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Kritika
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a refereed electronic journal

of literary / cultural and language studies
No. 16, February 2011
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ISSN 2094-6937
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AIMS, FOCUS, AND SCOPE

Kritika Kultura is an international peer-reviewed electronic journal of language and literary/cultural studies which
addresses issues relevant to the 21st century, including language, literature and cultural policy, cultural politics of
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Kritika Kultura seeks to promote innovative scholarship that challenges traditional canons and established
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EDITORIAL STAFF INTERNATIONAL BOARD OF EDITORS

Maria Luisa F. Torres Reyes Jan Baetens
Editor-in-Chief Cultural Studies Institute
[email protected] Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Ivery de Pano Michael Denning

Mayel Martin Yale University, USA
Managing Editors
Faruk
Mark Anthony Cayanan Cultural Studies Center
Associate Editor (Literary Section) Gadja Mada University, Indonesia
Roy Agustin Regenia Gagnier

Francis Sollano University of Exeter, UK
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University of Chicago, USA
Inderpal Grewal
University of California at Irvine, USA
Peter Horn
Professor Emeritus
University of Capetown, South Africa
Anette Horn
Department of Modern and European Languages
University of Pretoria, South Africa
David Lloyd
University of Southern California, USA
Bienvenido Lumbera
National Artist for Literature
Professor Emeritus
University of the Philippines
Rajeev S. Patke
Department of English Language and Literature
National University of Singapore
Temario Rivera
International Relations
International Christian University, Japan
Vicente L. Rafael
University of Washington, USA
E. San Juan, Jr.

Philippine Cultural Studies Center, USA
Neferti X. M. Tadiar
Columbia University, USA
Antony Tatlow
University of Dublin, Ireland
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Table of Contents
5 Where and When is Modernism: Editing on a Global Scale

Mark Wollaeger
15 Global Feminisms and the Polish “Woman”:

Reading Popular Culture Representations Through Stories of Activism Since 1989
Magdalena J. Zaborowska and Justine M. Pas
Childhood and Family in Contemporary Children’s Fiction:

44 Resilience, Agency, and Emerging Gender Norms
Rosario Torres-Yu
Homo Tropicus: A Yearning

65 J. Pilapil Jacobo
FORUM KRITIKA
PHILIPPINE STUDIES: TRANSNATIONALISM AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY
84 Introduction
Philippine Studies and the End of the American Century

86 Cynthia Tolentino
Empire and Globalization:

99 On the Recent Study of the Philippines in the United States
Vicente L. Rafael
The New Challenge of the Mother Tongues:

108 The Future of Philippine Postcolonial Language Politics
T. Ruanni F. Tupas
122 Decolonizing Knowledges: Asian American Studies, Carlos Bulosan,

and Insurgent Filipino Diasporic Imagination
Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao
145 What, and Where, is Philippine Studies? A Response

Charlie Samuya Veric
KOLUM KRITIKA
148 Confession as a Narrative Mode in Gay Indie Films

Gary C. Devilles
LITERARY SECTION
159 Five Poems

Michael M. Coroza
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Where and When is Modernism: Editing on a Global Scale
Mark Wollaeger
Vanderbilt University
[email protected]
Abstract
The paper explores some longstanding definitional problems in literary modernism with specific reference to
studying modernism on a global scale: What counts as modernism once we start to look for signs of it across the
globe? The author examines the question in the context of his recent editorial project, Global Modernisms, which
draws together multiple international and disciplinary perspectives in order to create a discursive space in which
a wide range of foreign language productions can be brought into productive dialogue. Raising the question of
whether a distinction between “modern” and “modernist” can be sustained, he suggests the need for continuing
efforts of recursive definition as the field expands in order to maintain a viable object of study.
Keywords
alternative modernities, transnational modernism
About the author

Mark Wollaeger is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and has published widely on modernism and modern
fiction. He is author of Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton 2006) and
Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism (Stanford 1990). He is editor of Joyce and the Subject of History (Michigan
1996) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Casebook (Oxford 2003). With Kevin Dettmar, he
is founding editor of Modernist Literature & Culture, a book series from Oxford University Press, and editor of the
forthcoming collection Global Modernisms.
Depending on who you ask these days, modernism is pretty much everywhere you look,
and possibly always has been. Where modernity has found cultural expression, such expression
(the argument goes) is by definition modernist. In theory, then, depending on one’s definition of
modernity, modernism can be found wherever and whenever rapid change has found cultural
articulation. Such ubiquity does not always sit well with colleagues in adjacent fields, some of
whom feel that modernist studies, like Conrad’s Kurtz, has opened its gaping maw, and is ready
to swallow the world whole. Of course loose definitions open borders to two-way traffic, and
many Anglo-American modernists, comfortable with a longstanding span of 1880 to 1945, may
look suspiciously at scholars inclined to debunk modernism’s claims to newness by locating the
beginnings of modernism earlier and earlier. Not content with the annus mirabilis of 1857, which
Kritika Kultura 16 (2011): 005-014 <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net> 5

© Ateneo de Manila University
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Where and When is Modernism
brought Flaubert and Baudelaire onto the global stage, Anglo-American criticism has reclaimed
both national territory and priority by citing John Locke and David Hume.1 A provocative
roundtable at the 2009 Modern Language Association Convention, “Unboxing Modernism,”
pushed the temporal boundaries the other direction during the question and answer session by
polishing off postmodernism like a leftover turkey sandwich. Further prompted by a question from
the audience about the possible relevance of formal criteria, the panelists were ready to swallow
realism whole before time ran out.
It may seem that I am positioning myself to pursue a critique of modernist studies’ imperialist
aspirations, but (perhaps not surprisingly for a modernist fully engaged in the global turn) I am
confident that scholarly resistance to any attempt to establish hegemony will forestall a new world
order underwritten by T. S. Eliot, Clarice Lispector, and Lu Xun. Indeed, as a member of the MLA’s
Delegate Assembly, I am quite certain that a resolution to rename the organization the Modernist
Language Association would fail. At all events, the “Unboxing Modernism” session (sponsored
by the Modernist Studies Association) showed no such aspirations. It engaged instead in an
exploration of what it means to “do” modernism when the field is changing so rapidly, and it asked
questions about what kind of frames—and more importantly, how many frames—are brought
into play these days in discussions of modernism. The session asked whether modernist studies
has climbed out of the boxes formerly used to define it and expressed the hope that it would never
again be placed in boxes that are too confining.
I found the roundtable particularly engaging because it raised questions of definition
that bear directly on my current editing project. I am in the late stages of editing a collection of
some thirty essays on global modernism for Oxford, Global Modernisms, and have found myself
struggling, as I edit the essays and plan the introduction, with a set of difficult questions. What
counts as modernism once we start to look for signs of it across the globe? If no single frame or
closed set of criteria can be adduced to determine what counts as “modernist” and what counts
as “modern,” should we simply dispense with the distinction altogether, and instead think
more broadly in terms of aesthetic expressions of modernity? Which is to say, why not dispense
with “modernist” altogether in favor of “modern”? (Here, in English Departments anyway, one
anticipates querulous objections from eighteenth century and early modern scholars.) In effect, this
is the route taken by Robert Scholes in his Paradoxy of Modernism. Scholes’s explicit aim is to enlarge
the category of modernism to include all sorts of texts that canonical distinctions tend to exclude.
He shows, for instance, that texts considered low often share qualities with those considered high,
and vice versa; but ultimately it becomes hard to say just what for Scholes warrants inclusion under
the rubric of modernism. One criterion might be called ethnographic: to the extent that a text helps
fill out our sense of the full range of modernist culture—that is, to the extent that it helps criticism

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produce what Clifford Geertz calls thick description—it should be included in the modernist canon.
But the adjective here begs the question: is modernist culture the same as modern culture, and if so,
why hang on to the term “modernist” at all?
We might ask what motivates a desire to preserve the distinction. Is it an analytic desire to
delimit the object of inquiry or a residual investment in the cultural capital associated with an
implicitly honorific term? And if criticism means to hold on to “modernist,” can the grounds for
doing so be specified with any rigor? Some scholars today seem reluctant to attach any formal
criteria to the term, in part because questions of form seem to them to threaten to reinstate a limited
canon of difficult, experimental works thought to be elitist. Call this the Pierre Bourdieu effect,
whose bible is the first chapter of his Distinction. Of course not everyone takes this line—I don’t,
for instance—and it seems to me, as it did to most of the panelists in the “Unboxing Modernism”
session, that what’s wanted is not a box but something more like Wittgenstein’s family resemblance.
The challenge then becomes, can we specify a set of criteria, subsets of which are enough to
constitute a sense of decentered resemblance? If aesthetic criteria are entirely ruled out, the
definitional challenge is displaced, without being simplified, onto the problem of modernity: are
there alternative modernities, or, only, as Frederic Jameson has argued, a singular modernity? For
me, editing my collection, the question has become, does a coherent set of criteria emerge when
the putatively modernist includes examples from across the globe? Michael Levenson observed
over twenty-five years ago that if “modernism” is a vague term, vague terms still signify and
often remain indispensable (vii). But now, with geographical and temporal coordinates rapidly
multiplying, is growing ambiguity starting to date Levenson’s claim?
At the moment of writing, I have not yet written the introduction to my volume (the editing
having stretched out longer than anticipated—shocking, I know), but even after finishing, I
expect to have better questions rather than definitive answers. I can, however, offer preliminary
observations, and of course, more questions, designed to move the conversation forward. Let me
first say a little more about the contents of the collection.
The essays include area studies of places that go beyond the usual suspects in English-
language criticism of modernism: the Balkans, Scandinavia, Turkey, Algeria, China, Japan, and
Spanish America. The collection also includes more familiar locales, such as the Caribbean, Latin
America, and Africa, that have nevertheless remained, owing to the tenacity of disciplinary and
departmental boundaries, largely blank spots on the map for most Anglo-European modernists.
Other essays target transnational nodal points: Andre Gide and Vietnam; Anglophone and Hispanic
modernisms; futurism in Paris, Italy, and Russia; Richard Wright’s photographs of Africa’s
Gold Coast; and the early-twentieth-century project of translating Russian literature in England.
There are also theoretical-historical essays on comparativity, cosmopolitanism, modernism and

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postcoloniality, lyric poetry and globalization, and little magazines as a global form.
My collection is of course not the first to take on the global or transnational turn in modernist
studies. Geomodernisms (2005), edited by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Geographies of
Modernism (2005), edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, both aim “to undiscipline”
(Doyle and Winkiel 7) modernism by embracing cultural projects that do not fall under the usual
modernist rubric of textual experimentalism, such as Taiwanese cinema or modernist architecture
and by pushing beyond Anglo-American boundaries. My volume will build on the considerable
strengths of these but will differ from them as well. Geographies of Modernism is composed primarily
of shorter, conference-length papers; Geomodernisms responds to the problem of scope—the world
is a big place, and modernism was of course never a purely literary phenomenon—by adopting
a primary focus on race and modernity. My volume will continue the project of diversifying
the map of modernism by expanding the scope of these volumes with respect to modernist
locations, in particular by devoting attention to the most surprising “awareness gap” in Anglo-
American modernist studies, Latin American modernism; it will also include a wider range of
theoretical perspectives on the challenge of studying modernism on a global scale.2 And of course
new volumes are coming out all the time, some targeting understudied areas (e.g., Pacific Rim
Modernisms), others diversifying established movements (e.g., Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist
Writings from Africa and the Diaspora).
A major goal of my collection is to create within Anglophone scholarship a discursive space in
which a wide range of foreign language productions can be brought into productive dialogue. Thus
from the outset I sought as my ideal contributors scholars deeply versed in forms of modernism not
well understood in Anglo-American scholarship but at the same time—and this is crucial—willing
and able to open their fields of expertise to Anglo-American perspectives, whether by using a
comparatist frame or by occasionally introducing points of potential contact or intersection. Which
is to say that while an ideal but impossible volume would aim to speak as much to Brazilian and
Vietnamese scholars as to Anglo-American and European scholars, the primary audience assumed
for the book are Anglo-American scholars of modernism who hope to broaden their horizons by
exploring comparative perspectives on the field. Thus the collection includes in the Locales section
a contribution entitled “Modernity’s Labors in Latin America: The Cultural Work of Cuba’s Avant-
Gardes” by Vicky Unruh from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Kansas University.
Unruh’s essay not only introduces readers to Cuban avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s (citing
Henry James, Flaubert, and Ortega y Gasset along the way) but also offers close readings of
literary texts by Agustín Acosta, Alejo Carpentier, and Dulce María Loynaz. Harsha Ram, from
the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley,
provides a comparative perspective on the futurist movements in Italy, France, and Russia while

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also sketching a genealogy of the emergence of “literariness.” To give one more example, Nergis
Ertürk introduces Turkish modernism while also suggesting, along the way, the value of pursuing
a comparative analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s relatively
unknown novel (outside Turkey) The Time Regulation Institute.
Insofar as my editorial duties have drawn me so frequently into materials far beyond my
usual range of competence, this project has often made me more than a little anxious. At the same
time, it is exhilarating to learn so much from experts in other fields, and if my recent attempt to
teach Woolf and Tanpınar side by side in a recent graduate class was not an unqualified success,
the effort certainly challenged the critical presuppositions of the class in profoundly useful
ways. The scope of the collection also raises worries about inclusiveness, but one quickly learns
to stop worrying about what might get left out. The answer, of course, is lots of things, and it
would be foolish to aspire to the totalizing ambition of Google Earth. The title of my volume—
Global Modernisms—may imply totality, but the plural “modernisms” is meant to undermine the
implication that such a volume aims to encompass the whole world. I have to add, however, that
“handbook” is somewhat misleading insofar as it implies a slim overview or a kind of schematic
distillation; this large volume will take two strong hands to support and a good deal of time to
absorb.
And so the volume aims to redress some obvious gaps without trying to scribble over all
the blank spots in Anglo-European critical awareness; it aims to set forth fresh efforts to think
new parts in relation to an ever shifting sense of the whole. If a conversation with two of my
senior English Department colleagues is any indication, the book should provide an experience
as radically decentering for its readers has it has for me. Hearing my account of the volume over
lunch, they asked in some puzzlement, “But how can you have a book about modernism without
any Pound or Eliot?” (I should add that both colleagues, far from being stereotypical white males
with one foot in retirement, are women, one a woman of color, and neither as old as they seemed at
this moment.) Of course, such stalwarts are not entirely shut out. Eliot appears in a footnote in an
essay on Balkan modernism, for instance, and he figures in his role as an influential editor in essays
on the translation of Russian literature into English and on the circulation of interwar Anglophone
and Hispanic modernisms. Pound too crops up in many places, as do such monumental figures in
the Anglo-European canon as Kafka, Conrad, Mann, Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf. But rather than
devote an entire chapter to any of them, each is typically seen on the horizon, from a perspective
that knows them but does not privilege them.
In keeping with this decentered approach, I have tried as much as possible to implement
a model of dialogue and exchange in the way I conceptualize relations among different strands
of modernism around the globe, and in the process of composition. Thus rather than chart the

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radiating influence of key modernist sites, the collection aims to map a multiplicity of sites, from the
usual European cities to the role of urban cafes in Yiddish and Hebrew modernisms, and to focus
on nodal points, such as the confluence of German expressionism and magical realism in Nigerian
“inflationary modernism” (in an article by Sarah Lincoln) or film noir and vernacular modernism
in South African film (in an article by Rosalind Morris). To put it in another way, just as Eliot and
company become provisionally peripheral, so lesser known figures become provisionally central,
to the point where the center-periphery model is itself permanently relativized. With respect to
composition, I encouraged collaboration among contributors by posting all drafts to a password-
protected website, and I grouped contributors into reading groups designed to draw out implicit
dialogues among essays. In an ideal world, all essays would have undergone radical revision in
relation to one another, but given the time constraints we all face, I was pleased that a good number
of contributors at least incorporated cross references to one another, and a few substantially altered
some key points. Finally, I also enlisted Laura Doyle to write an afterword in which she aims to
tease out additional common threads among the contributions. But a commitment to decentering
can require decentering in its turn. So while dialogue and exchange provide the dominant model in
the collection, I also came to realize that at times a diffusionist perspective is not only appropriate
and illuminating but necessary. The diffusionist model understandably comes in for a lot of
criticism insofar as it can seem to reproduce the center-periphery binary and all the ideological
baggage that goes with it. Here of course the key text is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe
(2000), whose argument against longstanding accounts of the diffusion of modernity from Europe
to the rest of the world (which he classes under the capacious rubric of “historicism”) serves as a
valuable touchstone for many essays in my collection. And yet some important cultural phenomena
did spread out from a center. Consequently, while many contributions explicitly critique the
center-periphery model, or emphasize instead processes of cultural exchange or the notion of coeval
production, the collection also includes a set of contributions on film as vernacular modernism in
which a new essay by Miriam Hansen is tested and expanded by additional essays on Indian (by
Manishita Dass) and South African film.
Although the collection will not settle the problem of definition, it does throw into relief
unresolved questions about modernity and about formal criteria for modernism. First, a few words
about the question of alternative modernities (championed most influentially by Dilip Parameshwar
Gaonkar) versus a singular modernity (see Jameson). Two contributions in the volume help clarify
what is at stake in the debate. Neil Lazarus, writing on African modernism, offers a persuasive
clarification of Jameson’s argument in A Singular Modernity:
Jameson understands modernity as representing something like the time-space

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sensorium corresponding to capitalist modernisation. In this sense, it is, like the

capitalist world system itself, a singular phenomenon. But far from implying that
modernity therefore assumes the same form everywhere, as Jameson has sometimes
mistakenly been taken to suggest, this formulation in fact implies that it is everywhere
irreducibly specific. Modernity might be understood as the way in which capitalist
social relations are “lived”—different in every given instance for the simple reason
that no two social instances are the same. Jameson emphasises both the singularity of
modernity as a social form and its “simultaneity.” (8)
Attempts to pluralize modernity, in this argument, fail to take into account the concept
of uneven development: “singularity here does not obviate internal heterogeneity and . . .
simultaneity does not preclude unevenness or marked difference” (Lazarus 9). Or, in Jameson’s
words, “modernism must ... be seen as uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social
development, or to what Ernst Bloch called the ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’ ... the
coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history—handicrafts alongside the great
cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance” (Postmodernism
307). The desire to postulate alternative modernities presupposes an “original” modernity formed
in Europe that must be subjected to Eurocentric critique, but as Harry Harootunian has observed,
the notion of a European origin inevitably entails the notion that modernity elsewhere is both
“belated” and “derivative,” “a series of ‘copies’ and lesser inflections” (62-63; qtd. in Lazarus 9).
Rather than accept the logic of original and copy, Jameson’s account of a singular modernity,
as elaborated by Lazarus and Harootunian, aims to acknowledge difference and heterogeneity
without instituting the hierarchical relations that follow from the positing of an origin. As Lazarus,
citing Harootunian, writes: “the specific modes of appearance of modernity in different times and
places—St. Petersburg in the 1870s, say, Dublin in 1904, Cairo in the 1950s, a village on a bend in
the Nile in the Sudan in the 1960s—ought to be thought about not as ‘alternative’ but as coeval
... modernities or, better yet, peripheral modernities ... in which all societies shared a common
reference provided by global capital and its requirements” (Harootunian 62-63; qtd. in Lazarus 9).
It is hard not to pounce here on the movement from “coeval” to “peripheral,” which
seems to reinstate the hierarchy dismantled by “coeval.” But before we slap the dismissive term
“diffusionist” on this line of argument, it is important to recognize that the deepest implication
here is all modernities are peripheral in relation to a singular process of modernization developing
unevenly across the globe. Following a similar line of thought, Sarah Lincoln also aligns herself
with Jameson, arguing that “what constitutes modernity [for Jameson] is above all the impulse
to make sense of—to document and to order or aestheticize—the disruptions, dislocations,

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and disjunctures brought about by modernization itself. Neither material transformation nor
innovative aesthetics, ‘modernity’ signifies instead the attempt to reconcile the two, to bring
together ‘modernization’ and ‘modernism’ under a common conceptual and affective umbrella”
(2). No doubt some may object to any model that implies a form of economic determinism. But in
fact if such elaborations of Jamesonian thinking insist on global capitalism as a common frame of
reference, they also leave room for the reciprocal influence of culture and economics.
Instead of trying to resolve a deadlock between competing versions of history, let me in
closing turn instead to the issue of what counts as modernism. Lincoln cites “the disruptions,
dislocations, and disjunctures brought about by modernization itself”; older, formalist accounts
of modernism often used similar terms to describe its aesthetic qualities. Does shifting the concept
of disruption from the domain of the aesthetic to the material constitute a correction, an over-
correction, or a displacement? Perhaps all three, to some degree. Certainly many early accounts
of modernism erred in trying to define modernism solely through aesthetic qualities, but it may
also be that in some criticism the pendulum has swung too far the other direction. To return to the
“Unboxing Modernism” MLA session in 2009: during Q and A, one audience member (OK, it was
me) asked whether modernist studies could do without some longstanding points of reference,
such as modernism as a crisis of representation, or modernism as anti-realist or anti-modernization?
And is there any point in identifying particular aesthetic forms or techniques as intrinsically
modernist, such as collage, montage, interior monologue, or the day novel? The question was meant
as a provocation to what seemed an unstated ideal of “unboxedness,” a conception of modernism
liberated from definitional corners and dead-ends that seemed to me in danger of dissolving any
coherent object of study. There was no time to debate substantial attempts to address the problem,
of course, so after some veering between bravado refusals of limits and more cautious intimations
that, in the words of E. M. Forster, “We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be
left with nothing” (38), the session concluded inconclusively.
Global Modernisms will not settle such disputes, but I hope it will help clarify the stakes of the
questions that inevitably arise when modernism “goes global.” For Lazarus, modernism clearly
does not entail a particular set of formal qualities; rather, any cultural production that attempts to
grapple with the realities of modernization or, more likely, the problematic of modernity, qualifies
as modernist. Thus a novel written in a realist mode could conceivably count. Vicky Unruh, in
contrast, retains an emphasis on experimentalism in Cuban literature, and Harsha Ram shows
how what has often been understood as key formal feature of literary modernism—literariness—
emerges from a specific set of historical pressures.
I myself remain skeptical about equating modernism too broadly with the aesthetic
expression of modernity. The struggle with modernity, what one might call modernism’s conative

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dimension, seems to me crucial: whether the aesthetic expression of an engagement with modernity
spills over into a sense of crisis or not, the felt pressure of desire, striving, and volition in response
to disruptive change is fundamental to modernism. And with respect to how the grappling with
modernity finds expression, some techniques and formal qualities are more likely to come into play
than others. No exhaustive checklist of the modernist sine qua non is possible or even desirable,
but I suspect that in the long run it will prove useful to bear in mind Roman Jakobson’s distinctions
among the six functions of language, and to explore the variety of ways in which a “set” toward
“message” and “code,” that is, towards “poetic” and “meta” functions, become variably dominant
within specific geographic and historical coordinates (18-29). At all events, continuing efforts of
recursive definition must accompany the current expansion of the term if the field of modernist
studies is to remain coherent. Bringing together a wide range of perspectives, my collection aims
to promote comparative discussions of modernism that will deepen our understanding by self-
consciously unraveling the edges of the field.
NOTES
1
See for instance Modernism: 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, which, despite the
subtitle, devotes much attention to Madame Bovary and Les fleurs du mal. For a Victorian perspective on
modernism that reaches back to John Locke (inter alia), see Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian
Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. For a non-genealogical take on Hume’s relevance to modernism, see
Mark Wollaeger, Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism.
2
See also the 2008 recipient of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, the two-volume collection
Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, which includes a section on locales that is
designed to decenter the usual Anglo-American perspective on modernism.

