Imagining Manila

The city of Manila is uniquely significant to Philippine, Southeast Asian and world history. It played a key role in the rise of Western colonial mercantilism in Asia, the extinction of the Spanish Empire and the ascendancy of the USA to global imperial hegemony, amongst other events. This book examines British and American writing on the city, situating these representations within scholarship on empire, orientalism and US, Asian and European political history. Through analysis of novels, memoirs, travelogues and journalism written about Manila by Westerners since the early eighteenth century, Tom Sykes builds a picture of Western attitudes towards the city and the wider Philippines, and the mechanics by which these came to dominate the discourse. This study uncovers to what extent Western literary tropes and representational models have informed understandings of the Philippines, in the West and elsewhere, and the types of counter-narrative which have emerged in the Philippines in response to them.

Imagining Manila has the merit of shedding light on a myriad of texts from the Anglosphere, some of them relatively unknown ... The variety of sources and references quoted is such that it makes it a very engaging reading. Intellectually stimulating, this book will be of utmost interest for scholars researching travel literature in South East Asia and postcolonial studies., Tom Sykes demonstrates how Manila functions as the metonym for the Philippine meta-archipelago, often with breath-taking reductiveness and strikingly telling material effects. Imagining Manila has much to teach us on the matter of representations, and why representations matter., Sykes provides a powerful antidote to the orientalist worlding of Manila in Anglo-American literature. Rigorous, engaged and insightful, his postcolonial critique of ‘Manilaism’ exposes the poverty and hypocrisy of this discursive paradigm and presents cogent analyses of anti-Manilaist writing, thereby offering a radically different imagining of Manila.

Tom Sykes is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His previous books include The Realm of the Punisher, and his essays have appeared in A Global History of Literature and the Environment, Supernatural Cities, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Social Identities and Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. His journalism has appeared in Private Eye, New Statesman, The Scotsman, The Telegraph, New Internationalist, Monocle, New African, Red Pepper, South East Asia Globe and numerous print and digital media around the world.