Introduction

Hello, everyone!

My name is Bethanny and I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. I was born in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I moved to Iowa City for my doctoral studies after completing my Masters in Illinois and my Bachelors in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. This Fall will be my fifth and, hopefully, last year in the program. For this summer, I am working on the third chapter of my dissertation and an article for publication. 

My dissertation project emerged from a personal inquiry and has become, in a way, an opportunity to better understand how social relations in the Philippines today was formed through European colonialism and the representations it had produced. To this end, I examine a collection of narrative fiction written by Spanish authors (men and women) who traveled to the Philippines. I conduct close readings of those texts alongside visual and historical materials produced by both Spanish and Filipino intellectuals of the nineteenth century. The dissertation is organized based on four areas of inquiry: 1) gender relations and mixed marriages in colonial Manila, 2) gender and racial representations of Muslims in the Philippines, 3) representations of imperial relations in exterior territories specifically Bali, Indonesia, and certain regions of China, 4) religious, race, and gender representations of the Philippines in narrative works by Spanish authors who did not travel to the Philippines. Through this project, I hope to understand the carefully crafted representations used by the authors to maintain the power relations during the colonial period and sustain the image of an imperial Spain in the Metropole. Furthermore, I hope to engage in the ongoing discussions regarding the effects of colonial identity constructions in our world today, specifically in the global Hispanic context.

 

I'm very excited to have a productive summer and work with everyone during this year's Dissertation Camp.

 

-Bethanny