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WORKS CITED
Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism: 1890-1930. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Brooker, Peter, and Andrew Thacker, eds. Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces. London and
New York: Routledge, 2005.
Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
2005.
Eysteinsson, Astradur, and Vivian Liska, eds. Modernism. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 2007.
Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965.
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, ed. Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
Gillies, Mary Ann, Helen Sword, and Stephen Yao, eds. Rim Modernisms. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009.
Harootunian, Harry. History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life. New
York: Columbia UP, 2000.
Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings: Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry. The Hague: Mouton, 1981.
Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity. London and New York: Verso, 2002.
—. Postmodernism. Durham, N.C: Duke UP, 1991.
Lazarus, Neil. “Modernism and African Literature.” Global Modernisms. Ed. Mark Wollaeger. Oxford: Oxford
UP, forthcoming.
Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922. New York:
Cambridge UP, 1984.
Lincoln, Sarah. “Ben Okri’s Inflationary Modernism.” Global Modernisms. Ed. Mark Wollaeger. Oxford: Oxford
UP, forthcoming.
Rosemont, Franklin, and Robin D. G. Kelley, eds. Pacific Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa
and the Diaspora. Austin: U of Texas P, 2009.
Scholes, Robert. Paradoxy of Modernism. New Haven, Ct. and London: Yale UP, 2006.
Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford and New York:
Oxford UP, 2009.
Wollaeger, Mark. Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Kritika
Ku ltu r a
GLOBAL FEMINISMS AND THE POLISH “WOMAN”:

READING POPULAR CULTURE REPRESENTATIONS
THROUGH STORIES OF ACTIVISM SINCE 1989
Magdalena J. Zaborowska
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
[email protected]
Justine M. Pas
Lindenwood University
[email protected]
Abstract
This article examines ten interviews with Polish feminist activists conducted by the Women’s Center “eFka” in Kraków
and gathered by the Global Feminisms Project at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University
of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Employing intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches, it reads this collection in the
context of Polish discourses on womanhood and femininity following the post-communist transition of 1989. The
interviews offer a unique perspective on gender formations and invite us to think of the Other Europe beyond the
clash of approaches to the region that have positioned it between the extremes of pre-1989 “communist oppression”
and post-1989 “democratic freedom.” As the GF interviews make clear, although initially influenced by western
gender theory, Polish women’s movements quickly crafted their own theorizations of patriarchy and the politicization
of the private. Approaching the Poland Site interviews as examples of located oral histories shows that attention to
women’s experiences and self-narrated stories of activism complicates the geopolitical contexts, historical accounts,
and popular representations of feminism in the East and West.
Keywords
gender symbologies, intersectionality, oral histories, post-totalitarian
About the authors

Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Associate Professor in the Program in American Culture and The Center for Afroamerican
and African Studies, and the 2009-10 Hunting Family Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include African American literature, (trans)national/-Atlantic identities,
twentieth-century immigrant literatures, American subjectivity and the city, and theories of gender, sexuality, race,
and social space. She is the author of award-winning James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (2009) and How
We Found America: Reading Gender Through East-European Immigrant Narratives (1995), as well as editor and co-editor
of Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures Through the East-West Gaze (with Sibelan Forrester and Elena
Gapova) (2004), The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature
(with Nicholas F. Radel and Tracy Fessenden) (2001), and Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of
Multiculturalism (1998).
Justine M. Pas is Assistant Professor of English at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. Her research
interests include Comparative Ethnic Studies, American literature of immigration, literature of the Holocaust, and
theoretical approaches to life writing, multilingual literature, and translation. She recently published “Writing
American Literature in Polish: Post-Holocaust Jewish Identities in Jadwiga Maurer’s Short Stories” in the Journal of
Jewish Identities.

Zaborowska and Pas
Global Feminisms and the Polish “Woman”
In his controversial and much publicized 2004 cartoon, “Polska wraca do Europy” [Poland
Returning to Europe], Andrzej Mleczko comments on his country’s revival after nearly half a
century of Soviet political, economic, and cultural domination.1 His Poland is anthropomorphized
as a revolutionary female leading a crowd, a depiction that has a long tradition in his country and
other parts of Europe. Nude, barefoot, and harried, Mleczko’s Poland-as-woman is both traditional
and transgressive: she struts her stuff while leading masses of men on a westward march to join
the “civilized” nations of the European continent. Like the French Marianne, she holds the national
flag. Unlike Marianne, she is being felt up by her countrymen (there are only three female figures
in the crowd: a witch and two lugubriously smiling nuns) and seems to be enjoying it. Larger than
any who follow her, Poland’s ample body is a human battering ram, a vulgarized national symbol,
and a sexual object. A bearded, wide-eyed Catholic god, sporting an aureole and clutching his head,
looks down at this spectacle from the heavens.
FIG. 1 Andrzej Mleczko, “Polska wraca do Europy”
Mleczko’s cartoon, no matter how trivial it may seem at first, provides a provocative
representation of Poland’s changing place in Europe by making clear the central role of women
in the post-communist cultural, political, and social transition that has been taking place in that
country since 1989. In blatant and hyperbolic ways characteristic of cartoon art, it suggests that
gender and history, and to some degree even sexuality, must be key analytical categories in any
reading of the many political uses and abuses of the representations of women’s bodies and
stereotypes of the feminine in Polish culture. By means of caricature, it also throws in sharp relief

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what the eminent literary scholar, and one of the matriarchs of Polish feminisms, Maria Janion,
terms the symbolic role of “Woman-[as] Freedom and [-as] Revolution” in European literary and
visual culture imaginaries, a figuration of the feminine that “contains all the paradoxes of the
creative process.” Janion’s claim that the concept of “woman” is based in the dual nature of what it
symbolizes at the intersections of gender and history – the female is both the “creator of meaning
and at the same time a concrete vessel for that meaning” (42) – suggests that women as creative
agents and bearers of symbolic representations of the feminine stand at the center of the debate on
national identity.2
Like the French Marianne, Poland-as-woman has been a symbol, indeed the meaning maker
and its vessel, of the Polish nation during the times of hardship and moments of revolutionary
and geo-political shifts. She inspired artists and resisters during the period of 18th-19th-century
partitions of Poland and the time of its Soviet domination following World War II. Her images
as mother, wife, nurse, and crone accompanied the many doomed uprisings of the 19th and 20th
centuries; as comrade and laborer she appeared alongside brawny men in socialist-realist posters
during the communist era; her ambivalent depictions in political and popular culture venues have
illustrated the recent post-communist transition. While the patria-related notions of heroism, honor,
freedom, and equality have been traditionally represented as masculine, Polonia, as she has been
called, has signified the matria, or the nation’s feminine qualities of homeland and hearth (Płatek
5-25). While Mleczko’s cartoon riffs on these gendered histories and symbols, it also embraces the
all-too-familiar objectification and fetishization of women’s bodies and sexuality in Polish popular
culture that accompanied their invisibility as social and political agents before and after 1989.3 Akin
to the drawings of his American contemporary, Robert Crumb, Mleczko’s depictions of women are
“politically incorrect,” to put it mildly. They are often shocking; to some they may seem crudely
sexist and misogynist. Yet Mleczko’s images have been an important part of Polish visual culture’s
landscape for generations; they have had wide circulation and considerable influence on, and are
in many ways a record and reflection of, the changing Polish national imaginary before and after
the geo-political caesura of 1989. The artist’s long career and his deployment of gender (and often
racial) stereotypes to illustrate momentous historical shifts demand serious studies of their own.
Far from being able to do that in the pages that follow, we use “Polska wraca do Europy”
as a framing device for our discussion of the representations of women and gender relations in
post-communist Poland as reflected in the ten interviews with Polish feminist activists that were
conducted by the Women’s Center “eFKa” in Kraków, Poland, with whom the authors of this
essay collaborated closely from 2002 to 2006. During that period, “eFka” conducted ten interviews
with women whom they deemed to be most representative of “Polish feminist activism and
scholarship,” whose work and allegiances best traversed the spectrum of feminisms across regions,

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generations, social classes, and ethnicities.4 Accessible to students and scholars through the gateway
to the “Global Feminisms Project” (GF Project) at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender
at the University of Michigan,5 these ten interviews provide the key archive for this essay. Poland
was one among four sites comprising the GF Project, besides China, India, and the United States.
Each site developed its list of interviewees independently, selecting on their own terms the issues
and subjects that best represented aspects of their national histories and women’s movement
histories. Working at the intersections of the local and global, the collection of life histories from
India, China, Poland, and the United States gathered in the GF archive offers scholars and students
a nuanced understanding of the dense historical relations and long history of mutually influential
interactions among women’s movements in feminist scholarship from different countries and
regions.
As part of the “Poland Site” team in the GF Project, the authors collaborated with the
leaders of Women’s Center “eFka,” Slawka Walczewska and Beata Kozak, in ways that included
observation and discussion of the interview process as it took place, close engagement with the
transcription and translation of each of the videotaped interviews, review and sharing of each
other’s materials and thoughts on disparate ideas about the body, the public-private divide, the
state, law and jurisprudence, and publishing that have emerged from the interviews. The historical
frame of feminist thought and activism in Poland narrated in the ten “eFka” interviews stretch
from World War II, through the communist rule and Soviet domination of Poland following 1944,
to the period following the Round Table talks and first democratic elections in June 1989 that
initiated the fall of socialist and communist governments all over Europe. These women’s histories
intersect strikingly with diverse institutions ranging from governmental bodies and forces, through
underground dissident organizations, to religious organizations and injunctions. They reflect
complex relationships with and reactions against these institutions while providing invaluable
insights into individual women’s daily negotiations of gender and representation as narrated by
themselves.
While this essay relies on this rich archive of videotaped personal narratives, it also
brings it in conversation with deliberately diverse and eclectic historical, literary, theoretical, and
popular culture samples of material from Polish culture. Given the complexity of our subject, as
well as our backgrounds as bicultural (Polish-American) and historically grounded scholars of
literature, cultural studies, and feminist theory, we felt compelled to deploy an interdisciplinary
analytical apparatus to shed some light on the intricate workings of gender and history within that
elusive identity formation and set of cultural symbologies that can be named “Polish woman.”
Such an approach resonates with the mission statement of the Global Feminisms Project, which
“by documenting individual life stories of activists and scholars, and considering them in their

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particular historical and cultural contexts … records important differences in women’s activism
in specific local sites, and questions constructions of ‘global’ feminism that assume a common
(Western) set of issues as universal to all women.” In particular, by privileging the voices of the
interviewees, scholars, artists, and critics from Poland, many unknown in the United States and
inaccessible to those who do not speak Polish, we forward another important goal of the GF Project,
that is, “to question conventional notions of global feminism as the ‘internationalization of the
women’s movement,’” an approach which may have expanded the understanding of feminism in
the Third and Second Worlds, but “which often assumes a transfer eastward of western feminist
ideals.”6 As we hope to show through the Polish interviewees’ life stories, these women’s activism
and scholarship give impetus to new readings of global feminist knowledge making.7
As we analyze the stories of feminist activism and scholarship gathered through the GF
archive, we take into account the different, and often divergent, roles that images and meanings
of “woman,” “feminine,” and “feminist” have played in the Polish national cultural imagination.
Echoing Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s concept of engaged feminist scholarship that reaches across
borders of national and academic cultures, we situate our analysis at the intersection of personal,
material, political, and theoretical vectors that propel these women’s stories (190-96). We thus place
the stories provided by the Polish feminists within the context of the print media and popular
culture discourses about women that continue to circulate in postcommunist Poland. This approach
allows us to interact with Griselda Pollock’s theories of gender and visual culture as we interrogate
historical stereotypes and images of Polish femininity and their impact on what Mohanty calls
“‘women’ as material subjects of their own history” (23). The notion of femininity we explore here,
then, does not reflect flesh-and-blood identities, but rather mirrors the dual role of the feminine in
meaning making that Janion espouses, and what Pollock terms “a position within language and in a
psycho-sexual formation that the term Woman signifies” (xvii). We analyze femininity as a “fiction
produced within that formation” and “something of which its defining Other, masculinity, speaks,
dreams, fantasizes” as it certainly does in the Mleczko cartoon (Pollock xvii). At the same time,
we locate this fiction in the context of specific women’s stories that map their lived experience as
“Polish women” and that are located in the archive of the Global Feminisms Project.
The essay unfolds in three overlapping thematic blocks that interrogate the GF Poland site
interviews in the context of historical representations of gender in twentieth- and early twenty-first
century Poland. First, we offer an introduction to the relationships between symbolic feminine role
models in Polish culture—to the “Polish woman” as Janion’s meaning bearer or “vessel.” Second,
we examine the often paradoxical ways in which these roles have informed the representations
of “woman” in diverse examples of post-World War II Polish popular culture that resonate
with the GF interviews. Third, we highlight instances where these roles have affected women

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as meaning makers and agents, where they not only clash with individual experiences vis-à-vis
state institutions but also inspire survival strategies that have been employed and narrated by our
subjects.
MAKING MOTHERS, VIRGINS, AND FEMINISTS: A MOSAIC OF FEMININE ROLE MODELS
The majority of symbols depicted in Mleczko‘s cartoon are recognizably Polish, yet some
of them reflect the recent influence of western media on Polish popular culture – e.g., Poland’s
long-time political and cultural aspirations to be counted among the most “civilized” or “western”
parts of Europe and its recent accession to European Union (hence the western direction of the
march) or its governments’ frequent support for and alignment with the US foreign policy,
military interventions, and conservative social agenda on family values (hence the right-wing and
militarized character of the marchers and the prominence of visibly Catholic religious leaders).8
At the same time, Mleczko‘s image is an example of a masculine “fiction” of “woman” located in a
specific historical moment that must be read against the background of the post-Cold War rise of
feminist movements in Poland. While these movements were to some degree influenced by western
feminist theory and political practice, they were quick to craft their own theorizations of patriarchy
and the politicization of the private.
For example, one of the GF interviewees, Joannna Regulska, a social scientist who divides
her time between Poland and the United States, gives an apt example of how American inspirations
for making the electoral process legible to women during the post-communist transition were
folded into the efforts to reinvent that very process from the ground up:
We wrote a guidebook on how to win elections … I initiated contacts with the

American organization … National Women’s Political Caucus. We asked if we
could use their materials, translated them and then made adjustments to Polish
movements.… So we took it, did a translation, and kicked out all the American stuff,
since we saw it was written for Americans, and we were creating this Polish reality.
(124)
It is such Polish feminist theorizations and their practical applications, indeed, the
experience of living them, that are clearly muted and ridiculed in, but are also key to understanding
the full context of Mleczko’s cartoon.
“Polska wraca do Europy” appeared on the cover of the prestigious weekly political and
cultural review magazine, Polityka [Politics] on May 1, 2004. Its date of publication on the day of

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that socialist version of Labor Day – May Day – harmonizes with the image of a parade depicted
by Mleczko, whose imagery recalls obligatory annual marches through towns and cities that
were sponsored by the Polish United Workers Party prior to 1989. But May 1, 2004 also marked
a momentous political, historic, and economic event that was antithetical to this collective Cold
War memory: Poland’s accession to the European Union. One of the interviewees in the “Global
Feminisms Project,” Agnieszka Graff, contends in her recent book, Rykoszetem: Rzecz o płci,
seksualności i narodzie [Stray Bullets: On the Subject of Gender, Sexuality, and Nation], that the cartoon’s
appearance on the cover of Poland’s major political publication confirmed the importance, if not
centrality, of the issues of gender equality, power, and representation to that historic moment
and its aftermath (76-77). Drawing on a rich archive of popular news media, Graff points to the
proliferation of similar images on the covers of other publications as indicative of a specifically
Polish version of an anti-feminist backlash in the country where “feminism has not existed as a
powerful social movement,” but where women’s and gender issues have been historically of central
importance (77).9
For instance, Barbara Labuda, who served as the Secretary of State in the Cabinet of
President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, tells stories of the male-dominated Solidarity movement and
describes her attempts at breaking the glass ceiling of that otherwise progressive independent
labor union. Another interviewee, Małgorzata Tarasiewicz, reared in a multigenerational female-
centered family that instilled in her a strong sense of independence, describes her activism in the
light of her disillusionment with Solidarity’s politics vis-à-vis its Women’s Section during the post-
socialist transition, her “huge disappointment about how this struggle with communism ended,
in what kind of an imperfect way, so far from what I have imagined” (139). In the country where,
despite all the progress in the wake of the accession to the European Union, the word feminism
still draws a range of hostile responses, where attempts at cultural openness and respect for racial
and ethnic diversity often fuel anti-Semitic and anti-black sentiments, and where openly sexist and
homophobic reactions coexist with a nascent gay and lesbian activism, women like Labuda and
Tarasiewicz emerge as pioneers who support women’s independence, develop structures to uphold
women’s rights, and fight discrimination against ethnic and sexual minorities.
Like Labuda’s and Tarasiewicz’s, all of the Polish interviews in the GF Project show how
their authors’ histories of activism on the local level, in cities and voivodeships, intersect or clash
with state-sanctioned policies, but also with movements and organizations from which one would
expect sympathy for issues concerning women. They contextualize Polish women’s struggle against
the backlash discourses of the right-wing organizations and their followers, such as the nationalistic
and fundamentalist Catholic program “Radio Maryja” [Radio Maria] or the racist, anti-Semitic, and
homophobic organization “Młodzież Wszechpolska” [The All-Polish Youth]. The interviews dwell

