This conversation brings together three emergent scholars of the Philippines and Philippine diaspora whose first books contend with different aspects of colonial world making (or competing versions of world making). These books linger on the forces, materials, and narratives that are brought to bear on this process in the contact zones and circuits of US-Philippine relations, but also how the imaginative, material, political, social, cultural world-building apparatuses of empire are met by the colonized. What’s particularly exciting about them are the different theoretical frameworks and fields they engage with and the methods and archives that are explored in each one—which speak to the richness of Filipinx studies and the rigor and innovation of work in the field today.
Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (VG): To get started, let’s have each of you tell us about your ideal reader or the reader you had in mind when you were researching and writing your book.
Sony Coráñez Bolton (SCB): My book is interested in looking at representations of disability in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. Mestizaje in the Americas has its own eugenic history and I was curious about what a Philippine case study would bring to the global archive of mestizaje. The book argues that mestizaje is an ideology of ability, meaning Filipino mestizos preferred able-bodiedness and able-mindedness within a Western Enlightenment framework. And more globally, I’m really interested in how colonialism writ large uses disability as a hidden logic to propel and to rationalize itself as a project.
So, while one intended reader is someone who is in Latinx studies or romance studies in Spanish, another intended reader is in the joint audiences of disability studies and Filipino studies.
Genevieve Clutario (GC): My book is a history of how beauty and fashion shaped the Philippines. It takes vignettes or scenes of beauty and fashion to tell the story of empire and…
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