Crystals in the Colony

Abstract This article examines the Crystal Arcade, the project of a little-known architect, Andrés Luna, read through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s contemporaneous Passagenwerk, at the same time as it is described within the complex context of Luna’s own family history—one entangled with the tragic history of the First Philippine Republic. It uses Benjamin’s “literary montage” to conjure the spectral presence of the colonial-cosmopolitan subject within his manuscript. I contend that the Crystal Arcade cannot be properly understood outside of a transnational framework and network, or without considering the conditions under which a colonial-cosmopolitan consciousness formed. Situating the Crystal Arcade and the Passagenwerk within this transnational milieu is intended to allow the reader to locate an often too marginalized history within the heart of the nineteenth-century global metropolis while at the same time allowing us to place that history at the forefront of the theorization of the global city.