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on the personal effects of what Bożena Umińska terms the “ethnic cleansing of the spirit” or the
ways in which the state- and Catholic Church-sanctioned censorship of feminist, Jewish, and pro-
lgbtq discourses in Polish politics and culture, profoundly complicate the understanding of both the
geo-political contexts surrounding feminist movements and the personal stories involved in them
(66). While Polish culture, history, and people have been sometimes cast in simplified binary terms,
that is, as forever split between the dark era of post-1944 “communist oppression” and the brighter
era of post-1989 “democratic freedom,” the women interviewed in our project offer public and
private feminist histories of national and community activism that challenge such binaries.10
Labuda emphasizes that many women who were active in the anti-communist movement
are still reluctant to identify themselves as feminists. One factor that may come into play, as the
Polish-Jewish-American immigrant author and journalist Eva Hoffman explains, is that “the
concept of feminism was corrupted by the former regime, by the ‘shop-window women’ of
Communism, who were exhibited much like Potemkin villages to the unwary foreigners” (241).
Writing from the United States, Hoffman is a returned immigrant, a visitor in her native Poland
whose published account is a carefully edited travelogue of an outsider-participant. As the
interviews with women like Uminska and Graff show, although with the advent of capitalism
the images of ideologically correct Potemkin-village women have given way to the ultrafeminine
models in glossies like Glamour, Twój Styl [Your Style], and Elle, the popular meaning of feminism
has remained negative and reflects complex histories of sexism during and after communist era.
It is true that some connotations of feminist today resonate in the United States – e.g., man hater,
unnatural woman, dike/lesbian – but others are uniquely Polish and have been deployed trans-
historically. For example, denoting meanings such as anti-(Polish) state, anti-Catholic, anti-(normal)
family these new terms arise from both the legacy of communist-state manufactured illusion that
women had completely equal access to politics and culture during the period of 1944-89 and from
the more recent insistence of right wingers that they return to their “natural roles” as bearers of
national cultures and barefoot-and-pregnant guardians of the hearth.
A brief note on language and gender might be helpful here. We include it to emphasize
that much of what is key to understanding the workings of representations of female gender in
Poland cannot be compared, seen through analogies, or translated without peril since, in contrast
to English, Polish grammar genders all nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Most nouns denoting
professional occupations like doctor, lawyer, or writer have their male and female counterparts that
are marked by recognizably feminine endings (e.g., “prawnik” [lawyer] – “prawniczka”[female
lawyer], “nauczyciel” [teacher]-“nauczycielka”). But as Graff points out, when the feminine
ending is used, it often implies something not entirely serious, in most cases something lesser
than its grammatically masculine counterpart (the example of “poet” vs. “poetess” in English

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might be helpful here). On the other hand, there are numerous professions where the masculine
ending virtually never appears. These are understood to be the “feminine” jobs, which require a
lot of “care, patience, hard work … and low wages” like nursing, childcare, teaching, and cleaning
(Graff 35-36). In fact, the word “feminist” never appears in its grammatically masculine form in
Polish as “feminista” but always as “feministka.” Feminism has even been associated with murder:
homemade signs, “feminism kills women,” have been carried by participants in the so-called
“marches for national tradition” that are sponsored by nationalist pro-life organizations. Given
the relative absence of self-censoring among most publications in Poland, the term also invariably
springs onto their front pages whenever words such as woman and freedom or equality, abortion,
and minorities appear nearby.
Among these terms, “woman” or “kobieta” deserves an explanation across cultural and
linguistic contexts, despite its apparent clarity. The terms “woman” and its Polish equivalent
“kobieta” pose no apparent difficulty as far as nouns denoting a female of the human species are
concerned. But when we take cultural connotations into account, the word in Polish requires
explanation and contextualization in its attendant representations of femininity. Historically, there
have been two basic, linguistically grounded, and closely interlinked ideologies of femininity that
modify notions of woman, womanhood, and feminine in Poland. Though often unspoken, they
resonate in all of the GF interviews. These ideological constructs bring together linguistic and
visual representations of historically contingent gender in the way that Janion has posited it. As
“creator[s] of meaning and at the same time … concrete vessel[s] for that meaning” they reflect and
are represented by the symbolic archetypes and iconographies of Matka Polka/Mother Poland and
Maryja Dziewica/Virgin Mary (Einhorn; Płatek).
The first image, Mother Poland, goes back to the 18th century and the time when Poland
did not exist on the map of Europe for about 150 years, following the partitions by Austria, Prussia,
and Russia. The second, Virgin Mary, originates long before, with Poland’s 1000-year long Catholic
history and arises from the embroilment of that history with the development of the Polish state
and its institutions (Zaborowska; Porter). Matka Polka/Mother Poland symbolizes women as
guardians of the hearth, soldier-bearing wombs, and bearers of national culture, language, and
“family values.” Its shadow, Maryja Dziewica/Virgin Mary has stood for the unattainable, chaste,
perfect femininity sanctioned by the Catholic Church. The resilience and plasticity of this formation,
and its complex links with female sexuality and reproductive rights, are especially important for
understanding today’s clashes around femininity and feminism.
While somewhat familiar in the US through its counterpart of Our Lady of Guadalupe that
was described poignantly by the late Gloria Anzaldua, the Polish cult of the Virgin verges on
goddess worship with specific political and practical results for the lives of ordinary women.

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Mary was officially crowned the “Queen of Poland” by the authorities of the Catholic Church
—Poland seems to be the only female divine monarchy in the world—and was proclaimed the
nation’s “Divine Mother.” A feminist paradox incarnate, she is a monarch and a divine mother that
everyone has to worship yet no one has to take seriously. She is the infinitely forgiving, passive,
and merciful mother figure dreamt up by a patriarchal society in which all women are expected to
be just like her: lovely visions to behold but never opinionated subjects. It is no accident that the
right-wing radio station led by the anti-feminist, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay Father Rydzyk is named
“Radio Maryja.”
Both models, the Mother and the Virgin, have persisted, in various permutations, through
the Cold War and capitalist transition. They continue to inform visual culture and are deliberately
deployed by the propaganda machines of the Catholic church and conservative political
organizations. Neither offers contemporary Polish women any help with envisaging full citizenship
in the nation’s post-socialist rebuilding. Both, given the intertwining of the most recent discourses
of exclusion with the anti-feminist backlash under their auspices, exclude ethnic, sexual, and
religious minorities.
OUR STORIES, OURSELVES: GROWING UP BETWEEN COMMUNISM AND (CATHOLIC) CAPITALISM
For women like Bożena Umińska, another of our interviewees, whose father changed their
family’s name from Keff to shield them from anti-Semitism, neither model offers a viable option –
aside from their obvious restrictions - because both are Christian and nationalist.
Umińska told us that
various human institutions … have this identity stamp, and they just stamp and
stamp. And, for example, the Catholic Church stamps and says this: “You have a great
Polish-Catholic identity, and simply everything is fine with you.” Probably what’s
included is, I don’t know, baptism, confessions, you know, offerings … I don’t know,
everything, so‚ “you’re great.” And then it’s called… what’s it called? A true Pole, you
know, and we have this nationalist and fascist with a great identity. (181)
Umińska has also offered a trenchant analysis of race and gender in 19th and 20th Century
Poland when she examined an array of literary texts that depict Polish Jewish women in Shadowed
Figure: Jewish Women in Polish Literature. She found that the double bind of gender and race, as
Jewishness was then considered a race in roughly the same way it was in the US, constricted these
women’s lives because it more easily confined them to anti-Semitic stereotypes. In a more recent

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collection of essays, Barykady, Umińska links her feminist activism to patriotism, whose duties
demand unequivocal support for the civil rights of gays and lesbians from each responsible citizen:
“as long as homophobia endangers Polish democracy, we are all gays and lesbians and should
march out in the streets with them” (66). To this, the out-lesbian poet and writer Izabela Filipiak
adds that, in Poland, sexuality and sexual object choice have become forms of passing, dissent, and
contestation similar to ethnicity: “It may be that the lesbian is – along with her body and desire
– the litmus test of what is up with culture today. … [But] like Jewish women during the Second
World War lesbians exist on others’ papers … they cross over to the Aryan side … and like the best
actresses enter the roles of a good auntie, devoted wife, social activist, businesswoman” (69).
The double burden of gender and sexuality to which Umińska and Flipiak point plays a
constricting role for women like Anna Gruszczyńska, our youngest interviewee, born in 1978.
Gruszczyńska’s personal experience has led to local and national activism on behalf of Gay and
Lesbian Rights. When Gruszczyńska was a graduate student of Foreign Languages and Literatures
in Kraków, she came upon much resistance from a female professor for whom women’s literature,
let alone lesbian literature, was completely taboo and off-limits. Instead of continuing her research
on the first lesbian novel published in Argentina, the professor insisted that Gruszczyńska study
Spanish-Polish relations:
For the whole year, my mentor didn’t even pronounce the word lesbian; if at all,
she talked about “relationships between women,” and she’d try to persuade me to
… I mean between the lines … that if I really had to work on such an awful topic as
women’s literature, and the starting point was that women’s literature didn’t exist,
then why did I have to focus on lesbians? If it had to be, be on women, then let them
be normal women, heterosexual, and preferably in novels. (31)
Undaunted by this relegation of lesbian and women writers to the realm of the invisible,
Gruszczyńska continued her scholarship and plunged into activism that included spearheading
of the well known action, “Niech nas zobaczą” [Let Them See Us], that posted photographs of
maleand female same-sex couples on walls and billboards of Polish cities. To make this nation-wide
action most effective, Gruszczyńska paid attention to Catholic religious holidays whose sequence
dictates the rhythm of public and private life in Poland: “We did have some leaflet campaigns, right
before Christmas,” she recalls, “when, on a snowy day, we were giving out leaflets with the slogan
“How Gay Men and Lesbians Spend Their Christmas” to remind everybody that gays and lesbians
existed and had to take questions about grandchildren for Christmas (29).

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FIG. 2, Anna Gruszczyńska, “Let Them See Us”
Recent scholarship on lesbian life stories (e.g., Anna Laszuk’s Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z szafy!
[Girls, Come out of the Closet!]), the fallout of homophobia on Polish public life and popular culture
(e.g., Zbyszek Sypniewski’s and Błażej Warkocki’s Homofobia po polsku [Homophobia in Polish]), as
well as attempts to recast prominent literary works in the context of gay and lesbian biographies of
their authors (e.g., Krzysztof Tomasik‘s Homobiografie [Homobiographies]) gives us hope that things
may change in the future. But for now, whether you are a Jewish woman, a feminist or a lesbian (or
all of the above), or an atheist in the Poland dominated by Catholic values, your position as a real or
true kobieta is contingent on a whole set of religiously and culturally prescribed functions. Like its
counterpart of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, the Polish role model inspired by Catholic ideology
and iconography that has put the Virgin Mary on a pedestal contributes strongly to the saintly and
sacrificial role that many women feel they must follow to avoid alienation and isolation.
The other ubiquitous image of Polish womanhood, Matka Polka or Mother Poland, though
neither virginal nor whorish, has long created a tight maternal box.11 There is, of course, a direct
link between the Virgin Mary and Mother Poland. Lech Wałęsa, the emblematic hero of Solidarity,
has successfully employed feminine symbols to illustrate his social and political position. By
wearing the badge with the image of the Polish Virgin, the famous Black Madonna of Częstochowa,
in his lapel, he has been reminding Polish women, especially in their absence in the media, that

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their role has been that of men’s unwavering supporters, caretakers, and nurturers (Płatek). The
image of Mother Poland as connoting these virtues emerged during the three partitions of Poland
in the 18th Century, when nation building consisted of preservation of language, literature,
Catholicism, and traditional gender roles in tandem with armed uprisings against the Russian rule.
Though they often participated in resistance movements against the partitions, women were most
welcomed as contributors to the nation insofar as their capacities for bearing sons-patriots-warriors
were concerned. A model Polish woman who emerged from that period emulated the Virgin by
being passive and self-sacrificing. A slave to her fertile body, she was nevertheless de-sexualized,
and focused her energies first and foremost on bearing and rearing male saviors of and for the
nation. In another gendered, romantic anthropomorphization, the partitioned and war torn Poland
was at that time considered a “Christ of Nations” who would lead other beleaguered countries to
freedom. So when one of her sons died on the battlefield, Mother Poland/Virgin sent another in his
stead.
A curious version of this myth still thrives among conservatives and prominent right wing
politicians as women who refuse, delay or are unable to bear children are represented by them as
failures not only of motherhood but, indeed, of womanhood. Women who embrace their jobs and
education, for example, rather than thinking of motherhood first, are often seen as threatening
the very well being of the nation, at least according to the infamous former Minister of Education,
Roman Giertych, who is part of the ultra right-wing Liga Polskich Rodzin or LPR [League of Polish
Families]. Giertych and his ilk see feminists as something akin to what the American reactionaries
term “femi-nazis,” or as monsters who have to turn to work and lesbianism to bury their grief as
unfulfilled females; who, supposedly unable to attract a man and bear children, attack and criticize
men out of spite and certainly not out of any desire to fight inequality and gain political agency.
Giertych’s vision of Mother Poland overshadows even those women who do want to have children
but have trouble conceiving and turn for help to modern reproductive technologies, such as in vitro
fertilization. These women are seen as unnatural which is often shorthand for feminist, because
they demand that their treatments be covered by national health care plans the way such treatments
are covered in other countries of the European Union.
In “Święte życie, święty lęk” [“Holy Life, Holy Horror”], an article that responds to the
conservatives’ control over women‘s reproductive rights, Graff argues against the Catholic church
newspeak. This newspeak, she argues, has monopolized the discourse on reproductive technologies
in Polish media and it equates in vitro procedures with abortion and those who turn to in vitro with
baby murderers. Graff emphasizes the link between language, politics, and women’s right to health
care free of ideology: “We must regain another, forgotten language in Poland. In this language
a pregnancy is called a pregnancy, an embryo – an embryo, and patients are spoken about with

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empathy.… [This is] about the respect of the state for women’s privacy and women’s subjectivity,
about supporting people‘s decisions in the realms of fertility and how to become parents.” Graff
ends her article with a dire prediction about the future of a country in which the Catholic Church
prescribes the one and only way to have children: “[The ban on in vitro] will pass. One will have to
travel abroad to undergo tests and procedures, and only the very wealthy will be able to afford it.…
In religion classes, the in vitro children will become objects of persecution as having been conceived
against the natural law.”
In addition to the omnipresent Mother Poland, another important model of femininity that
emerged after World War II is the Female Comrade. During the Cold War, communist ideology
promoted camaraderie among ethnicities, classes, and genders. Feminism was not mentioned
much, but existed in a socialist-realist form that required, as eFKa Director Sławomira Walczewska
observes, a “dogmatic representation of women’s movements in the spirit of the ideology of the
state, the workers‘ state and class struggle to be exact, that is, as dramatically different from the
bourgeois fancies of the ladies from the haves class” who first fought for women’s suffrage and
reproductive rights in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (11). In some important ways,
feminism was itself a “foreign” word and concept associated with the West and capitalism. Indeed,
according to state authorities, it had no right to exist in Poland at all because women were not
discriminated against under communism (5). To some extent, it was an organizational force without
the label of feminism applied to it because, as Hoffman points out, “like socialism, feminism was
co-opted and corrupted by its association with official ideology” (80).
When Hoffman compares the US and Polish political systems, she elucidates important
ways in which Polish and American women struggled with very different post-World War II
cultural contexts. For one, there was no equivalent in socialist Poland of what went on in the
US in the 1950s. There was no cult of post-World War II domesticity. This was due to the simple
fact that women rarely, if ever, were able to be only homemakers in a country that lost so much
of its population and that transitioned into state-sanctioned socialist culture in an almost single
staggering leap after the end of World War II. There was no suburban isolation in Poland of the
1950s, no room for a homegrown “feminine mystique,” because women were not expected, or
allowed, to ponder their condition, as excessive introspection was considered a “bourgeois”
pursuit. As Labuda points out in her interview, Communism equalized genders, at least in the
public discourse and national imaginary, and women were expected to get an education and
jobs just like their male counterparts: “Higher education was more discriminatory by class than
gender—discriminatory, that is, against the upper classes—and women entered the professions in
relatively large numbers, and reached high levels of authority, if rarely the highest” (Hoffman 81).
But glass ceilings existed even in the midst of this socialist gender utopia: the Party allowed only

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a specific number of women members in its ranks, while in the world of academia, where women
had been more often educated than men, they achieved fewer academic titles and honors, not to
mention prominence and visibility in the media (Sawa-Czajka 109).
Like among university presidents and public intellectuals, in higher echelons of the
government women were objects of discussion and background images rather than active
participants. The Central Committee of the United Polish Worker’s Party (KC PZPR), Walczewska
observes, was a “men only” body. During the forty odd years of the KC PZPR’s existence, its seven
secretaries general were all men (2005, 6). Regardless of the few gains made on the ground by
Polish women during this period, however, it was still the only era in Polish history when gender
equality was part of the ruling party’s official agenda. Like racism, sexism was prohibited; the
proliferation of both in private lives, on the job, in the jokes and popular discourse notwithstanding.
As a result, one of the concepts that Polish feminists, as well as women who refuse that label,
cannot understand is “feminine weakness,” or any such notion of “passive, ornamental femininity,
of the half-childish doll-like women” exemplified by Donna Reed-inspired images of white middle
class American women (Hoffman 80). Given Lenin’s and Stalin’s opposition to the oppression of
women under both feudal and capitalist systems (the former referred to domestic work as both
unproductive and barbaric), so-called prerevolutionary gender roles were routinely ridiculed
and repudiated in socialist realist popular culture as “bourgeois.” In popular films, for example,
especially during the height of Stalinism in Poland of 1949-1955, there evolved a model of behavior
for the female part of the proletariat, what Piotr Zwierzchowski describes as the “pedestrian
stereotype of a socialist realist she-hero … the proverbial tractor driver, who personified the social
ascendancy of woman” for the masses of movie goers (130). Engaged politically and socially, aware
of ideological implications of their actions, such socialist heroes might fall in love and marry, but
competed as equals against men who were part of the same work force. And yet, no matter that
these women were represented as larger than life, as giantesses as Ewa Toniak describes them in
her study of early socialist-realist visual culture, such depictions erased their sexuality and evoked
curious fetishism, misogyny and abjection vis-à-vis the female body.
Amid other cultural and historic legacies of 1944-1989, it is virtually impossible to see Polish
feminists in comparison to their white American counterparts of any “wave.” In fact, if comparisons
are to be made, Polish feminists who fought in the anti-Communist underground express views
that seem much closer in political sentiment to those expressed by American feminists of color
and Third World Feminists. One of the women Hoffman interviewed, for example, said this
about gender cooperation in the anti-communist movement: “Well, you know, we’ve had all these
problems we had to deal with together … we’ve always had to struggle, and in some respects, we
tried to help each other” (181). Still, as Labuda recalls her years as a Solidarity activist, when push

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came to shove men saw women in very specific, that is, subordinate positions; female peers were
more often asked to serve their male colleagues tea than to join their discussions as peers (69).
Residues of the archetypal communist Female Comrade have survived the transition of
1989 and complicate the images, which we have depicted thus far. The following fragment of a
newsreel celebrating International Women’s Day on March 8, 1953 illustrates well the extent to
which communist ideology attempted to shroud the reality of women’s lives during the Cold War;
the extent to which it normalized gender equality and thus attempted to make all citizens take it for
granted:
Constitutional Project of the Polish People’s Republic, article 66: Women in the Polish
People’s Republic have equal rights with men in all respects of national, political,
economic, social, and cultural life. Every morning all over Poland people rush to work.
Women walk alongside men. Wacława Durniewicz is a forewoman in the Kasprzak
Factory in Warsaw. She gets satisfaction out of her work and equal pay. With a bright
smile, she teaches her female colleagues. Helena Wytrwał has a different workday.
She is the chair of her community’s local council. There were no such chief village
officers in prewar Poland. She is like Helena Olszewska who is the chairperson of the
local committee of the United Polish Workers Party. She is one of the many women
who have been entrusted by the People’s Government with the care for her co-citizens.
Fryderyka Niewiadomska, a female District Attorney, is also among them. There is
noble competition among men and women in all walks of life. (PRL Propaganda)
In People’s Poland, constitutional law, however, was not enough to guarantee gender
equality. Polish women’s everyday life was different from this rosy picture of communist
camaraderie, as they carried the double burden of homemakers and professionals, few, if any,
had the means to rise to prominent positions or free themselves from the workload that awaited
them at home (Corrin; Bystydzieński). But, as Labuda suggests in the following fragment, at least
theoretically, women could fully participate in the political and professional life of their country:
With all the criticism of that [communist] system, I nonetheless believe that it did
something, that it caused the women’s issue, the status of women, to be noticed and
discussed, that social norms changed in Poland. And the situation of women in the
Polish People’s Republic, in my view, was decisively better than in France of the 60s
and 70s. (69)

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Between 1946 and 1989, women enjoyed benefits which have since disappeared from
Poland’s social map: free childcare, long paid maternity leaves (up to three years), and paid time off
to care for sick children, not to mention state-sanctioned vacations, subsidized winter and summer
camps for children, as well as workers‘ health resorts (“No Place to be a Woman 60). Abortion was
legal and easily accessible, as was contraception, under socialized health care and so, unlike in
France during the same period, Polish women had control over their reproductive rights. Not so
after the fall of communism, when the pro-life forces of the Catholic Church and Solidarity got rid
of these gains despite women’s 50% membership in the anti-communist underground movement,
and their vocal protests (Penn).
UNSPOKEN TRANSITIONS: BEYOND THE SOLIDARITY OF SILENCE
On March 15, 1993, the Law on Family Planning, Human Embryo Protection, and
Conditions of Abortion was approved by the upper house of the Polish Parliament, overturning
the liberal 1956 legislation (David and Titkow 239). Now, Poland has some of the most restrictive
abortion laws in the world. As the Slavic Studies scholar Halina Filipowicz explains:
Many Western observers find it difficult to reconcile the political transformation

of postcommunist Poland with Polish society’s fierce and enduring attachment to
traditional nationalist scripts.… However, the “transition narrative” crudely falsifies
postcommunist developments. What emerged from the Quiet Revolution of 1989
in Poland was a highly traditional culture, rooted in religious fundamentalism,
nationalist ideology and patriarchal practices. Seen in this context, the reluctance of
many Poles to challenge the “hidden” taboo of particular forms of inequality (such as
gender discrimination) as well as “unspoken” (yet still active) nationalist narratives
becomes less puzzling.... When communism collapsed, a need for clear-cut identities
of “us” and “them” became especially urgent, and a demand for scapegoats was (and
still is) at its highest to feed the totalizing desire for order, stability, control.
Such a turn of events has led our interviewees to struggle even more fervently for women’s
rights. For instance, Tarasiewicz, the director of The Network of East-West Women, recalls that the
end of communism was a bitter disappointment for her, despite her active role in its demise—a
moment when “the [gender] blinders kind of started to fall off” (2003, 139). Like African American
feminists disillusioned with the male heterosexist agenda of the Black Power Movement in the
1960, she realized in Poland of the 1990s that the struggle for end of oppression were understood

