT
Travel is not merely an act; it is also a text. And like any text, it is produced through the dynamic interplay of social, cultural, and historical contexts. That early modern Europe saw an overzealous, unprecedented publication of travel narrations was both a fundamental component and an inevitable consequence of the era’s geopolitical configurations. Hence, chronicles of one’s travel can be read to exist in a dialectical relationship with the context of their genesis as they are simultaneously products and producers of certain ways of being, thinking, and exercising power. The rise of modern states across the continent ran parallel with its emerging hegemonic status in view of the Western European zeitgeist that ascribed expansionist ideals to the consolidation of the nation. This expansionist project, in turn, birthed the discourse of difference that would be (re)produced through the agency of travel writers. Travel as journey was the foremost means by which conquest was waged and commerce conducted while travel as text was an indispensable tool in reimagining and reshaping the globe and its diverse denizens. The repertoire of Modernity is replete with travel reports doubling as ethnographic accounts of innumerable native communities in the New World and the Far East. Of the vast colonial repository, this study zeroed in on Italian travel writing about the Philippine archipelago throughout its colonial history and presented two approaches which need not be divorced from one another. The first drew insights from postcolonial criticism, with particular focus on the construction of the Othered subject in the three accounts. The latter framed their chronicles within the context of travel as a prevalent yet noncanonical genre in the Italian literary tradition, and of Italy’s historical ambivalence in early modern Europe. Both lines of inquiry foreground the intricate relationship between place and identity construction that transpires in travel writing, while revealing travel writing’s place not just in the colonial infrastructure of knowledge but also in counter-hegemonic articulations of the nation, such as the Gramscian postulate of an Italian nationhood situated in its international European function and the deployment and contestation of Western episteme by the anticolonial Filipino Propaganda Movement.
