TY - JOUR
T1 - Atmosfera Rizaliana
T2 - Metonymic Journeys of Storm Tropes in Jose Rizal's Writing on the Philippines
AU - Lacuna, Isabela Laura
PY - 2021/9/10
Y1 - 2021/9/10
N2 - Stormy weather appears in recurrent instances across the literary and political oeuvre of José Rizal, a nineteenth-century figure who is one of the most significant and well-known personages in Philippine history. This paper analyzes the manner by which he describes storms in a few of his personal and political works, and observes that there is a deployment of metonymic logic that undergirds not only the texts, but a variety of other movements across the nineteenth-century cultural, technological, and political landscape. The metonymic logic of storm tropes are, in this sense, not only a productive literary modality in understanding weather representations during the Philippine fin de siècle, but also become illustrative of political and historical developments during the period. Based on this overarching logic, the paper articulates the possibility of understanding global climate and climate change as a series of interconnected and associated postcolonial and ecocritical experiences that are able to figure the world at large through an alternative expansion. This paper also investigates previous critiques that categorize the Rizaliana’s weather as romantic, and interrogates the assumptions that are deployed in such categorizations – and what they might mean for Philippine postcolonial ecocriticism and its climate imaginaries.
AB - Stormy weather appears in recurrent instances across the literary and political oeuvre of José Rizal, a nineteenth-century figure who is one of the most significant and well-known personages in Philippine history. This paper analyzes the manner by which he describes storms in a few of his personal and political works, and observes that there is a deployment of metonymic logic that undergirds not only the texts, but a variety of other movements across the nineteenth-century cultural, technological, and political landscape. The metonymic logic of storm tropes are, in this sense, not only a productive literary modality in understanding weather representations during the Philippine fin de siècle, but also become illustrative of political and historical developments during the period. Based on this overarching logic, the paper articulates the possibility of understanding global climate and climate change as a series of interconnected and associated postcolonial and ecocritical experiences that are able to figure the world at large through an alternative expansion. This paper also investigates previous critiques that categorize the Rizaliana’s weather as romantic, and interrogates the assumptions that are deployed in such categorizations – and what they might mean for Philippine postcolonial ecocriticism and its climate imaginaries.
KW - storm tropes
KW - postcolonial ecocriticism
KW - environmental and literary history
KW - tropical imaginaries
KW - climate change
KW - ninteenth-century literature
KW - Jose Rizal
KW - Philippines
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85115795460&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3806
DO - 10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3806
M3 - Article
SN - 1448-2940
VL - 20
SP - 180
EP - 208
JO - eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics
JF - eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics
IS - 2
ER -