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as masculine. To her, the transition of post-1989 meant that male Solidarity and Church hierarchies
replaced the communist rule:
The news about my involvement in feminism somehow got around, and that’s how
I got my work in Solidarity, this next stage, already after 1989, when I became a
coordinator of the National Women’s Section, that is a person responsible for building
this section from scratch. It was because … even though there were many women
in Solidarity—after all, many women worked for the underground and played
exceptionally important roles—later on it turned out that there were no women in the
union’s leadership and that there actually was no single unit within the union that
would represent women’s issues. (140)
Tarasiewicz goes on to explain that Solidarity’s bosses agreed to form such an organization
only because of international pressure, which insisted that women’s voices be more explicitly
represented. Solidarity’s leadership also did so in hopes that such a section would be more of a
symbolic figure-head, another Potemkin village rather than an effective activist arm of the labor
union. When it turned out that the women under Tarasiewicz’s leadership demanded that changes
be made and women’s interests represented in the government, “the Women’s Section reached the
end of its life,” as she recalled, “in a rather sudden and dramatic way” (140).
Solidarity, closely aligned with the Catholic Church, proposed a restrictive anti-abortion
law, which the Women’s Section opposed. When Marian Krzaklewski became the leader of
Solidarity soon after, Tarasiewicz remembered, “he undertook steps toward repressing and
dissolving the Women’s Section” whose stance against the anti-abortion law threatened his position
in relation to the Catholic Church (2003, 142). As a result, Solidarity dissolved the Women’s Section
and a “façade Section was created, consisting only of women from the right” (143).
Asked in an interview what it was like to be a woman in a position of power in Poland,
the well-known Solidarity activist and later editor of Gazeta Wyborcza [Electoral News], the largest
newspaper in democratic Poland, Helena Łuczywo, explained that it was “not any kind of a
problem.” She added that she “couldn’t understand American feminists when [she] spent a year
in the US” (Hoffman 49). Łuczywo admitted that women in Poland were in some ways worse off
than their American counterparts – they had to wait in long queues after coming home from work
to put food on the table, for instance – but she also thought that Poland offered women liberties not
to be found in the West. She explained that there was a long tradition in Poland of “female activism
and authority” (Hoffman 49). In recalling the 18th and 19th century Polish women’s resistance
movements, for example, Łuczywo linked women’s participation in Solidarity to these earlier

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uprisings and to the images of Mother Poland as a powerful cultural symbol. She acknowledged
that even if women were deliberately held from direct positions of power in Solidarity, and later
in the democratically elected government, women were able to develop “formidable examples
of feminine strength.” There was a common cause and it proved to be “a stronger force than the
polarizing stereotypes of gender” (Hoffman 49). Unfortunately, when the communist system
collapsed, many of the women who led to its demise “rejected any gender analysis, saying: we
were all in it together, and we did what was needed, because it was the right thing to do,” no
matter that their hard work was not recognized, appreciated, or rewarded by their male colleagues
(Grudzińska-Gross xii).
This unease with systemic gender inequality – no matter that Łuczywo suffered as a
Solidarity activist who was not as visible as her male counterparts – is similar to the unease
expressed by some activists of color in the Global Feminisms Project’s U.S. interviews. Rabab
Abdulhadi, for instance, advocates a complex gender analysis that addresses the victimization of
Arab and Muslim men as well as women, which she finds necessary in the post-9/11 xenophobic
atmosphere. As Abdulhadi observes, “women’s oppression … does not disappear with the
targeting of men” (36). Likewise, Cathy Cohen recognizes that feminism needs to change so that
it can “take into account other factors, or the intersection of race, then you have to kind of really
think through a position on … not a position on patriarchy, but the ways and contours, the nuances
of patriarchy. How do we understand, for example, Black men’s male privilege within a white
supremacist or racist society” (128). However desirable such approaches are, in light of many of
the GF interviews, it is rather revealing that men described in these interviews rarely make such
pronouncements.
The women, who participated in and led the anti-government revolution in the 1980s
Poland, went unacknowledged by the new government and their former Solidarity colleagues after
1989. As the interviewees in the GF Project like Labuda and Tarasiewicz made clear, this erasure did
not bother many, including some of those it targeted or even hurt. At the same time, it served as a
call to arms for others like the historian Shana Penn who documented women’s work in the anti-
communist underground. As the opening epigraph in her book, Solidarity’s Secret (2005), Penn uses
a revealing quotation from Labuda: “You’ve come to learn about Solidarity women, so I will tell
you the truth, but who will care to publish it? Everyone in Poland knows that women started the
1980s underground, but no one bothers to talk about it.”
As Penn observes, together with the Western press, male-dominated Polish society relayed
a specifically male inflected portrayal of the revolution. As a result, virtually simultaneously with
the so-called “birth of democracy,” women activists were thrown out with the bathwater. It could
also be argued that, caught between impossible gendered role models, seasoned independent trade

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union fighters like Łuczywo or Anna Walentynowicz actually let themselves become invisible
when their role in the national revolution went so blatantly unacknowledged (Penn). Helping to
explain this paradox in the socio-historical context of lingering traditional gender roles and curious
approaches to sexism, our “eFka” collaborator Sławka Walczewska stresses the power of yet
another belief about womanhood in Poland, or the “notion readily spread among women that it is
women who rule the world through men … that HE may be the head of the family, but SHE is its
neck” (2000, 11). According to this logic, women have power and stay invisible as power brokers; it
also implies that men need to be led and manipulated by women.
The interviews collected in the GF archive give us a view of women’s reality on the cusp
of the twentieth anniversary of the momentous shift of 1989, whose public celebrations the Polish
government is currently undertaking. The current cultural and political climate fosters an image
of the ideal Polish woman that may be more recognizable to American readers than to former
Solidarity activists. As numerous fashion magazines, TV ads, and domestic soap operas suggest
not too subtly, the kobieta/woman of today is someone who remains a vessel of meaning, a male-
made fiction by fulfilling men’s needs: she has “that miraculous and dependable something”
and devotes every moment to learning how to catch and nurture a man. These images are often
imports from the west, true enough, but they also reflect lingering and resurgent stereotypes of the
contemporary, sexed-up, and westernized Mother Poland.
These new incarnations echo both Mother Poland and the Virgin Mary, as the latter
appears in more conservative publications and programs promoting family values, such as the
aforementioned program “Radio Maryja,” a weekly Nasz Dziennik [Our Daily], or in more genteel
versions in the recent chick-lit hit by Malgorzata Kalicinska, Dom nad rozlewiskiem, and a TV
program for children Ziarno [Seed]. The proliferation of these female fictions and figurations,
their complex historic roots, as well as hybrid character in contemporary systems of gendered
significations do not go unnoticed in more progressive publications, such as Gazeta Wyborcza’s
magazine Wysokie Obcasy [High Heels], or Polityka, and in academic feminist circles where some of
the most trenchant gender analyses now take place.
Twenty First Century heterosexist fantasies are particularly jarring in the context of what has
only recently emerged in Poland as a topic of public debate – domestic violence and its relation to
gendered systems of power. Ironically and tragically, it is this new attention to an age-old problem,
and de facto systemic covering up of women’s victimization by state institutions and the media,
that allows for a widening of gender analyses in public discourses to include men and masculinity.
As our interviewee, the social worker Anna Lipowska-Teutsch, recalls, her advocacy for abused and
battered women was discouraged and cost her her job. Initially aware of feminism only from stories
of western activists, she felt in the 1980s that it had no place in Poland. But then she heard terrifying

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stories of violence against women as the women themselves related their experiences to her: “These
were women who showed up in the Acute Poisoning Clinic after suicide attempts and who had
suffered some inhuman kind of abuse by their husbands, fathers, brothers, boyfriends and so on for
many years. And finally they tried to take their own lives, because for many years, they had been
seeking help, trying to escape, trying to get some protection from the law, trying really hard” (2005,
97). Women’s accounts made Lipowska-Teutsch embark on activism that radically changed her
outlook and that revealed to her the interlocking systems of male dominance between the private
and public spheres. She was shocked and outraged that no one listened to these women’s cries
for help, that there were no institutions where they could turn for protection and understanding.
Between the home and the state institutions designed to protect all of Poland‘s citizens, battered
women had no place and were invisible. Most of all, Lipowska-Teutsch was amazed that many
of these women internalized their invisibility and victimized status, as they blamed themselves
for their abuse and saw suicide as the only option in a culture that expected and rewarded female
sacrifice. One woman, a Catholic from the countryside, drank poison that would ensure she would
die slowly, so that, while in agony, she could still undergo confession and gain absolution to ensure
that she would go to heaven. For years, this woman was abused by her husband, who also molested
her children; she lived through it all “with no result but silence and loneliness” (98). She died in a
horrifyingly painful way but, as Lipowska-Teutsch emphasized, she tried to be “a good Catholic,”
to “save” herself in the afterlife by enacting in her death models of feminine sacrifice disseminated
by the Catholic Church. This woman was certainly comforted by her deep faith and prayer, but she
was just as certainly a victim of the culture and state that did not recognize her as a fully-fledged
citizen and political subject. She died locked in a trap that was, ironically and tragically, set up and
sanctioned by the discourses and institutions that embraced both the Mother and the Virgin models
of womanhood, the models that were to secure her a good life on earth and a certain passage into
an even better afterlife.
To compound the bitter irony of the lessons learnt through stories such as this one,
Lipowska-Teutsch discovered that more often than not the role of the victim precluded the
victimized woman from identifying herself as a feminist. The organizations that came on the scene
during the 1990s to help battered women expected only the “classic” or “good victims,” or those
who deserved “to be believed and to receive help” mutely. Women who would “embrace a sense of
empowerment and demand [their] rights,” who would identify with a larger group to defend their
place in the world, had little or no credibility:
Here you are, dear ladies, here you have these suffering women, these women who
are tortured, raped, killed, abused, who die, and take care of them, you know. Well,

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there is something about this that makes you talk about these women. It’s a bit like
a sound of a nail scratching a board, you know. There is something kind of tactless
about this. This kind of showing … flaunting of this … this suffering. There is this talk
about some kind of negative effect of the victim’s feminism, this kind of showing the
stigmata and baring the wounds, and that, on the other hand, feminism slides down
into this kind of hole, where all well-meaning people meet and they want to help
somebody, you know. But that kind of dulls the blade, let’s say, the political blade of
feminism and focuses on the universal suffering of a human person. (98)
As another interviewee, Barbara Limanowska, found out, she could become active on behalf
of women victimized by human trafficking only by leaving Poland. Limanowska felt that she could
not limit her activism to Poland, whose system and institutions she found constricting, even if she
first embraced feminist consciousness while a university student there. Limanowska worked for
the LaStrada Foundation, which allowed her to use her links with her home country and Eastern
Europe, as well as with Asia and the West. Still, her international activism was inspired by what she
sees as a distinctly localized feminist perspective: “We had this idea to go beyond the ‘first world,’
beyond the language and methodology, which kind of reflected Western feminist imagination, to
look at it from some Eastern vantage point, and to try to describe this phenomenon, to work on it
kind of… from the inside, from our perspective, without appropriatin g… or … or accepting the
language, which, as we felt, didn’t quite reflect what was really going on in trafficking” (88). On the
other hand, for Anna Titkow, her feminism as a scholar of sociology and gender became confirmed
only after her work had been included in the famous collection, Sisterhood Is Global, and after Robin
Morgan told her that this publication already defined Titkow as a feminist. That was so, Titkow
pointed out, because for her generation of women in Poland, the ones who are now in their sixties,
the label of feminist could come only after having created a sense of a gendered self, after having
developed what we would call a feminist self and story (149).
Remembering her own troubled road to feminist consciousness, literary scholar Inga
Iwasiów, points to the complexities of exploring issues of gender and representations across
cultures and languages that have inspired this essay. Iwasiów emphasizes that she was a feminist
“since preschool” given her independence and strong-mindedness. It was in fact her repressive
upbringing and education in the socialist Poland of the 1960s and 70s that gave her the first
tools for gender analysis. Iwasiów saw her past and her road to her feminist self as framed with
performances of womanhood, gendered gestures and a specific setup that accompanied her
education at that time, which was also, as she came to see it later, the “pinnacle achievement of
patriarchy.” This was so, as Iwasiów explains, because

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the feminized teaching profession didn’t guarantee that one would be in a space
beyond patriarchy. Just the opposite, all these gestures performed there, this whole
framing that accompanied education in the 70s and the 80s were, of course, top
achievements of patriarchy, and in its communist version, there was, of course, some
place for girls. It wasn’t clearly specified which place exactly it was, but it was clear
that one could hold a red flag and perform at a school assembly.” (46)
It was in those performative moments, while a decorative element in political spectacles,

that Iwasiów realized both her private “objectification as a girl” and her political “insightfulness”
that later enabled her to voice her opinions as a scholar. It is on this intersection of the private and
political meanings of woman, feminist, and feminine that we would like to bring this essay to its
conclusion. And by way of an apt conclusion, let us offer an image of Polish womanhood that can
confront Mleczko’s cartoon with which we opened this essay.
Working with photography and socialist realist architecture, multimedia artist Zofia
Kulik, who came of age in the 1970s, echoes Iwasiów’s sentiments in “Self Portrait with the
Palace.” In this piece that was made entirely by hand, using traditional photographic and collage
techniques, Kulik uses her own nude image to map out male and female bodies as fissured
meeting places for gender and history. “Self Portrait with the Palace” both deconstructs and
Fig. 3, Kulik, “Self-Portrait with the Palace” (1991)

Zaborowska and Pas
disrupts the proliferation of monumental religious, political, and gendered symbols that represent
Polish national identity during and after the Cold War. While doing so, it gestures ironically and
powerfully toward the historic contexts we have examined through the interviews with Polish
feminist activists: from the iconic Mother Poland and Virgin Mary, through the Communist
Comrade, to the Super-Feminine Chick of today.
Bridging historic periods and generations, Kulik represents the wave of feminist artists
who contended with a peculiar form of gendered internal exile in the world of the arts under and
after communism, during the height of socialism in Poland and during the height of nationalist
and religious frenzy unleashed in its aftermath. We see her work as positioned on the crossroads,
in the uncensored space of creative practitioners and intellectuals, and as offering by means of a
visual narrative a story of female resilience that is akin to those told by the GF Project interviewees
we have examined in this essay. The woman at the center of “Self-Portrait with the Palace” is the
Polish anti-Madonna and phallic anti-Virgin, at the same time as she can be read in dialogue with
the depictions of Our Lady of Guadalupe by Chicana artists like Alma López, because the story that
she tells cuts across multiple idioms and cultures. And as much as the woman in Kulik’s image is
imprisoned by the national religious and political symbols, imperilled by the spire of the upside-
down Palace, she is also central and commanding attention; she is a formidable goddess with whom
no one would want to mess.
Like the images and stories included in the Nieoczekiwane Archiwum Kobiet [The Unexpected
Women’s Archive], a catalogue from the ground-breaking multimedia exhibit, “Polka: Medium –
Cień– Wyobrażenie” (2005) [Polish Woman: Medium – Shadow – Vision], that brought together
feminist scholars, artists, and activists, Kulik’s image suggests a choral vision and a collage of
voices that comprise the Polish feminine. And that is why the image of Kulik’s socialist realist
goddess that clearly anticipated and inspired The Unexpected Women’s Archive is a perfect visual
homage to the women whose stories constitute the Global Feminisms’ archive and who inspired
and inform this article. It is also a perfect answer to the cartoon by Mleczko with which we have
opened it: you have to listen to the stories and voices that animate the pictures. They defy neat
narratives and historical categorizations, escape theory, and challenge disciplinary divisions. As
is the case with all the stories gathered in the Global Feminisms archive, we learn from them one
woman, one voice, and one listener/reader, at a time.

Zaborowska and Pas
NOTES
1 Andrzej Mleczko is best known for his political drawings. He is the author of thousands of cartoons
and drawings published in dozens of newspapers and magazines over the past forty years. For more
information on the artist and his work, see the web site of the Andrzej Mleczko Gallery at <http://mleczko.
interia.pl/andrzej-mleczko>.
2 This issue opens up a fertile ground for engagement with the rich US scholarship on this subject. We
choose not to follow this lead and focus instead on the voices of Polish women featured in our primary
archive.
3 Our purpose in this paper is not a detailed account of women’s history in Poland, but rather an
interdisciplinary and cultural studies-inflected unpacking and contextualization of some of the notions of
womanhood and the feminine that are employed by the interviewees whose stories comprise the Poland
Site Global Feminisms Project archive.
4 “eFKa” (Fundacja Kobieca) Women’s Foundation is a feminist organization, founded in March 1991,
whose main goal is to support solidarity and independence among women, to counteract discrimination
against women, and to develop women’s culture. See <http://www.efka.org.pl/en>.
5 The “Global Feminisms Project” was funded, beginning in 2002, by a grant from the Rackham Graduate
School, with additional funding provided by the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, the Institute
for Research on Women and Gender, the Women’s Studies Program, and the Center for South Asian
Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Global Feminisms Project’s detailed description,
interviews with feminist scholars and activists from China, India, Poland, and the United States, as well
as transcripts, contextual and bibliographic materials can be found on the Project’s web site at <http://
www.umich.edu/~glblfem>. So far, the archive has been used by many scholars and students, and
has provided a basis for several courses on global feminisms at the University of Michigan and other
institutions.
6 23 Sept. 2009 <http://www.umich.edu/~glblfem/en/about.html>.
7 Although aware of the emergent scholarship on this subject in the US, we choose to focus on the voices of
Polish activists included in the Global Feminisms Project and rely on the work of Polish feminist scholars,
most of whom publish in Polish only, as our primary sources. We do so to offer a perspective that is
rooted in between the US and Polish academe theoretically, but that brings to the table primary and
secondary sources that may be unavailable to readers with no command of Polish.
8 As a Catholic country, Poland has been read as a culture awash with conservative religious symbologies
and its nationalisms as directly related to the hegemonic social role of the Catholic Church and
conservative family policies associated with its power and influence. See Porter 2000 and 2001.
9 With the exception of the Polish GF interviews and unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own.

Zaborowska and Pas
10 Many scholars of Eastern Europe have been critical of the effects of the postcommunist transition on
women and they also reject such binary terms. See Funk and Mueller; Einhorn; Gal and Kligman.
11 While scholars like Einhorn and Piątek analyze these stereotypes, they, and others, have also traced many
ways in which these images and dictates have been contested and resisted by Polish women. See Jolluck
and Fidelis.

