Early post-war travel guides to the Philippines

Abstract

Travel guidebooks are an important component of the world’s popular information infrastructure, which alone justifies their study. In this article I examine four early post-war travel guides to the Philippines in terms of how they depict the Philippines and its peoples, as well as their construction of an imagined reader and the ties between that reader and the wider social context of their production, in this case neo-colonialism, the Cold War and the rise of a more independent kind of tourist in the 1970s.