Transcultural Orientalism Re-writing the Orient from the Philippines and Latin America

This article investigates an alternative interpretation of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism both as theoretical approach and as a style of writing in three poems by Hispano-Filipino author Jesús Balmori (1887-1948). It argues that given the geopolitical location of the Philippines and its history of colonisation, the type of orientalism that Balmori’s poems reveal can be understood as a form of transcultural writing that goes beyond the rigid binaries of East and West by simultaneously being located within both paradigms. Filipino orientalism can be defined as transcultural (rather than peripheral, or transpacific, as Latin American orientalism(s) have been called) because it sees the orient through various other cultures while being in the Orient. Often the self and other that are created through orientalism are simultaneously the orientalising subject and the orientalised object. Transcultural orientalism serves to understand both the Eastern and Western elements of the Filipino cultural landscape through the optic of the various cultures that constitute it. This article begins with a revision of the key ideas of Said’s Orientalism followed by an analysis of the reaction towards those ideas by scholars and writers from Latin America. Specifically it focuses on Araceli Tinajero’s study of the influence of orientalism in Latin American modern travel writing (2004)using examples by Guatemalan and Mexican authors Enrique Gómez Carrillo Irene Villaescusa Illán Universiteit Utrecht, Netherlands