Zaborowska and Pas
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Kritika
Ku ltu r a
childhood and family in contemporary children’s fiction:

resilience, agency, and emergence of new gender norms
Rosario Torres-Yu
University of the Philippines-Diliman
[email protected]
Abstract
New awareness of re-thinking childhood in the emergent field of childhood studies inspires production of new
discourse on social construction of childhood in literature. This paper looks at contemporary children’s literature
in the Philippines from this perspective and within the context of the globalization and transnationalization of
care giving. Its interrogation of selected children’s books and literature for young adult reveals that the traditional
concept of childhood is now being challenged and resisted. Cognizant of the need to sustain this direction of literary
production, this paper posits that children’s literature in the country should mainstream this new thinking so that
it can become a meaningful venue for Filipino children’s socialization and construction in light of the increasingly
complex world that children need to deal with.
Keywords
childhood studies, migration, transnational families
About the author

Rosario Torres-Yu is Full Professor of Philippine Literature and Philippine Studies at the College of Arts and Letters,
University of the Philipines-Diliman. She has published works on Philippine literary criticism, gender and writing,
peace and children’s literature, and the Philippine labor movement under Martial Law. She won numerous awards
for her essays and books on Philippine literary criticism. Notable among these are her critical essays on two National
Artists on Literature, Amado V. Hernandez (Tudla at Tudling: Amado V. Hernandez) and Bienvenido Lumbera (Bayan at
Lipunan sa Kritisimong Lumbera). She has also won major prizes for her creative nonfiction in Filipino from the Palanca
Memorial Awards for Literature. She was Visiting Professor at Osaka University of Foreign Studies in Japan from
1988-1992 where she taught Philippine Studies and helped in the development of the Philippine Studies graduate
curriculum.
She is the founding president of Pilandocan, Inc. (National Research Society for Children’s Literature), an association
of writers, critics, and researchers that aims to contribute to the development of Filipino children’s literature through
research and criticism. She is a member of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature.
INTRODUCTION
Motherhood is a very powerful ideological concept in the Philippine socio-political and

cultural landscape. The passing on of former Philippine President Corazon C. Aquino on August
1, 2009 and the response of the people to her demise enacted this power. Reminiscent of the 1986
People Power Revolution which brought down dictatorial rule, people lined the streets wearing

To r r e s -Yu
Childhood and Family
symbols and flashing signs signifying the struggle for democracy, as they paid their last respects to
the first woman president of the Republic, who in death had become an icon, “ Ina ng Demokrasya”
(Mother of Democracy). She is now remembered as a leader whose commitment to justice,
democracy, and peace had become her legacy.
In national-political and family life, maternal ideology which ascribes to motherhood
women’s highest, and perhaps, most noble aspiration remains pervasive. In the operation of this
ideology, motherhood and childhood have become two poles which are inextricably linked to
each other. Children need nurturance and care from mothers to reach maturation while mothers
need children to realize their socially and culturally constructed life-world. Following this, family
relations are defined along economic and social roles, with gender underlying both.
Mothers play a key role in child-rearing practice in the Philippines as in many other
societies. This is expressed in a saying, “Ang ina ang ilaw ng tahanan” (The mother is the beacon
of the home.) Traditionally, mother and children spend most of their time together at home, while
father earns a living.
The child receives nurturance and care primarily from the mother who also presides over
the introduction of the child into the core values of obedience, filial piety, and duty in the context
of the family. The child’s learning of these values are reinforced and built on with more social,
moral, and civil codes, in school and in the practice of religion. The disciplining of children, on the
other hand, is the domain of the father who is expected to be firm and unwavering, an attribute of
child-rearing practices inscribed in a number of the often quoted work of eighteenth-century poet
Francisco Balagtas which is part of canonical literature being read in public schools today.1
The foregoing describes the traditional place of a child in the family. I shall return to
this in relation to the concept of childhood. Connectedness and interdependence are highly
valued in family relations as inscribed in another popular saying, “Ang sakit ng kalingkingan ay
nararamdaman ng buong katawan” (The whole body feels the pain of the little finger.) It means
that if a member of the family is afflicted, the whole family suffers and the rest of the members,
therefore, are expected to deal with it to restore the family.
The subjects of motherhood, childhood, and family relations described are the focus
of this paper’s discussion of children’s literature and its representation of these subjects in the
context of changes in the family structure and relations caused by labor migration and, recently,
female overseas work. These changes have led to the rise of different forms of family structures
such as single-parent families, mother-headed, father-headed, child-headed, blended families
and many others, and in the process have probably affected the child’s position in and in relation
to the family. Presumably, children’s literature may be creating venues for rethinking present
conceptions of childhood and family relations, and if it does, children’s literature for Filipino

To r r e s -Yu
children may be helping children by providing them with “mirror books” (Gangi and Barowsky)
with which to understand the complexity of their present world. One way of knowing this is to look
at children’s literature and its representation of the subject. An exploration of these representations
in terms of themes and ideological messages found in the literature may suggest to adult readers
whether the socialization of children to traditional concepts and values continue or whether some
kind of interrogation and subversion of old ways of thinking is already taking place. Apart from
its educational use for children, it is hoped that this reading may instruct adults involved in the
production and consumption of children’s literature on the importance of critical engagement with
these texts which, for children’s literature scholars Peter Nodelman and Mavis Reimer, require “a
deeper consciousness of the pleasure texts offer, how they offer it, and why they offer it—in the
service of what values can only benefit both adults and the children in their charge” (23).
This reading of selected texts of contemporary children’s literature combines the
perspectives of the emergent field of Childhood Studies with its recognition of the need to rethink
ways of understanding childhood in light of the reality of different kinds of childhood and in its
rejection of the universalism of the North American and Western European conception, and literary
criticism in its interrogation of ideological messages which these texts present to its implied child
readers. These ideological themes, once revealed through the method employed in the critique of
ideology of texts for children, are further analyzed in the context of the changing world of Filipino
children in relation to their social construction through literature and an understanding of Filipino
childhood deploying the categories of agency, class, and gender.
OUTSIDE THE TEXT: FILIPINO CHILDREN IN SOCIETY
Writing for children usually invokes the principle of reflection, of crafting stories taken
from day to day experiences of real children following the didactive impulse. Realism in this sense
is believed to be an effective way to teach children to get to like reading by allowing them to relate
to characters and events in the stories about them and in the process learn about themselves and
the world they inhabit. Others call these uses of the narrative mode “mirror books.” Having said
this, fantasy and magic are not less valued than realism. They are equally employed in canonical
and modern children’s fiction, but in most instances their themes relate to real concerns of children.
Hence, in this discussion it is necessary to look at Filipino children and what constitutes their social
reality in order to give readers of children’s literature a larger social context for seeing through
narrative discourse and determining its social significance or meaning.
Filipino children below 17 years old constitute nearly 40% of the country’s population. For
this reason the Philippines is considered a young society. In 2002, 33 million children constitute a

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population of about 85 million. Population grows at a rate of 2.11% which is expected to bring the
number to 102.8 million by 2015 with an estimated 45 million children to support with education,
health, and other services that will require huge resource allocation from the government. As a
country with a weak economy also called “developing “as opposed to “developed” economies of
the First World, majority of Filipino children who belong to the poorest of the poor families live
in an environment characterized by abject poverty, neglect, violence both physical and structural,
death, sickness, abuse, economic exploitation, lack of access to education and other basic children’s
rights enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC). The Philippines is also one
of the countries identified by the United Nations as having children in need of special protection
(CNSP) as is common in many other poor countries. To this particular group of belong street
children, child soldiers, child workers, children in conflict with the law, indigenous children, and
children in the flesh trade. The numbers of children who belong to this category are in millions and
continue to grow as population expands while government’s support falls behind the demand for
services and interventions.
A recent study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) and United
Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) titled “The Filipino Child, Global Study on Child Poverty
and Disparities: Philippines” reveal that Filipino children suffer from economic and multiple
dimensions of poverty. According to the study:
Aside from the rising income poverty, it is a disturbing situation when about half
(44%) of all Filipino children are living in poverty. The lack of income can have
more adverse impacts on them because unlike adults, children are still in certain
developmental stages where proper nourishment is necessary and are most vulnerable
to diseases. Moreover, families with inadequate income may be discouraged to send
their children to school. (1)
Translated into numbers, there were 12.8 million children below the age of 15 in 2006 living
in poverty which represented a 4% increase from 2003 or around one million more children. Apart
from income poverty, the study considered other dimensions which include “deprivations in terms
of food, shelter, health, education, water, sanitation facilities, electricity and information.” Needless
to say, this situation of Filipino children calls attention to the need for an “overall development
of children” perspective and immediate action. Notwithstanding the alarming reality of the
situation of Filipino children, the study acknowledges some significant improvements in child
survival indicators such as significant decline in infant mortality under five years of age, decrease
in the proportion of children deprived of electricity over the years, and improved access to radio,

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television, telephone, computer, water and sanitary facilities (“The Filipino Child” 2).
FILIPINO CHILDREN AND OVERSEAS WORK

The situation of Filipino children with OFW parents may be different from children living in
poverty described above since their parents work abroad and away from home to earn income and
provide for their needs. According to a recent report, there are now three to six million children of
OFW parents. In this and in other studies, which will be discussed in succeeding sections, concern
over the social cost of transnational families on child care and development calls for a rethinking of
the policy and practice of overseas work. On the reasons for overseas work such as better income
and increased opportunities for education of children, UNICEF Director Tobin doubts whether
these are in fact the case and cites studies which reveal that the money sent to the Philippines is
barely enough for the families (Rufo).
TRANSNATIONAL CARE GIVING AND FILIPINO CHILDHOOD
Globalization has been transforming family structures and family relations, bringing
fundamental changes to social and cultural worlds of Filipino children. This process invariably
implicates mainstream Filipino children’s literature in ways that re-affirm, as well as challenge,
traditional representations of family and childhood.
The absent-mother seems to be the emerging common form as an increasing number of
women continue to join the international labor market. According to Yinger, recent assessment
shows that men no longer constitute the majority of international migrants. In the Philippines,
70% of Filipino labor migrants are women, and it is estimated that about 10 million children are
growing up without a mother (Carandang and Lee-Chua 109). Migrant women labor came into
demand when the need for household work and care giving in rich countries opened new work
opportunities for women from poor countries. Feminization of migrant labor thus went hand in
hand with the transnationalization of care giving. This trend is most evident in Asia where women
migrant workers come mainly from Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, while the
main destinations are Hong Kong (China), Malaysia, Singapore, and the Middle East (Yinger).
Studies have looked into globalization and the phenomenon of transnational care giving,
and one that examines the experiences of children in transnational families from the lens of gender
was done by Parreñas in 2006. The study reveals that the “gender paradox defines the transnational
family in the Philippines, and that gender norms are being reified and transgressed” (7). Put
plainly, gender role switching is not taking place in Filipino families with migrant parents. The

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study shows that “each group reinforces gender boundaries in the caring work that they do for the
family” (11). Of particular relevance to this discussion is the study’s examination of the discourse of
abandonment among children of migrant mothers. Even if care is provided by substitutes, children
in these families feel abandoned by their mothers. This strong emotion increases as families deviate
from conventional practice, i.e., with father doing care giving role, and mother doing income-
earning role.
An in-depth study of overseas Filipino workers’ families by Carandang et al. in 2008
describes children in families where both parents are labor migrants as “seasonal orphans.”
Drawing from several case studies, it is revealed that although there is a pervasive sense of
powerlessness and hopelessness among fathers and some of the children, resilience is present
especially among children who try to look beyond the present and imagine a happier, complete
family in the future (1-124).
Other studies cited by Parreñas qualify the generally assumed negative effect of migration
on the family as a social institution. She cites Asis who acknowledges the effects migration may
have on the family such as infidelity, strained kin relations, and “wayward” children, but adds that
these are not as extensive as media and other scholars claim. In another study of more than 700
schoolchildren, Batistella and Conaco (1996) confirm that “severe cases of emotional disturbance”
and “disruptive behavior” do not necessarily occur in transnational households but emphasize
that “the single most important finding in the survey is that absence of the mother has the most
disruptive effect on the life of the children” (Parreñas 94).
CHILDHOOD AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION IN LITERATURE
Understanding childhood is currently undergoing rethinking in the emerging field of

Childhood Studies in the last two decades. Social scientists’ discontentment with the way their
discipline dealt with childhood led to critiques on key notions found in conventional approaches
such as “development” in psychology and “socialization” in education and sociology. This new
impetus produced studies in which childhood was examined as social construction and children
were seen as social actors in their own right (Prout 7). Childhood studies scholar Alan Prout, in
his own critique of the “new social studies,” however, is dissatisfied with its framework that rests
on implicit assumptions of oppositional dichotomies of social construction versus biologically-
centered notions of childhood, of culture versus nature. He insists that “social relations are already
heterogeneous, that is, they are made up from a variety of material, discursive, cultural, natural,
technological, human and non-human resources,” and proposes a perspective that childhood as a
social phenomenon be viewed in the same way. Following this theoretical position, Prout sees the

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need for a “broad set of intellectual resources, an interdisciplinary approach and an open-minded
process of enquiry” (2).
This examination of the social construction of Filipino childhood in contemporary children’s
literature draws inspiration from this new perspective. Using categories of class, gender, and
power in cultural studies employed in the current practice of reading cultural texts, this paper
explores representations of childhood and family, brings to the surface ideological assumptions
and ideas on Filipino childhood and family, and critiques such representations in the larger context
of prevailing social conditions. The preceding discussion on Filipino children and society provides
a social context against which this reading is being undertaken. What follows is a discussion of
some theoretical concepts and assumptions related to social constructions in literature and a brief
explanation of key concepts and assumptions involved in an adult reading of children’s text which
this particular reading employs.
The function of children’s literature in education is well established in theory and practice as
a fairly good venue for teaching children skills, moral, religious and social values, and aspirations,
as well as for modeling social roles. This thinking rests on theories of growth taken from
developmental psychology (Piaget, Vigotsky), social learning in education (Bandura), and theories
of social and cultural construction in sociology (James, Prout).
In literary study and criticism, children’s literature is attracting new interest as an
interdisciplinary area for those in childhood studies, literature, education, development and
culture. In mapping out this development, Vanessa Joosen and Katrien Vloeberghs observe that in
Western discourse the tradition of criticism of ideology of the 1960s prevails, as with the tension
between pedagogy and aesthetics which continue to influence our understanding of children’s
literature. Relevant to this discussion is their observation that the cultural studies framework,
with its emphasis on the critique of power and the criticism of ideology, infused criticism and the
production of children’s books with new insights and energy and brought back discussions of the
political dimension. Cultural studies gave way to a more serious consideration of marginalized
forms of cultural expression such as children’s literature. These theoretical insights on children’s
literature and its relation to childhood construction inform this project.
Literature’s stable position in the social construction of childhood from the perspective
of these literary and critical approaches is pretty much established which remains central to the
theoretical discussion defining children’s literature, then and now. Scholars continue to deal with
a fundamental question regarding the function of literature written for children in an effort to
differentiate it from other kinds of literature. Whether it serves a socializing or subversive function
is a question that has been pertinent to the field for as long as there has been children’s literature
(Flynn 311-12). It is widely accepted that literature written for children teach children to learn about

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and embrace society’s many assumptions and values that the dominant authority favors at any
given socio-historical milieu. This didactive impulse that influences the production of this kind
of literature remains strong. As a matter of fact, observers like Hoffman insist that “even the most
seemingly subversive children’s books about School Picture Day reaffirm social and educational
authority … and potentially all of children’s literature” (Flynn 311). Conscious of this function
of literature for children, literary critics engaged in critical practice took interest in exposing
ideological biases and values which prove that children’s literature is not innocent on the issues of
class, race, power, gender, ethnicity, and the like. And by doing so, they are led to conclude that
a new radical children’s literature is possible as a countercultural practice. In his critical survey
of the development of ideas on the balance of power in children’s literature, for instance, Charles
Sarland recalls the critique of mainstream children’s books as a result of the contention in Britain
and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth century that these books represent certain groups in
a certain way that privileges being essentially white, male, and middle class. Such representations,
therefore, are class biased, racist, sexist, and promote discrimination and violence (Hunt 31). Joosen
and Vloeberghs best capture the direction and underlying assumptions of this critical practice in
these words:
The enlightened concept of childhood helps to explain the dominance of criticism of

ideology in the study of children’s literature: the belief that literature exerts a direct
influence on the child governs and fuels the need to question the norms and ideologies
that this literature conveys. More affirmatively, the enlightened view of children’s
literature values its potential to educate, to provide Bildung and guidance to the
young. It thus invests literature with a transformative force to improve society and
raise humankind to a supposedly more advanced level. (xi)
Such thinking allows for an adult reader of children’s literature, say a critic, to interpellate
texts, surface assumptions, and ideological ideas, and construct an understanding of childhood and
society. This discussion of Filipino texts that follows takes this perspective on children’s literature
and grounds its reading using John Stephens’s analyses of ideologies in children’s fiction and, in
particular, his categories of explicit and implicit ideology. Stephens offers a methodology which
synthesizes “the elements of narrative theory, critical linguistics, and a concern with ideology and
subjectivity” (4). He argues that:

within a literary text, relations of power and domination exists in two ways,
conceptually and narratively. Conceptually, there is the dilemma for both writers

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and readers that on the one hand ideological practices may be more or less directly
advocated while on the other hand ideological assumptions (not necessarily the
same ones) will always pervade discourse because they are always implicit within
discourse itself. Narratively, these relations exist separately on the planes of “story”
(what is represented) and discourse (the process of representing): that is, characters
within the text are represented as affected by the operations of power, and the various
mediations between writers and readers are also a form of power relations. A fictional
narrative’s “meaning,” in its broadest sense, will incorporate all four possibilities, and
this principle will apply to any fiction. (44)
EMERGENT CHILDHOOD: RESILIENCE, AGENCY AND NEW GENDER NORMS
Philippine stories on children belonging to families with migrant mothers (transnational

families) show the child-protagonists capable of acting on their own. Whether narrating the travails
of a much younger child who imagines she has special powers (Rivera, Ang Lihim ni Lea) or a much
older child (Pacis, OCW, A Young Boy’s Search for His Mother) who leaves home to search for his
mother and succeeds in bringing her home, albeit temporarily, these stories portray characters who
have agency and in this sense, these texts advocate a different kind of childhood from the widely
constructed one in mass-market picture books which foreground innocence and passivity.
AGENCY, CHANGING GENDER NORMS AND ASPIRATIONS

A number of stories illustrate children acting on their own in different circumstances.
Agency is exemplified in different situations. InVibiesca’s “Tahooey,” a mimicking of the sound of
“taho” or bean curd that vendors shout when peddling this sweetish snack, a son and a younger
daughter take over selling taho when their father gets sick. In Vibiesca’s “Ang Kumot ni Dora”
(Dora’s Blanket), a young girl from a poor family understands what her parents say about being
content with what they have while resources are limited and shares her blanket with them in
the end. In Molina’s Ang Silya ni Titoy (Titoy’s Magic Chair), a boy born without legs is able to
explore the world around him on a magical chair. In another story, Coroza’s Imbisibol Man ang
Tatay (Invisible Though My Father), a boy who rarely sees his father and suffers doubts and peer
judgment believes in the power of a charm that comes from a banana blossom to make him invisible
whenever he needs to be; he discovers that he was born out of wedlock but learns to appreciate
his mother’s and grandmother’s love for him, and resolves to become a good father someday.
In Patindol’s Papa’s House, Mama’s House, the main characters – children in middle class families

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whose parents have separated – are able to comprehend the reasonableness of living apart and the
different ways their parents nurture them. And lastly, in Floresta’s War Makes Me Sad, a girl who
lives in war-torn Mindanao (southern part of the Philippines with a long history of armed conflicts)
expresses insecurity, anxiety, and fear, unable to understand why there is war, and prays for it to
end.
These characterizations are further helped by the use of the first person child narrator,
which projects the child’s voice and wisdom in no unclear terms. These narrative voices are
effective because in the act of reading, an atmosphere of children speaking to each other
(presumably the implied child reader) is easily established, avoiding the didacticism characteristic
of traditional storytelling. Authorial power is diminished and rapport is created between text and
reader. Uncanny links to harsh realities of childhood in the Philippines serve to inform children
of the real world they are in, but at the same time empower them through the use of magic and
fantasy.
It is interesting to note that in contemporary representations of Filipino childhood, none of
the stories show child characters who aspire to seek work overseas. This is in great contrast to the
fact that transnational families have become dominant in the Philippines.2
Filipino children’s literature socializes children to conform to dominant gender roles but
at the same time manifests a counter-cultural voice. Many stories on motherhood teach children
the codes of domesticity by glorifying the work of mothers at home, including domestic work of
migrant mothers. Mothers are almost always characterized as compassionate, self-sacrificing, and
sensitive to children’s needs.
Hence it is interesting that, in one of the stories, a mother has decided to take on the
role of breadwinner after her husband passed away. In struggling to be able to send the child
to school, the mother decides to drive the pedicab her husband had used to earn income to earn
for her child’s schooling. She thus has to wear clothes like that of a male driver which her child
resents, embarrassed of what has become her mother’s “ugly” look. The child eventually discovers
that other mothers in the neighborhood and even her teacher liken her mother to a heroine and
describes her as “may trabahong lalaki at may pusong babae” [with a man’s job and a heart of
a woman] (Chong 22). From a feminist perspective, the story socializes children to the idea that
women are strong, capable, and responsible. It puts in question the common concept of feminine
beauty when the child finally understands that her mother, who does not wear make-up and whose
hands are not soft, possesses inner beauty, a concept taught to her by her teacher. In another sense,
this story challenges gender boundaries as critiqued by scholars of transnational families.
Other new images of women presented to children include single professional mothers,
mothers in separated households, and women bonding with women. On the other end of the

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spectrum, unconventional images of fathers who are equally nurturing as mothers are deployed as
well. There is the shoemaker who makes her daughter, born without legs, a dozen pairs of shoes as
an expression of his love (Gatmaitan); a grandfather and a grandson’s special bonding made strong
with grandpa’s stories and the child’s genuine love (Gatmaitan); and a man who finds inner peace
when he discovers that his life can be made more meaningful when shared with others, particularly
children living in the streets (Villanueva). These images provide children with new windows with
which to understand changing gender roles already evident in their lived experience.
WHEN MOTHER LEAVES HOME FOR WORK OVERSEAS

Two collections and a novel for children deal with the subject of a mother who leaves home
to work abroad as a domestic helper and/or caregiver and entrusts the care of her children to the
father and/or grandparents. The storybook Uuwi na ang Nanay Kong si Darna (My Mother Darna is
Coming Home), written by Edgar Samar and illustrated by Russel Molina, projects a happy child
in the care of his father who meets his mother for the first time when she arrives home after a long
time. The picture book Ang Lihim ni Lea (The Secret of Lea), written by Augie Rivera and illustrated
by Ghani Madueño, is a story of a girl who survives sexual abuse by her own father. A novel in
English by Carla Pacis, O.C.W. A Young Boy’s Search for His Mother, tells the story of a young boy,
Tonyo, eldest of three children, who embarks on a journey to find his mother, a domestic helper in
Hong Kong, and succeeds in his goal of bringing his mother home.
AFFIRMING FEMALE OVERSEAS WORK IN UUWI NA ANG NANAY KONG SI DARNA

