The UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies (UST CCWLS) held one of its regular programs, the UST International Writers and Scholars Series, on February 15, 2019, Friday, at the Tanghalang Teresita Quirino, Benavides Bldg. The lecture titled “Missionary Chronicles as Colonial History” featured Prof. John D. Blanco of the University of California San Diego with UST Visiting Prof. Jorge Mojarro Romero serving as reactor.
The contexts that inspire Blanco’s investigation range from the Spanish empire in the Americas and the Philippines, to the spread of Christianity in the modern period, to the philosophy of modernity and Eurocentrism, comparative forms of imperialism and anti-colonial struggles, and the legal, religious, and racial dilemmas and contradictions of post-colonial societies and states in and through the study of Philippine, Latin American, Caribbean, and US minority literatures and cultures (religious, political, and artistic).
Blanco received his B.A. (with honors) from Arts and Ideas in the Residential College at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, California. His research interests concern the colonial roots of globalization between the 16th-19th centuries. He is the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century Philippines (UC Press 2009; UP Press 2010); and the translator of Julio Ramos’s Divergent Modernities in Latin America: Culture and Politics in the Nineteenth Century.
The UST CCWLS International Writers and Scholars Series consists of formal lectures and informal conversations by international writers as guests of the UST CCWLS. Previous speakers include Peruvian-Spanish Nobel Prize winner for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa, Filipino-Americans Ninotchka Rosca, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Sabina Murray, Gina Apostol, M. Evelina Galang, R. Zamora Linmark, Marivi Soliven, Lara Stapleton, Fidelito Cortes, Nerissa Balce, Amalia Bueno and Wilfredo Pascual, Filipino-Australian Robert Nery, Filipino-Canadian Miguel Syjuco, and foreign nationals, Tim Tomlinson, Dennis Haskell, Qaisra Sharaz, Yukari Yoshihara and Xu Xi.
UST CCWLS Director Prof. Emeritus Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo delivered the opening remarks, while Assistant Director Assoc. Prof. Ralph Semino Galán delivered the closing remarks.
