Manila existe: Filipinas y la recuperación de la memoria histórica en la novela española

Abstract

In the interval between 2001 and 2014, at least 20 novels set in the Philippines were written and published in Spain. They come after a period of time with barely no cultural production on this topic, which lasted for almost a century. The first part of this article approaches the reasons leading Spanish literature to forget the Philippines after 1898. To explain this phenomenon, it will establish a parallelism between the process of oblivion of contemporary Spanish history carried out during the Spanish Democratic Transition according to María Teresa Vilarós, and the forgetting of the Philippines after 1898. The second part of the article proposes two possible reasons for the small boom of novels set in the Philippines lately: on the one hand, the recent visibility of the country thanks to institutional efforts to rescue Spanish-Philippine cultural links, and on the other hand, the editorial success of novels dealing with forgotten episodes of Spanish history (Memoria histórica). To draw the connection with Spanish novels dealing with historical memory, the paper will also attempt a general characterization of them.