Story books or picture books, according to Stephens, have “a tendency to reflect dominant
social practices, advocate values widely regarded as socially desirable … but conflicting practices
may also be expressed” (199). The storybook Uuwi na ang Nanay kong si Darna is informed by
the first tendency; that is, it reflects the widespread practice of overseas work for Filipinos and
advocates its acceptance by addressing the absence of a parent (a mother in this case) using parental
manipulation (father’s view poised to the child). The argument in the story appears to be that if
the child in this absent-mother family is happy with this arrangement, and then society should not
worry. In Stephens’ classification, this represents the explicit ideology of the story.
The story uses the first-person voice of the child narrator, from which vantage point he
narrates the series of actions that make up the story of his mother’s homecoming and projects the
child-protagonist’s subject position. The dual discourse of text and visual image set the dilemma
of Popoy in the beginning of the story: the visual image of a thought bubble “Uuwi na!” (“She’s

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coming home!”) is in big colorful letters set off from a background of small black and white letters,
possibly a letter, and the text that describes this image as “balita ng tatay” (report of father) and
describes the father’s excitement which the child knows from what he sees, “nasisilip ko na halos
ang ngala-ngala niya sa pagtawa” (I can almost see his palate as he laughs). The child, however,
says he cannot tell whether he, too, is happy, because he has not really seen his mother (“hindi
pa nakikita nang totohanan si Nanay”). The narrator then mentions details explaining why he
feels ambivalent: he sees her only in photos, talked to her only once over the telephone, was very
young when he last saw his mother during the family’s send off in the airport. This ambivalent
feeling is compounded by the child’s curiosity and excitement to know one thing: is Darna really
his mother? This is what his father tells him when he describes his mother’s work in Hong Kong
in reply to his question why his mother left, “Bakit po umalis si Nanay?” (Why did mother leave?)
Listening to his father narrate how his mother fights millions of bacteria as she uses her wonder
walis or magic broom, her power conveyed to the child reader by the visual image of a woman on
top of a giant broom and giving her command “attack” while bacteria hover in fear, and in other
instances that depict the mother in a fighting mood, the child infers that his mother is like Darna, a
fictional character in Philippine print and popular media (film, television) who possesses magical
powers. Parental authority is exercised by the father when he corrects the child’s idea and insists
that mother is in fact Darna herself. The child, however, seemingly not fully convinced, asks his
father why mother would not just fly to arrive early, to which father replies she will indeed fly but,
she needs to fly across a wide ocean. This conversation between father and child ends with the text
and visual images revealing the subject position of the child—caught between belief and doubt,
unsettled by fear that his mother will no longer be able to recognize him, but sure, however, about
his feeling proud of her (“Aba, ipagmamalaki ko siya sa mga magiging kaklase ko sa pasukan. Si
Darna yata ang Nanay ko.”/ I will proudly introduce her to my would-be classmates. After all, my
mother is none other than Darna.) The story ends confirming the father’s version of the mother’s
identity with the image of the child holding a card that says “I love (heart) DarnaNanay ” when
the child gets to meet his mother and the image (in full spread) of the child flying with Darna.
Affirming the social practice of overseas work for Filipinos, and the idea that this brings wealth
both at the level of the family and national economy, the story depicts the widespread practice
of visiting OFWs who bring gifts as a way of sharing “wealth,” as the mother gives relatives
“pasalubong” (gift by one who returns from abroad or some distant place not necessarily another
country) such as electric appliances. The child receives crayons and books, signifying the oft
repeated reason why parents seek overseas work, which is to send their children to school. The
approving stamp on the ideological position of this text relative to the culturally constructed image
of OFWs as modern day heroes is further expressed in the 2002 Salanga Writer’s Prize, Grand Prize

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that this book received both for story and illustration. That the story book belongs to the mass
market also explains its wholesale endorsement of female overseas work.
WHEN ABSENT-MOTHER FAMILIES ENDANGER THE CHILD AND ANG LIHIM NI LEA

This story book merges two thematic ideas in a rather complex plot not usually witnessed
in this genre: there is hope for a child who may suffer sexual abuse and the child is safe and happy
living with his/her mother. There are two different homes which frame the story of a girl-child
named Lea: one in the Philippines in which most of the story takes place, and the other, a new home
away from the old where the child protagonist lives with her OFW mother, a nurse who works
in London. Lea’s story narrates how she is left to the care of her father while her mother works
abroad, becomes a victim of sexual abuse by her own father, survives this traumatic experience,
and lives with her mother in their new home in a foreign country where her mother works. The
character in this story represents a child who experiences two kinds of social phenomena: an
absent-mother family and child abuse. This text acquires social significance in terms of the subjects
it depicts and in its use of several narratological elements that explicitly and implicitly project
rejection of child abuse and separation of mother and child.
The story very clearly and explicitly advocates education in order to prevent the sexual
abuse of children by providing a context by which both child and adult readers become aware
of this problem. Published by Soroptimist International of HOPE (Helping Through Outreach
Programs and Expertise) in Baguio, the proceeds from the sale of the book, according to the group,
will help fund the establishment of a shelter for young women and children who are victims of
abuse.
The story uses a third-person narrative voice which describes the girl’s external situation,
feelings and thoughts. Its use is appropriate if the observation of therapists and psychologists that
children who experience trauma may be easily helped in the context of a story, not really their
own, is to be considered. One easily recognizes the connection between the word “lihim” (secret)
and the visual image of a closed and open door. Throughout the book, this image changes in color,
conveying the changing atmosphere and emotions of the main character. The identical doors of
many rooms in the condominium which became her new home are always closed whenever she
walks its corridors, conveying a feeling of coldness. This new home, for Lea, seems to isolate her
from the outside world which she seeks whenever she is at home or in their unit with her father.
This changes when she discovers one day that she has the power to pass through those doors
without opening them. The changes in her facial expression (image of her face drawn on the
inside of different doors) may be read as her varied responses as she sees different people doing

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different things. These range from surprise in the case of the old woman snoring while scratching
her dog’s tummy, joy as she listens to a girl practice her violin, and laughter and fun at the sight of
a househelp watching TV startled by the ringing phone. This child’s magical experience suddenly
changes when she confronts a closed door, inside their own bedroom, her face showing fear while
looking at her father seated at the edge of the bed holding a cell phone. The room is dark purple,
which is the same color of the room that the father enters while Lea is shown afraid and helpless
in one corner of a sofa before a television. This purple door, later on, changes to white, conveying
light, as the image of her handcuffed father is being taken out.
Again, visual images effect, together with the discoursal text, the changes in the quality
of the girl’s relationship with her parents. The first illustration shows Leah cuddling her stuffed
toy with her eyes wide open, facing the reader while the father, with his back turned, looks at the
condominium. This positioning which is repeated in other frames clearly suggests distance between
daughter and father. Mother and daughter, on the other hand, hug each other when the mother
arrives, are shown again going out of a lightly colored open door, happy and holding each other,
after the girl has gone through her therapy sessions and is deemed healed. In the last illustration
which ends the story, mother and daughter are shown going out of a door of a brick-walled house
and a neighborhood that suggest a foreign setting, perhaps some place in London.
The ideological position of this text is implied in the way the problem of the child is
resolved. Lea stays with her mother in a happy accommodation of continuing work overseas which
is possible because the mother in this case is a professional who, we may surmise, can afford to
take her eight-year-old child. In a way, this resolution seems to challenge the dominant practice
of handing children (of mothers working abroad) over to the care of other members of the family
when the father is unavailable. However, it obviously affirms the mother’s overseas work by
“resolving” the issue of separation. This story educates readers, both child and adult, that sexual
abuse (“things happen”) may happen even when mothers are present, an idea which the teacher in
the story shares with the mother by way of correcting the misconception. Moreover, this story book
seems ambiguous in its portrayal of the child’s character. Throughout the events in the story, the
protagonist’s identity evolves from an innocent child who needs protection and help from caring
adults and social institutions (teacher, psychologist, social worker, and child protection unit) to a
victim, and finally a survivor. Her response to sexual abuse of imagining she has magical power
simply suggests escape, not resistance. The writer of the story could have explored this element to
show some agency on the part of the child-victim, thus preparing readers in conceptually accepting
her ability to survive and be healed later on.

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WHEN A CHILD TAKES CHARGE
Nodelman and Reimer observe that “stories in which escape from home allows the
preservation of some innocence tend to be for adolescents. The discovery of a secure home in which
one is free to be childlike is often the culmination of novels for young people … in which characters
journey from a broken or disrupted home to a new home” (198). The novel O.C.W. A Young Boy’s
Search for His Mother3 written by Carla M. Pacis with illustrations by Yasmin B. Ong, straddles this
pattern and the typical home/away/home motif in children’s stories because the home at the end
of the novel does not represent the “new home” in the story but rather an ambiguously restored
home. This point will be argued later in the discussion.
The pattern follows the story of a family of three children with the main character Tonyo,
already in high school, a father who drives a pedicab for a living, and a mother who works as a
maid in Hong Kong. They live in a village called Lauan, far from the city of Manila, and of course,
too far from Hong Kong. The novel opens with the third person narrator detailing how the mother
was recruited as a maid in Hong Kong and why she is excited though sad at times at the thought
of leaving. The mother, in talking to her eldest Tonyo, expresses the usual reason shared by
Filipinos who seek work overseas which is to be able to send all children to school and even to
college, buy father a jeep, or maybe buy a piece of land to grow rice. Things happen within three
months since the mother left, inciting Tonyo to distance himself from home. The father is unable
to cope with his wife’s absence, spends most of his time in the cockpit, comes home very late and
drunk, and eventually starts beating Tonyo in feats of anger over his wife’s absence. Tonyo stops
going to school because he starts taking over most of his mother’s chores apart from working in
the rice fields. Tonyo leaves home to prevent his relationship with his father from worsening and
to go to his mother while he, too, works, or asks his mother to come home. The events that follow
Tonyo’s departure depict his growing maturity, although it should be noted that before he leaves
home, Tonyo already displays some maturity in the way he responds to his situation: not to escape
but to deal with the problem. This part of the story not only depicts the child in the world outside
the home, experiencing new life in the city so different from the familiar village setting, but also
exposes the social problems children in the city without homes suffer and embrace as a way of life
in order to survive, which the main character himself goes through. Tonyo experiences hunger,
sleeping next to street children who sniffed glue, hooking up with street gangs, eating leftovers;
he gets involved in dangerous errands like snatching bags and selling drugs, but also lands a job
in a bakery through the help of a priest after escaping from the street gangs and seeking refuge in
a church. All these experiences teaches Tonyo to become street smart and, as a consequence, he
loses his innocence. But he does not lose sight of his goal, although he would feel confused for a

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while, not knowing what to do, and would even entertain the idea of going back home. Brave and
resolute, he is able to refocus on his purpose for leaving home, reaches the shores of Hong Kong as
a stowaway, finds his mother with the help of some Filipinos and eventually goes home with his
mother.
What is the social significance of the story? What concept of childhood does it inscribe?
What does the text advocate on the question of absent-mother families brought about by the
transnationalization of care giving? The answers to these questions are interrelated and constitute
the ideological position of the text.
Tonyo, the main character, and other child characters in the story represent concepts of
childhood that the novel advocates and in some way resists. The family’s low economic status,
as well as the location of his home, a far flung agricultural village with limited opportunities for
growth, provides the argument for several attributes of the child-character. Education is a normal
aspiration of poor families in the hope that formal schooling will enable social mobility. In the
case of Tonyo who is already in high school, he must be able to go to college while his two siblings
will have to be schooled when they reach the proper age. Tonyo has to help raise income from
their small makeshift piggery and has to divide his time between this and his studies. When his
mother leaves for work overseas, shouldering her home chores pressures him to drop from school,
a decision which reflects a child’s orientation toward the family, rather than himself. He represents
another common aspiration of adults for children, which is to become responsible members of the
family. His going away to bring back his mother is an act of responsibility in the sense that he is
taking charge, in great contrast to the father who shows weakness and succumbs to distractions.
In every sense, Tonyo is an example of a child who knows his priorities, makes decisions, and acts
on his own. This concept of childhood is evident in this characterization of Tonyo and in the choice
of events that would end the narrative. Tonyo is responsible for the restoration of the family – the
return of the mother and, hopefully, the return to family life and all its arrangements before it was
disturbed by the temporary absence of the mother. As for himself, he knows he is going back to
school (“I have to finish school first”) (171). He changes his attitude toward his father in the end;
pity replaces his deep-seated anger and this suggests that respect and love for his father is likewise
restored.
It is important to note, however, that apart from employing focalization in creating the
character of Tonyo, there are some elements in the narrative, such as statements made, and other
use of details, which point to a counterdiscoursal position on childhood and family. For instance,
the narrator comments in connection with the scene on leave-taking:
The children crowded around Nanay. They would all miss her, especially Ryan who

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was only five and Neneng who was three. They were still too young to be without a
mother. But Nanay tried not to be sad and promised she would send them toys and
clothes as soon as she could. (13, underscoring in original)
The portrayal of street children, child labor, children engaged in criminal activities, and
children without home and family call attention to social problems that children in poor families
experience. Such representations of childhood have the effect of questioning many of society’s
values and priorities. With their presence, the text invites readers (adult and young adult) to reflect
on these realities in relation to the culturally accepted notion of Filipino childhood which regards
children as “gift of God,” “hope of the future,” and “blessing.” The author’s note is also relevant to
the discussion of the novel’s position regarding overseas work and its negative effect on children.
She explicitly expresses her rejection of overseas work for women especially mothers and maintains
that:

Because of this diaspora, many families have come undone, those suffering most
being the children. This is a sad reality of the OCW. Hopefully, with the help of the
government, our OCW’s can come home to stay, to enjoy their families and their hard-
earned prosperity. (Pacis 177)
Filipino sociologists have pointed to Filipinos’ special concern for children and specific
sensitivity to the future of a child (Dalisay). One may ask in consideration of prevailing social
conditions of Filipino children discussed in the earlier section of this paper whether this “special
concern” really and substantially translates to social practice and policy. As long as these harsh
realities put the majority of Filipino children to risk, such “special concern” remains an ideological
mask that literature for children should continue to interrogate and reject.
Filipino children are living in an increasingly complex world brought about by changes
in the socio-cultural and economic conditions at the national and global levels. Their social
construction through literature is likewise undergoing changes that reflect the complexity of this
world, and puts into question assumptions of childhood, traditional notions of care and child-
rearing practices, and gender construction. In this way, contemporary children’s literature serves
as a venue for re-educating Filipino children to better prepare them to discern and deal with future
challenges – a function that, however, has yet to be fully realized.

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NOTES
1
These are: “Ang laki sa layaw karaniwa’y hubad/sa bait at muni’t sa hatol ay salat (202); “di dapat
palakhin ang bata sa saya, /at sa katuwa’y kapag namihasa, /kung lumaki’y walang hihinting ginhawa”
(197); “sa taguring bunso’t likong pagmamahal/ang isinasama ng bata’y nunukal/ang iba’y marahil sa
kapabayaan /ng dapat magturong tamad na magulang” (203). (Balagtas Florante at Laura 1838)
2
It is relatively easy to understand that in a country where transnational families have become dominant
that children would “naturaly” aspire to seek jobs overseas just like their parents did. This is evident, for
instance, in Malano’s “Coping with Life with OFW Parents.”
3
There is a discrepancy in the title of this work. In the cover it reads O.C.W. A Young Boy’s Search for His
Mother, while in the title page it reads O.C.W. A Young Man’s Search for His Mother. Underscoring mine.
There is no explanation offered in the book for this.

To r r e s -Yu
WORKS CITED
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Cacho, 1996.
Canon, Kristine. Ang Tahimik na Mundo ni Bunso [The Silent World of Youngest Brood]. Illustration by Frances
Alcaraz. Quezon City: LG&M, 2008 .
Chong, Grace. Bakit Hindi Naka-lipstik si Nanay? [Why Mother Doesn’t Wear Lipstick?]. Illustration by Kora
Dandan- Albano. Mandaluyong City: 2006.
Coroza, Michael. Imbisibol Man Ang Tatay [Invisible Though My Father]. Illustration by Kora Dandan-Albano.
Manila: Lampara, 2009.
Evasco, Eugene. Ang Mahiwagang Kamiseta [The Magic T-shirt]. Illustration by Ghani Madeno. Quezon City:
LG&M, 2009.
Cruz, Genaro. Si Nanay Mining at ang Tatlong Kuting [Mother Mining and Her Three Kittens]. Illustration by
Jason Moss. Quezon City: LG&M, 2005.
— . Ang Aking Pamilya [My Family]. Illustration by Laura Abueg Garcellano. Quezon City: LG&M, 2006.
Ferreol, Yvette. Haluhalo Espesyal [Haluhalo Special]. Illustration by Jill A. Posadas. Quezon City: Adarna, 2006.
Floresta, Mary Ordinario. War Makes Me Sad. Rev. ed. Illustration by Biboy Blu. Kidapawan City: ABC
Educational Development Center, 2003.
Gatmaitan, Luis. Sandosenang Sapatos. Illustration by Beth Parrocha-Doctolero. Mandaluyong City: OMF
Literature, 2002.
—. May Mga Lihim Kami ni Ingkong [Grandpa and I Have Secrets]. Illustrated by Beth Parrocha-
Doctolero. Mandaluyong City: OMF Literature, 2002.
Matias Jr., Segundo. Inay, Inaaay Ko! [Mommy, Mommyyy!]. Illustration by Ray Ann Bernadrdo, Quezon City:
Lampara, 2009.
—.Ang Usok at si Daddy [The Smoke and Daddy]. Illustration by Ghani Madueno. Quezon City: Lampara, 2009.
—. May Genie ba sa Bote ng Daddy ni Rocky? [Rocky’s Daddy Has a Genie in His Bottle?]. Illustration by Ghani
Madueno, Quezon City: Lampara, 2009.
Molina, Russel. Sandosenang Kuya [A Dozen Brothers]. Illustration by Hubert Fucio. Quezon City: Adarna, 2003.
—. Ang Madyik Silya ni Titoy [Tito’y Magical Chair]. Illustration by Marcus Nada. Quezon City; Adarna, 2002.
Pacis, Carla. O.C.W. A Young Boy’s Search for His Mother. Mandaluyong City: Cacho, 1999.
Patindol, Jean Lee. Papa’s House, Mama’s House. Illustration by Mark Salvatus III. Quezon City: Adarna , 2004.
Remigio, Ompong. Papel de Liha. Illustration by Beth Parrocha-Doctolero. Quezon City: Adarna, 1999.
Rivera, Augie. Ang Lihim ni Lea. Illustration by Ghani Madueno. Quezon City: Soroptimist International of
Hope Baguio, 2007.

To r r e s -Yu
Sagisag, Lara. There’s a Duwende in My Brother’s Soup. Illustration by Marcus Nada. Quezon City: Lampara,
2001.
Samar, Edgar. Uuwi na ang Nanay kong si Darna. Illustration by Russel Molina. Quezon City: Adarna, 2002.
Tobias-Papa, May. Araw sa Palengke [A Day in the Market]. Illustration by Isabel Roxas. Quezon City: Adarna,
2008.
Vibiesca, Renato. 10 Kuwento ni Kuya Nats [Ten Stories of Brother Nats]. Mandaluyong City: Morlanda, 2008.
Villanueva, Rene. Ang Makapangyarihang Kyutiks ni Mama [The Magic Nailpolish of Mama]. Mandaluyong City:
Cacho, 2005.
—. “Nemo ang Batang Papel.” Ang Gintong Habihan: Mga Kuwentong Premyado ng Palanca [The Golden Loom:
Winning Stories in Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature]. Manila: Tahanan, 1998.
Scholarly sources
Bandura, Albert. Social Learning Theory. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1977.
Carandang, Ma. Lourdes, and Quenna Lee-Chua. The Filipino Family Surviving the World: The Psychology of
Pinoy Families. Pasig City: Anvil, 2008.
Dalisay, Grace A. The Filipino Child in Contemporary Society. Proceedings of the First National Seminar on
Child Psychology. 18 Sept. 1982. Asian Institute of Tourism, Quezon City.
“The Filipino Child, Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities: Philippines.” Unicef Policy Brief No.3. 28
Jan. 2011 <http://www.unicef.org/philippines/brief03_fnl.pdf>.
Fleer. M., M. Hedegaard, and J. Tudge, eds. “Childhood Studies and the Impact of Globalization: Policies and
Practices at Global and Local Levels.” 2009 World Yearbook of Education. NewYork: Routledge, 2009.
Gangi, Jane, and Ellis Barowsky. “Listening to Chidren’s Voices.” Childhood Education 85.6 (2009).
Hunt, Peter, ed. Understanding Children’s Literature. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
— . “Children’s Literature and Childhood.” An Introduction to Childhood Studies. Ed. M.J. Kehily. New York:
Open UP, 2004.
James, Allison, and Alan Prout, eds. Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the
Sociological Study of Childhood. London: Falmer, 1997.
Joosen, Vanesa, and Katrien Vloeberghs. Changing Concepts of Childhood and Children’s Literature. New Castle,
UK: Cambridge Scholar, 2006.
Kehily, Mary Jane, ed. Childhood Studies: An Introduction. New York: Open UP, 2004.
Malano, Melanie. “Coping with Life with OFW Parents.” ABS-CBNews.Com 27 July 2009. Migrant Stories,
Migrant Voices. Philippines: Philippine Migrant Rights Watch (with support from Cortaid, an
international development organization based in Netherlands): 2009.
Medina, Belen. The Filipino Family. 2nd ed. Quezon City: U of the Philippines P, 2001.

