GENDER, MODERNITY, AND THE END OF THE FIL-HISPANIC WORLD.

"Gender, Modernity, and the End of the Fil-Hispanic World" examines how modern social life was imagined by the early twentieth-century Filipino writer, Jesús Balmori, who was thirteen years old when Spain sold the Philippines to the United States. As a famed poet, journalist, and novelist, Balmori adapted Latin American "modernista" writings to criticize life under the new imperial regime. Balmori's first novel, Bancarrota de almas, draws on a worldly Hispanic tradition that produces no possibilities for the future of the Spanish-speaking elite within the Pacific Archipelago. This is, in part, because Bancarrota de almas represents the incursion of North American modernity as a threat to Filipino masculinity produced through the bodies of Filipina women. Balmori's turn to a pan-Hispanic worldview thus depends on the segregation and re-domestication of women, and abandons the potentially liberationist politics of the nation for the repressive politics of the home. By exploring Hispanic culture between nonmetropolitan sites, this article opens new ways of thinking about South-South relations in literary studies, as well as how gender conditioned the transition from Spanishlanguage literature in the Philippines to a literature based in English and the indigenous languages, such as Tagalog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]