Conference article

My paper is a critical study of images of the Igorota in various Philippine texts; from literature and history to popular visual forms. Informed by postcolonial theory; the short story Sam-it and the Loom by Filipino writer Lina Espina-Moore may be read as an attempt to depict how American women fit into the colonial design in the Philippines; the Cordillera in particular. I argue that the representation of the Igorota in the story encapsulates what Filipino historian Vicente Rafael calls “colonial domesticity”; or the assumption that in constructing ‘home’ in the tropics; “the structures of the public and private are mobile and indefinitely reproducible; capable of translation across cultural bodily spaces” (Rafael 2000). It would thus be interesting to look at how American women manoeuvred into the public and private spheres where the Igorota figured prominently. This will allow me to foreground the Igorota’s cultural and spiritual negotiations in the light of her colonial past and in the midst of an increasingly competitive global present.

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