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Nodelman, Peter, and Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Allyn ans Bacon,
2003.
Parreñas, Rachel Salazar. Children of Global Migration,Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford UP, 2005; Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila UP, 2006.
—. Servants of Globalization. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2001; Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila UP, 2003.
Piaget, J. The Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977.
Prout, Alan. The Future of Childhood. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2005.
Rufo, Aries. “Six Million Filipino Children Left Behind by OFW Parents.” ABS-CBN News.Com. 25 Sept. 2008.
Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. London, New York: Longman, 1992.
Vigotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. 1934. Rev. ed. Ed. Alex Cozulin. USA: Masachusetts Institute of
Technology, 1986.
Wichterich, Christina. The Globalized Woman: Report From a Future of Inequality. Trans. Patrick Camiller.
London and New York: Zed, 2000.
Yinger, Nancy. “The Feminization of Migration: Limits of the Data.” 2007. 2 Feb. 2009. Population Reference
Bureau <http://prb.org/Articles/2007/Feminization/Migration>.
Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 1983.


Kritika
Ku ltu r a
homo tropicus: a yearning
J. Pilapil Jacobo
Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines
[email protected]
Abstract
Variations on the theme of the tropical diptych suggest a temporality whose percussion presents a counterpoint
to the habit of symphonic time, that is, temperate time, one premised on a quadruple measure of exuberance
(summer), descent (autumn), cessation (winter), and nascence (spring). What I am trying to introduce here is a sense
of a choreography that may be akin to a primal fort-da —a kinesis that elicits at the same time that it donates an
attunement to the earth that is more displaced than located. Hence I begin the utterance, even an ululation, of a
desire to seek out what remains from this movement—what could be that creature of stasis that may as well be a
worldling, an indigene, a subject whose promise is a species whom we name homo tropicus.
Keywords
anachronistic space, autochthone, homotropy, Manila, time of the Other, tropology
About the author

J. Pilapil Jacobo is a candidate for the PhD in Comparative Literature at the State University of New York (SUNY)
at Stony Brook, where he enjoyed a fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation. He teachers literature and literary
theory and criticism in English and Filipino at the Ateneo de Manila University, where he graduated with an AB-MA in
Filipino Literature. His critical essays have been published in Bulawan, Ideya, Loyola Schools Review, and Unitas, while
his poetry in Filipino is anthologized in Ladlad 3 and Likhaan. He is President of the Film Desk of the Young Critics
Circle of the Philippines.
As long as the waiting can only be directed toward some other and toward some
arrivant; one can and must wait for something else, hence expect some other—as when
one is said to expect that something will happen or that some other will arrive.1
- Jacques Derrida
In my tropics, I had been taught to yearn for tagsaldang, the “time of the sun.” One could
not help desiring this time, especially if the “time of the rains,” tag-uran, had seemed to extend its
welcome.

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H o m o Tr o p i c u s
Tagsaldang, tag-uran:
Luminance, and of things lutescent in their exposure: a langka halved at the ripest spot, the
now-swarthy hand that picks up the sappy flesh, and the afternoon that allows the delectated to
look out and catch the gleam of another fruit—perhaps the mango drooping from a branch, perhaps
the banana already fallen from its stalk, perhaps the passion fruit demure among the scorched
fronds.
Precipitation, and those worn and carried to be safe from the torrents. Straw hats and rubber
boots, plastic raincoats and silk umbrellas. And thoughts spun with hope (“He shall be home
tonight, the carabao is sturdy enough for him to ride against the flood”) and unraveled in defiance
(“I don’t care if the crops drown, my wife will labor for our firstborn until midnight”).
The tropical year, as far as the Philippine rendition is concerned, is one that is measured
in double time. The matheme can only be 2. The tempo of the folk rests on this rhythm. In the
enactment of this premise, when double time is rehearsed and repeated in daily life, that is where
the desire is syncopated.
Yearning for another time can happen in tagsaldang, especially when one, scantily clad
and yet still perspiring, awakes at high noon and remembers that it is also tag-init, “hot time.” If
the plantation is found dire because of the drought, the morning can’t get any worse. While one
may yearn for rain, and even perform a rite to summon the waters above to descend and salve the
parched earth, another simply skips the idea of the wet months to dream of taglipot, that “cool time”
from December onwards. Until the body can no longer take the breeze, and it starts to yearn for the
respite of March to come, in order to have a reprieve from those diseases brought by the cooling.
Tagsaldang, tag-uran. Tag-init, taglipot. Between the sun and the rain, the hot and the cold. Such is
the way we kept track of the passing of “time,” or, panahon. Or, such is my remembrance of those
times.
II
Variations on the theme of the tropical diptych suggest a temporality whose percussion
presents a counterpoint to the habit of symphonic time, that is, temperate time, one premised on a
quadruple measure of exuberance (summer), descent (autumn), cessation (winter), and nascence
(spring). What I am trying to introduce here is a sense of a choreography that may be akin to a
primal fort-da2—a kinesis that elicits at the same time that it donates an attunement to the earth that
is more displaced than located. Hence I begin the utterance, even an ululation, of a desire to seek
out what remains from this movement—what could be that creature of stasis that may as well be a
worldling, an indigene, a subject whose promise is a species whom we name homo tropicus:

Jacobo
III
To comprehend homo tropicus as an epiphany in time, one needs to keep in mind that
her figuration has been fraught with ethical contention. Taking to task anthropological discourse,
Johannes Fabian has argued that while ethnography writes the autochthone as if she had revealed
herself in the present of the interlocutor’s document, that writing depends on a ruse of temporal co-
presence. The reportorial verb may act as if the anthropologist is keeping up with the native, but the
tense does not conceal
the all-pervading denial of coevalness which ultimately is expressive of a cosmological

myth of frightening magnitude and persistency. It takes imagination and courage to
picture what would happen to the West (and to anthropology) if its temporal fortress
were suddenly invaded by the Time of the Other. (35)
The ethnographer’s retrogressive maneuver is more a privilege of his modernity than a respect
to the purported nobility of his object, the savage. Whatever prose may have been produced to
describe the exception of the Other, the turn of phrase can only emphasize the difference—the time
difference—between the ethnographer and she who signifies the ethnic essence.
Anne McClintock takes the critique of this “denial of coevalness” to the literary, where
the discovery of the difference may subtly execute the fictions of exoticism while insisting on its
axiomatically factitious coordinates:
The colonial journey into the virgin interior reveals a contradiction, for the journey
is figured as proceeding forward in geographical space but backward in historical
time, to what is figured as a prehistoric zone of racial and sexual difference … Since
indigenous peoples are supposed to be spatially there—for the lands are “empty”—
they are symbolically displaced onto what I call anachronistic space. (30)
Like the anthropologist, the narrator enters the realm of the autochthone only to describe an
awakening to his departure from modernity, which is nevertheless preserved in the inhabitation
of anachrony: the world seems uncanny because the figures do not cohere temporally. The space is
anachronistic insofar as it does not suit the habiliments of the one arriving. This makes him resort to
witness the unknown with temporal omnipotence. Again, McClintock: “By panoptical time, I mean
the image of global history consumed—at a glance—in a single spectacle from a point of privileged
invisibility” (37).

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The character may express discomfort with the transport to a prehistory, but that time-lag
enables him to realize that his modern placement severs him from the habits of the prehistoric. It is
the Other who does not cohere with his time.
I am a literary critic. In imagining homo tropicus as a trope for the time that has been taken
away and could be regained from these denials of coevalness, I hope, like Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, that literary reading may “come close to the irreducible work of translation, not from
language to language but from body to ethical semiosis, that incessant shuttle that is ‘life’” (13).
In a series of comparative readings, I would like to open up the interval between texts to delay, if
not deter, the chances of the exotic to thrive as natural if not commonplace when the accomplice is
tropology. This comparative literary gesture is one that takes into account time as, to borrow from
Achille Mbembe, “precisely that moment when different forms of absence become mixed together:
absence of those presences that are no longer so and that one remembers (the past), and absence of
those others that are yet to come and are anticipated (the future)” (16). This time of “entanglement”
could be the cusp where the future perfect present of homo tropicus emerges.
IV
How does homo tropicus come into being? How does her living struggle from the earth
to a world? How does she account for the turn from terra to mundi? What happens when she is
transformed from being the earthling into a worldling? Where can the question of the origin,
represented by the indigene, be posited in this scheme? And what about a sense of the final figure in
the name of a subject? Does she arrive after all the living, or before the dying?
I derive the distinction between terra and mundi from Martin Heidegger’s differentiation
between Erde and Welt. For him, the earth is a matter of descent, it is where “everything that arises
is brought back … and sheltered” (21). This downward motion suggests not only the gravitational
force that holds the earthling to be a creature of the ground but also that understanding that she
is to be found there—as a home/body. That is where she is kept and protected. On the other hand,
the world is that which is opened up by the creation of a release from the said concealment. This
emergence, this “‘setting up’ no longer means merely putting in place” (22). It is in this sense that
Heidegger’s example of the temple is not just an erection but an ascent as it aspires to “consecrate”
(22) presence.
The figure that makes possible this raising is raised as well in the ritual as she passes
from being a riddle of creation into a name that answers for creation itself. This shift is indeed
paradigmatic, not merely a semantic change from the earthling into a worlding. Nonetheless, I
will not leap, like Heidegger, in saying that this “self-opening openness” of the world refers to the

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“broad paths of simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people” (26). The path
towards that destiny is painful. It necessitates a turning away from the point of origination and an
acceptance of originality itself. Heidegger names this encounter strife (Riss). Conflict arises between
the earth and the world, and neither sphere wins the contest. A wound insists on being marked out
after the deference, before the defiance. An indigenal moment may be collective in the process of
national nomination, but at the moment of birth, the native is alone. To be born and raised from the
womb of the earth is also to be taught one’s difference from it: as life, as indignation, as insistence.
Nativity is the wounding.
On a promontory, a figure looks over:
Delhi
dos torres
plantadas en el llano
dos sílabas altas
Yo las digo en voz baja
acodado al balcón
clavado
no en el suelo
en su vertigo
en el centro de la incandescencia
Estuve allá
no sé adonde
Estoy aqui
no sé es donde (Paz, “El Balcón” 170)
Delhi
two towers
planted on the plains
two tall syllables
I say them in a low voice
leaning over the balcony

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nailed
not to the ground
to its vertigo
to the center of incandescence
I was there
I don’t know where
I am here
I don’t know is where (Paz, “The Balcony” 26-27)
In this poem, emplacement in a locale is declared by the persona, or at least it is remembered to

have occurred, the being-located and the located-being. The locus is made uncertain however.
Delhi, and yet not Delhi. The simplicity of the past tense points to this (Estuve allá). When the time
shifts to the present (Estoy aqui), the hope of the location, its naming, is brought back, however
simply so, again. And then the ignorance of Delhi (displacement) is affirmed to be one’s knowledge
in it (emplacement).
This being-lost/lost-being is made clearer if we examine the lines which precede those which
we have just read above. The said lines speak of the city as architecture (dos torres/plantada en el
llano), but its structures are made up of language that is elevated (sílabas altas): sounds making
sense with an tense tone, phonemes vibrated by a voice in bass (voz baja); because of this shuttling,
between height and depth, between cord and chord, such a metropolis is lost and unlocated. And
yet the topos appears, because of a locus, an illumination (incandescencia) that points to a certainty
of place. This light is immanent in language. Could this luminance be the ornamental reverie that
dislodges the commonplace of the architectural logic? Perhaps, if we augur that the sounds indeed
shine tropical, if the syllable can be a photon that summons no less than a second of sun, that
touches that surface which can either be skin or ground?
While the reader may be sure that it is tropicus mundi that is the referent here, one is not
certain that it is homo tropicus summoning that world into verbality. One can speculate that it
may be one indeed, if one foregrounds the implied author, the subject intimated by Octavio Paz
speaking of the tropics from his own experiences of it. Hence, the tropics, as configured by the
chronotope2 of the garden in Paz’s comparative imaginary, is repeated from India to and through
Mexico (however merely implied this garden in the collection may appear to be) and vice versa:

No la tierra
el tiempo
en sus manos vacías me sostiene (“El Balcón” 170)

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Not the earth

time
holds me in its empty hands (“The Balcony” 27)
With the tropics as time (el tiempo) and not as space (no la tierra), the two gardens are now finally
almost sequential (read: non-adjacent) in a moment that is indeed empty, because it provides for
the occupancy, and homogeneous, because of the enabling moment of resemblance.4 This imitative
chance provides for a simultaneity now being fulfilled in a single scenography. The mimetic
empowerment happens because of homotropy, a human talent to figure the world out in turns
of phrase which propel the desiring for a species that ever dreams to be closer to its object of
reference—itself:
Más allá de mí mismo

en algún lado mi llegada (“El Balcón” 170)
Beyond myself
somewhere
I wait for my arrival (“The Balcony” 27)
Who is to come? Or, what is to arrive? If this subject is indeed a homotrope, and she imagines her
futurity through a métissage between the world on the wane and the world unfolding, the wish that
Paz intones rests on a certain anterior moment that is neither antiquated nor prescient. While homo
tropicus may be a declension of the posture (erectus), mobility (habilis), and cognition (sapiens) of a
certain humanity, what Paz announces is a subject of both promise and predicament, if this figure is
dreamed in time and not in space. It is this cusp that we aspire to anticipate if not apprehend.
Elsewhere, another arrival:

El jardin botanico ahuyento sus risuenos recuerdos: el demonio de las comparaciones le
puso delante los jardines botanicos de Europa, en los paises donde se necesita mucha
voluntad y mucho oro para que brote una hoja y abra su caliz una flor, aun mas, hasta
los colonias, ricos y bien cuidados y abiertos todos al public. (Rizal 43, my emphasis)
The sight of the Botanical garden drove away his gay reminiscences: the devil of
comparisons5 placed him before the botanical gardens of Europe, in the countries where
much effort are needed to make a leaf bloom of a bud open; and even more, to those

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of the colonies, rich and well-tended, and all open to the public. (Rizal trans. Lacson
Locsin 67, my emphasis)
Here is the picture of the returnee struggling with the time of his homecoming, since the point of
arrival is interrupted by the place of departure. Again the garden as a chronotope asserts itself as
commonplace in the instigation of a differential moment (comparaciones/comparisons). And yet,
whereas in the poem above the analogy rests on an angelic epiphany that the time will be coming,
that there shall be a coincidence between prophecy and presence, this comparison unfolds in a
temptation scene (demonio/devil). The garden at hand reminds the native of another one that
he has visited elsewhere; instead of recognizing similarity however, the subject sees difference.
The immediate space presents a disjuncture to the returnee not so much because the garden fails
to summon the memory of a previous promenade but because the latter invokes the phantasm
of that passage. This reminiscence castigates the return; one awakes to the insight that one has
indeed missed the other site by an already distant time, in spite of a certain degree of recency.
The comparison is diabolical because of this taunt to succumb to a vision that is really at best a
disappearance, deny the substance that is there (da), and declare its urgency as already gone (fort).
The temptee’s impending offense is the repetition of nostalgia, but a reprise done perversely, since
the yearning is now for an alien shore within the vicinity of one’s indigenal zone. If this is the case,
then this scene of arrival is an erasure of its own performance. Its fulfillment can only be another
departure.
In the example above, the comparison rests on a binary opposition, and not a dyadic
partnership. One image is deemed major and the other picture minor. Manila is antithetical
to Madrid, Asia to Europe. Can this preference be attributed to climatic differences, between
horticultural spaces tropical and temperate? In the latter, the returnee muses that the garden is a
delicate niche, that there is a specific economy that dictates the care of foliage. Or can the choice
stem from the affective labor that is behind all manner of beauty and arrangement regardless of
the elements? When the comparison proceeds to describing the colonial garden,6 it is delineated to
flourish better not only because of imperial funding nor the exuberance that nature grants to the
horticultural space but the industry that this context embraces (ricos y bien cuidados). And yet the
question is whether Manilan space is considered to be part of this zone of imperial exception. José
Rizal’s claim is clear—that within the Spanish empire, Manila does not possess the inflorescence of
garden cities like Lima or Havana. It is for this reason that he averts the glance that could have been
inspired, adulatory, and loving:
Ibarra aparto la vista, miro a su derecha y alli vio a la Antigua Manila, rodeada aun de

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sus murallas y fosos, como una joven anemica envuelta en un vestido de los buenos
tiempos de su abuela. (Rizal 43)
Ibarra removed his gaze, looked right, and there saw old Manila, still surrounded by
its walls and moats, like an anemic young woman in a dress from her grandmother’s
best times. (Rizal trans. Lacson Locsin 67)
Manila is a city that has not matured. It is perennially adolescent. What’s more, its civility has
not yet been performed, sartorially, unlike the other key cities of the empire, from Mexico City to
Buenos Aires. It has not yet worn the proper comportments of a colonial city, like Santiago or San
Juan. This occurs, in spite of the homotropy in the narrative, because a promise of nature cannot be
fulfilled. Or, not yet. The wish to return to temperatus mundi thus finds its rationale here. Perhaps,
only when this is achieved can the anticipation for tropicus mundi resume. Or even for the world,
just the world, before any form of subjectivity?
VI
This theme of the tropics in an anachronistic relation with the world temperate and
temperated is at the heart of Claude Levi-Strauss’s work on the area. In the particular passage
below, the tropics seems not to have arrived, because it has not attained modernity:
Les tropiques sont moins exotiques que démodés. Ce n’est pas la végétation qui
les atteste, mais de menus détails d’architecture et la suggestion d’un genre de
vie qui, plutôt que d’avoir franchi d’immenses espaces, persuade qu’on s’est
imperceptiblement reculé dans le temps. (Levi-Strauss 70)
The tropics are less exotic than out of date. It is not so much their vegetation which
testifies to their identity as minor architectural details, and the suggestion of a way of
life which gives one the impression that, instead of covering vast distances, one has
moved back imperceptibly in time. (Levi-Strauss trans. Weightman and Weightman
87).
Because of this premodernity of the tropics, whatever attempt to transport it to progressive time is
somewhat defeated at the outset, for the zone will always remain a version of some prior temperate
success. Even within its terms, the tropics—as time—will always be anachronistic. While we are

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looking towards the anterior, Levi-Strauss gazes at the archaic. But isn’t this sentiment the stuff that
sustains the exotic?

