Visions of Global Modernity in Hispano-Filipino Literature

This chapter analyzes two works of Philippine literature written in Spanish in the first part of the twentieth century, focusing on how they invoke global modernity. Paz Mendoza’s travelogue Notas de viaje (1929) [Travel Notes] and Jesús Balmori’s novel Los pajaros de fuego. Una novela Filipina de la Guerra (1945) [Birds of Fire, A Filipino Novel about War] offer contrasting visions of the Philippines’ present and future, but they both relate this vision to the models of modern nationhood on offer in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing selectively on aspects of countries and cultures from around the globe, Mendoza and Balmori reveal how a variety of competing imaginations of Filipino nationhood sought to make the future independent Philippines part of the community of modern nations. The notion of global modernity helps to analyze Mendoza’s and Balmori’s engagement with a centralized global modernity from a location that, in relation to both, was emphatically peripheralized.