Research candidate

Dondy Pepito II Ramos

Research topic

Memorialising empires in the Asia-Pacific: The Dutch East India Company (VOC), the Spanish Empire, and the re-imagination of European foundations in Australia and the Philippines

My PhD thesis aims to compare and analyse memory sites concerning European foundations in the Philippines and Australia. Using three themes-monuments, museums, and public commemorations-the current project explores how and in what ways the Spanish Empire and the VOC are commemorated in the Philippines and Australia, respectively. This study will deepen our understanding of how the colonized and Indigenous peoples memorialise, represent, and challenge the legacies of colonial empires in their homeland using memory sites. Moreover, it aims to analyse evolving narratives constructed about these maritime empires and how they manifest in various memory sites. I argue that one can discern trends of challenges to, appropriation of, and contestation within memory sites across two vastly unique colonial experiences, distinctive government systems, and social contexts within the Asia-Pacific Region.

This project then grapples with the following questions:

1. What narratives are constructed about these maritime empires, and how do they manifest in memory sites? How are they contested and challenged?
2. What are the convergences and divergences in the recent efforts of the Philippines and Australia to memorialise empires?
3. What is included and excluded in the overall narrative and commemoration of the empire through these memory sites?
4. In the wake of a sweeping global reckoning of different memory sites, how do we deal with these controversial colonial memories and their material manifestation (i.e., memory sites)?

In addressing these questions, my thesis will make an essential contribution to the interdisciplinary literature on memorialisation and empire, in addition to offering insight into best practices for how empires should be remembered in a post-colonial period in public spaces and history-makers in the real world. My project builds on a vast body of literature on the early national histories of the Philippines and Australia. The current research focuses on the period from the late 16th to early 18th century and how this period is memorialised over time. This period is characterised by both countries' early national and pre-colonial histories, where European explorers were on their quests to search for new lands. I will mainly focus on the Spanish voyages to the Philippines from 1521 to 1815 and the Dutch voyages to Australia from 1606 to 1756.

Supervisory team

Principal supervisor: Professor Susan Broomhall
Co-supervisor: Dr Kristie Flannery

Projects

Mobilising Dutch East India Company collections for new global stories

Publications

Ramos, Dondy Pepito G. II. “‘China’s Curse’: The Racialization of Opium Use in Colonial Philippines, 1903-1908.” Philippine Sociological Reviewvol. 68, Issue 1 (2020): pp. 75-97 link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/48618326