Le hazard de voyages offer souvent de telles ambiguïtés. D’avoir passé à Porto-Rico
mes premières semaines sur le sol de États-Unis me fera, dorénavant, retrouver l’
Amerique en Espagne. Comme aussi, pas mal d’années plus tard, d’avoir visite ma
première université anglaise sur le campus aux édifices néo-gothiques de Dacca, dans
le Bengal oriental, m’incite maintenant à considérer Oxford comme une Inde qui
aurait réussi a controller la boue, la moisissure et les débordenements de la vegetation.
(Levi-Strauss 24)
The accidents of travel often produce ambiguities such as these. Because I spent my
first weeks on United States soil in Puerto Rico, I was in future to find America in
Spain. Just as, several years later, through visiting my first English university with a
campus surrounded by Neo-Gothic buildings at Dacca in Western Bengal, I now look
upon Oxford as a kind of India that has succeeded in controlling the mud, the mildew
and the ever-encroaching vegetation. (Levi-Strauss trans. Weightman and Weightman
35)
To reiterate, “el demonio del comparaciones” is that which forces one, while caught in a
dissimulating trance, to recognize an ominous difference, struggle with its refusal to cohere with
familiarity and homeliness, and surrender to its power to possess the subject of comparison with
a gaze that doubts the veracity of one’s immediate worlding. On the one hand, Puerto Rico, an
American locus that looks Spanish. On the other, Dacca, an Indian topos that might as well be
English. Spaces which invoke the unlikely and the unbecoming, that is, to the Parisian sojourner who
cannot perform flânerie on a promenade that is not French. Because the uncanny occurrence of
what is otherwise considered as a particularly European template is parodied in a mere aspiration
of it, in a province, the reiteration of Europe in its Other puts into question the very logic of the
repeatability of a worlding as an epistemological possibility that rationalizes the proliferation of a
prior civilized space in another that seamlessly allows for the completion of the historical sequence.
This seamlessness, we have been told elsewhere, is the ethos of colonial temporality; as flux, this
time inserts itself into colonial space as the instantaneous fulfillment of what had been prefigured as
the advent of the modern to the anticipations of the archaic.
While the time of the colonial mimesis is allowed some temporal adjustment (Dacca before
London, Latin America before Spain), this neo-similitude must nonetheless encounter a limit. The

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reordering in time, however allowed in a turn of phrase, is a phantasmatic token. England cannot
be India; its modernity has tended its gardens, and carefully so (a controller la boue, la moisissure
et les débordenements de la vegetation).
This temporal solitude causes the tropics to internalize, as the totality of Levi-Strauss’s
treatise claims, a certain sadness:
Le ciel fuligineux du Pot-au-Noir, son atmosphère pesante, ne sont pas seulement le

signe manifeste de la ligne équatoriale. Ils resument le climat sous lequel deux mondes
se sont affrontes. Ce morne element qui le sépare, cette bonace où les forces malfaisantes
semblent seulement se réparer, sont la dernière barriere mystique entre ce qui constituait,
hier encore, deux planètes opposées par des conditions si différentes que les premiers
témoins ne purent crioire qu’elles fussent également humaines. (56, my emphasis)
The inky sky over the Doldrums and the oppressive atmosphere are more than just
an obvious sign of the nearness of the equator. They epitomize the moral climate
in which two worlds have come face to face. This cheerless sea between them, and the
calmness of the weather whose only purpose seems to be to allow evil forces to gather fresh
strength, are the last mystical barrier between two regions so diametrically opposite
to each other through their different conditions that the first people to become aware
of the fact could not believe that they were both equally human. (Levi-Strauss trans.
Weightman and Weightman 74, my emphasis)
In this context, the equator presents itself as a paradoxical imaginary: it reconciles as much as it
demarcates. It was at this point of encounter that the comparative devil remained to terrify the
monovision of the altitudinal northerner as he met his abysmal counterpart from the south, with
the former realizing that the latter could be as homotropic as he is, and perhaps more so because
this other is also homo tropicus, with whom the turn of the sun can cohere, with whom the turn of a
phrase may finally cease, as the cadency might meet its reference—the other’s time wholly for itself.
The tropics remain melancholic, for the ones crossing it could not really get over this sense of global
justice.
As a tropical genre, bossa nova affirms this forlorn “music of the spheres,” however via a
pathos that gestures beyond the discourse of civility detected by Levi-Strauss. For it is homo tropicus
himself singing both his promise and his predicament. Antonio Carlos Jobim, Luis Bonfa, and
Vinicius de Moraes would launch this new syncopation of jazz, along with the ethos of tropicalismo,
through the soundtrack of the film Orfeu Negro (1959).

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The film’s thesis rests on a radical pigmentation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This
is signaled by the opening image of the star-crossed pair carved in a bas-relief of white stone but
abruptly broken by the screen filled by Afro-Brazilian bodies very much invested in the daily life
of Rio de Janeiro but also gyrating themselves out of these rites as they usher in the coming of the
Carnaval.
That Orpheus is reincarnated as Orfeu tells us that it was the homotropy that created homo
tropicus, a crucial diversion from our examples earlier. It is the text that engenders the species.
On the day that Orfeu applies for a marriage license with his girlfriend Mira, Eurydice
appears in the neighborhood in search of her cousin Serafina, to escape a man whom she says is
bent on murdering her. Later on we shall recognize this figure as Death himself.
As soon as Orfeu and Eurydice remember the ill fate that they have suffered in a Past,
the mythic time of the Underworld is raised and levels up with the folk rhythm of the Brazilian
tropics, promising that in the present, what had been discontinued could be ultimately relived. The
morning after they make love, Orfeu serenades Eurydice with “A Felicidade” (Happiness):
Tristeza ñao tem fim,

felicidade, sim.
A felicidade é como a gota

de orvalho numa pétala de flor.
Brilha tranqüila depois de leve oscila
e cai como uma lágrima de amor.
Sadness has no end,

Happiness does.
Happiness is like a drop

of dew on a flower’s petal.
Brilliant and tranquil, then quivering,
then falling like a tear of love.7
The predicament here is articulated as an intimation of an immortality whose long durée has arrested
its subjects as indeed only temporal beings: subjects-in-time as well as subjects-of-time—as selves
deathly and deadly, with lives merely defined by their evasion of the time of death. It is thus that

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they are rendered life-less. While Orfeu awakes into the eternal promise that he has made to
his beloved, he also realizes that such an encounter, along with the joys of chance, can only be
transient, now that their human hands hold the redemption of myth. Orfeu trembles before this
fragility. Once the beatific moment is not seized by the visionary subject, so will the bliss vanish as
quickly as it has made itself apparent to the witness.
The image of happiness as a dewdrop (a gota de orvalho) suspended on a bloom (pétala
do flor) intensifies the impermanence of this mortal sentiment. Dew can be beautiful indeed,
emanating light and calmness (brilha tranquila), but soon it shakes (oscila) and gravitates (cai)
toward the ground, threatening to disintegrate. The tremor is both tension and intensity. And yet
the metamorphosis of this fluid as a loving tear (lágrima de amor) also transforms the doleful
reflection into hope, as the downward movement is really not a loss but an arrival, to the earth, that
is. It is a tear, but one shed out of passion, thus nourishing the ground of the flower that we thought
had been abandoned because of the drop’s breakage. What is promised from this irrigation? The
sensorium between pollinating caress and nectarine succulence. Yes, another blooming. And
perhaps even more: fruition.
The song acts as a refrain for the whole film. A most significant repetition is found at the
narrative closure, as Orfeu, carrying the dead Eurydice, walks home in the dawn. Eurydice dies at
the tram station. She is electrocuted by the wires of the tram she was holding on to elude Death. It
is Orfeu who turns on the switch but he does not realize what the act does to his love. After waking
up from a swoon that Death cast on him, Orfeu searches Rio for Eurydice. After running through
a hospital and a building where files of missing persons are kept, Orfeu finds Eurydice speaking
in a macumba ritual, but loses her after looking at the medium. Through the help of his friend
Hermes, Orfeu finally finds Eurydice’s body in the morgue. Hence, the song again, to mark out the
darkening rite of the matrimony:
Tristeza não tem fim,

felicidade, sim.
A felicidade do pobre parece

a grande ilusão do carnaval.
A gente trabalha o ano inteiro
Sadness has no end,

happiness does.

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The happiness of the poor man

is like the great illusion of carnival.
We work all year long
Sadness has become eternal anew for Orfeu with the knowledge that his beloved has gone back
to the Underworld. The brevity of this bliss is made more poignant by the amorous encounter
coinciding with the Carnaval, when the infinity of Dionysiac revelry is allowed for the night then
taken away by daybreak, when another god’s suffering as a human body is made historic. And
yet the Christian mythos can only enter with the proper leave-taking of the residual narrative: the
Orphic death. When he is hit on the head by a stone hurled at him by Mira (who has just burned
her former lover’s cot on the hill), Orfeu falls off the cliff, and perishes.
With the corpses of Orfeu and Eurydice pictured in a mortal embrace, their reinsertion into
the anterior time of myth redeems their tragedy. The sadness ends, but only with their return to
the earth now contemporizing itself with another passional narrative. The figure of Orfeu recedes,
but only as pharmakos, the prime victim of carnival profanity that prefigures the ultimate sacrifice
of Lenten sanctimony—Cristo, who is pharmakos as well after the justification of a redemptive
victimage.8 The radical pigment then is not only black, not just the chromatic marker that alters the
mythic into cinematic but also red, the color of the blood that turns the whiteness of stone into the
earthiest hue of skin. Blood, whose shedding is both indicative of the time that is life and the time
that is death.9
The coincidence of these times in the sonority of the Orphic image and the reconstitution
of the latter as an apparition that is ultimately tragic and yet humbly surrendering to the
Christological scene are all intimations of the occurrence of millennial time. What I am trying to
suggest here is that the carnival death that marks the closure of the film points to the final moments
of a saeculum, a long time whose duration can only manifest in the recurrence of myth, its eventual
telling and its necessary culmination, in order for another long durée to take place.
The millenniality of the Orphic departure, that receding unto death, makes the question of
arrival resurface however. Homotropy enables homo tropicus to be born, raised, but also vanquished
in tropicus mundi. With the facticity of death now made certain to us by this phantasm of the image,
our yearning for the articulation of that other possibility called life, becomes all the more pressing.
For it is that which is threatened.
VII
In an ellipse, I encounter once more our provisional possibility where I began as an insister,

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or better yet, as an insistent of the tropics:
April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (Eliot 20)
The said lines from T. S. Eliot operate on the quadruple measure of temperate time. And yet while
the part of that tempo that is being inscribed above is that of the nascence of spring, a wintry
wrath is portrayed to be contaminating the scene. While life is announcing its return with nature
convalescing from the postponements of the previous season, there is a certain travesty of time
in the appearance of blooms and in the falling of rain. A travesty since the flowers are conjured
from a site of death and because the rains interrupt that zone of dying. April’s cruelty stems then
from nature operating out of time, that is, out of its own ending. This movement reaches its full
destructive arc because the life that it proposes to rise is an imposition. Or a life that comes too
close, and too soon. The cycle arrives again, but it comes when the waiting has not rendered itself
complete—when the anticipation does not yet attain the level of hope because despair has not been
fully respected. Because of this, the welcoming is again an adieu. The arrivant is a departee. And
where else can these two visitations coincide but at that cusp between the earth and the world:
The more instransigently the strife outdoes itself on its own part, the more
uncompromisingly do the opponents admit themselves into the intimacy of their own
belonging to another. (Heidegger 27)

It is with this familiarity with the April of the temperate earth that I find myself again comparing.
Now, in my vision, the April of the tropical world renders itself uncanny:
Ang abril ay marikit na kalupitan

ng kalikasan …
ngunit ako’y mamamasyal na walang balanggot
at hubad ang mga paa;
ako’y hindi nangangamba sa kagandahan. (Mangahas 1)
April is a loving wrath

of nature …

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but I shall walk around with my head uncovered

and with my feet bare;
I do not fear beauty.
Here catastrophe is taken for what it is. It is April and while it is not spring—while it is tag-araw,
the time of the sun—the Eliotic line is reverberated most potently. But instead of the persona
prolonging the agony of one’s witnessing of time working against its own timing, what we read
is intention, the willingness of a body to treat the sublime as beautiful and transform terror into
tenderness. This is a body that recognizes the aesthetic because there is no longer a supersensible
desire to contest what looms larger than humanity. Even the disaster of the summering no longer
becomes an ordeal. Since it is a matter of the earth, it is a matter of the earthling that one attempts
to be part of it—to be sheltered, kept, protected. The persona, embracing the calamity of the tropics,
sees the threat as part of existence. Hence, a resilience, a move to elevate. By this gesture, the
persona worlds oneself. One arrives, for one welcomes, accepts, yields.
VIII
This prose has been an attempt to evoke the temporal premise of the homo tropicus as an
imaginal possibility to vivify the tropological procedure but this time by way of the tropics. In
a series of comparative readings on the colonial cosmopolite (Octavio Paz and José Rizal), the
melancholy incarnate (Tristes Tropiques and Orfeu Negro), and the vernal/estival existent (T.S. Eliot
and Rogelio Mangahas), I have tried to theorize on the arrivance, pace Derrida, of a figure that
could perhaps reconcile the strife, pace Heidegger, between the resisting earth and the oracular
world.
I punctuate this essay where I had began, not so much to gesture into a sense of an ending
but to open up the oneiric textile further:
Sarung banggi
sa higdaan,
nakadangog ako
nin huni nin sarong gamgam.
Sa loba ko, katorogan.

Iyo kundi simong boses iyo palan.

Jacobo
Dagos ako bangon,

si sakuyang mata iminuklat.
Sa diklom nin banggi
ako nangalag-kalag.
Si sakong paghiling
pasiring sa itaas,
simong lawog
nahiling ko maliwanag.
One evening,
while in bed,
I heard
the song of a bird.
I thought it was a dream,

but it was you singing.
I rose
and opened my eyes.
In the dark of night,
I unraveled my gaze.
When I looked up
into the sky,
I saw your radiant countenance.
How hapless, these misprisions of the voice and the face as birdsong and moonlight! And yet
precious is the daze between dream and waking life that a nocturne composes itself to diligently
cope with abandonment in metonyms of trace and apparence.
In anticipating, one becomes the arrivant oneself. Now that there is nothing to fear, one ends
in yearning, where and when no finale insists. One becomes Them: homotrope and homo tropicus.
Such beauty shall have been desired. And They become One. Such beatitude will have been awaited.

Jacobo
NOTES
1
In invoking homo tropicus, I align myself with Jacques Derrida the way the arrivant haunts his work
Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth” (65).
2
Although I am articulating this term in a different context, I am still most indebted to Sigmund Freud for
illustrating the discursive possibilities which surround the fort-da game invented by Freud’s grandson to
cope with his mother’s absence. See Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Volume 18 of the Standard Edition of
The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
3
Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for the event in the text where “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one
carefully thought-out, concrete whole.” For the full discussion of how the chronotope works, especially in
narrative, see Bakhtin’s “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical
Poetics” in The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays (84-258).
4
Here, of course, I am alluding to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations
(264).
5
Benedict Anderson translates “el demonio del comparaciones” as “the spectre of comparisons” to
describe the inability of Ibarra to “matter-of-factly experience” the gardens and see them “simultaneously
close up and from afar.” See The Spectre of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (2).
6
It is here that the presumed dichotomy in the comparison reaches an aporia, since the climate of the
Spanish colonies spans from high temperativity to deep tropicality.
7
The words of the song and its translation are Antonio Carlos Jobim, Luis Bonfa, and Vinicius de Moraes’s,
as they are performed and subtitled in Orfeu Negro.
8
For a discussion of the pharmakos as the scapegoat, see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays
(41).
9
But I also believe that Orfeu Negro’s death cannot allow an aberrant birth. The radical pigment of black
cannot be effaced in a whitewash. The pathos of the latter’s narrative can only pave the way for the
passional of Cristo Negro. Although I must still provide for this linkage, I am guided by the figure of the
Black Nazarene of the Philippines which finds a most productive genealogy alongside the Black Christs
of Latin America. I thank my colleague Patrick D. Flores for this valuable instruction. See his “Moving
Image, Touching Moment” (unpublished manuscript).

Jacobo
WORKS CITED
Anderson, Benedict. The Spectre of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. Quezon City,
Philippines: Ateneo de Manila UP, 2004.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968.
Derrida, Jacques. Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth.” Trans. Thomas Dutoit.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.
Eliot, T. S. “The Wasteland.” 1922. The Wasteland and Other Writings. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
Flores, Patrick. “Moving Image, Touching Moment.” Unpublished.
Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 18. Standard ed. Trans. James
Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1991.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957.
Heidegger, Martin. Off the Beaten Track. Trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Kaynes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2002.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John Weighman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Atheneum,
1974.
—. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1955.
Mangahas, Rogelio. Mga Duguang Plakard at Iba pang Tula. Quezon City, Philippines: Manlapaz, 1971.
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, LA, and London: U of California P, 2001.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York and London,
Routledge, 1995.
Orfeu Negro. Dir. Marcel Camus. Perf. Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, Leá Garcia, Lourdes de Oliveira. Paris:
Janus Films, 1959. DVD.
Paz, Octavio. “El Balcón.”The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. New York:
New Directions, 1983.
—. “The Balcony.” A Tale of Two Gardens: Poems from India, 1952-1995. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. New York:
New Directions, 1997.
Rizal, José. Noli Me Tangere. 1887. Trans. Soledad Lacson Locsin. Makati City, Philippines: Bookmark, 1996.
—. Noli Me Tangere. 1887. Manila, Philippines: Comision Centenario de José Rizal, 1961.
—. Noli Me Tangere/Huwag Mo Akong Salangin. 1887. Trans. Patricio Mariano. Manila, Philippines: Roberto
Martinez, 1950.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.

Kritika
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FORUM KRITIKA
PHILIPPINE STUDIES: TRANSNATIONALISM AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Introduction
A special session titled “Philippine Studies:Transnationalism and Interdisciplinarity” was
held at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention on January 6, 2011 at Diamond Salon
7, J. W. Marriott Hotel in Downtown LA, California, USA. The special session had been conceived,
proposed, organized and presided by Dr. Maria Luisa Torres Reyes, founder and present Editor-
in-Chief of Kritika Kultura and faculty member of the Ateneo de Manila University Department
of English. The panelists included Vicente Rafael (University of Washington, Seattle), Cynthia
H. Tolentino (University of Oregon), Ruanni Tupas (National University of Singapore), Jeffrey
Cabusao (Bryant University), and Charlie Samuya Veric (Yale University).
This special session, which was also billed as part of the “travelling” Kritika Kultura Lecture
Series, addressed the complex legacy of the Philippine experience of multiple colonialisms, to wit,
by Spain, the United States, and Japan, each similar in strategic expansionist trajectories but unique
in tactical colonial technologies. Among the questions asked were: What is empire about from the
perspective of Philippine Studies, at once a product of colonial discourse and critique? What gives,
what takes, between center and periphery within the empire and in the course of empire building?
What strategies of “containment” confront the borders? What counterstrategies destabilize center
and periphery beyond or despite the constraints borders?
Following the lectures, the discussion among the panelists and the members of the audience
revolved around the following specific and general issues:
• Encouraging further research concerning the responses of African-Americans to the

Filipino-American War;
• Critiquing the apparent marginality of Philippine Studies within Latin American Studies;
• Understanding how Philippine Studies could be truly “transnational” and
“interdisciplinary”;
• Developing and institutionalizing Philippine Studies on predominately white college
campuses in the context of the United States;
• Developing Philippine Studies in other parts of the world from transnational perspectives
as a form of “borderless studies”;
• Developing Philippine Studies that is both post-national and post-disciplinary;
• Expanding the field of Spanish language and culture to include early historical texts from
the Philippines;

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• Developing a historical understanding of the development of Philippine Studies as a

formal field of inquiry from its inception in the 1970s through pioneering collections such
as Brown Heritage: Essays on Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature (1967);
• Developing new forms of literacy to understand the complex colonial histories of the
Philippines;
• Acknowledging the ways in which the push for Philippine Studies challenges students,
teachers, and scholars to confront the history of US Empire which is deemed significant
given the deep historical amnesia within the United States regarding its own history of
imperialism; and
• Examining the connection between African Americans and Filipinos during the
Philippine-American war and its implications for forging contemporary connections
between the African American struggle for reparations and the Philippine struggle for
independence.
____________________
Editor’s Note: The information here has been culled from the notes from Dr. Jeff Cabusao and Mr. Charlie Veric.

Kritika
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forum kritika
PHILIPPINE STUDIES AND THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
Cynthia Tolentino
University of Oregon
[email protected]
Abstract
The current struggles over US military bases and territorial sovereignty in the Pacific, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and the phenomenon of globalization, alongside what is being called the “end of the American Century,” have
pushed interdisciplinary scholars to develop new frameworks for engaging US Empire. The paper attempts to
draw out the various figurations of “Philippine Studies” and “US empire” in the papers, which may include analyses
of comparative colonialisms, class and participation in social justice movements, as well as the intersections
between globalization and imperial conquest. By considering the papers’ insights on disciplinary formation and
knowledge practices, the present analysis will also attend to their entanglements with contemporary articulations of
exceptionalism and containment. The paper is especially interested in how recent incarnations and positionings of
Philippine Studies generate insight on notions of the unique, particular, special, and relational that have intellectually
and institutionally structured colonial discourse and critique.
Keywords
decline narratives, overseas Filipino workers (OFW), transnational Americanity
About the author

Cynthia Tolentino is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon where she teaches courses on
cultures of US empire and Asian Pacific American literature and film. She received her PhD from the Department of
American Civilization at Brown University. Her book America’s Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology was published
by the University of Minnesota Press in 2009. As a study of US ethnic literature in the mid-twentieth century, the book
argues that writers such as Richard Wright, Carlos Bulosan, and Jade Snow Wong were the subjects of the US state’s
sociological interest in narrating problems of racial identity and assimilation as well as the narrators of such problems
themselves. Tolentino’s articles appear in journals that include American Literature and Novel: A Forum on Fiction and
also in edited collections. She is now at work on a book-length study of US legal categories for the Philippines and
Puerto Rico, a project that examines representations of the unincorporated territory, the commonwealth, and the
special economic zone in twentieth and twenty first century Filipino and Puerto Rican fiction, film, and visual art. It
has received support from the Oregon Humanities Center and the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at
National Sun-Yat Sen University in Taiwan. She lives in Eugene, Oregon in the United States and also in Paris, France.
Following the US bombing of Afghanistan that also launched the “War on Terror” in
October 2001, a cottage industry of United States decline books has expanded and flourished.
Written primarily by historians and political scientists, these books chart the global rise and fall

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of United States hegemony. To list just a few examples, this genre includes titles such as Charles
A. Kupchan’s The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First
Century, Emmanuel Todd’s After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, and Immanuel
Wallerstein’s The Decline of the American Power: The US in a Chaotic World. Whereas earlier books
such as Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers may have served as templates for an
outpouring of decline narratives that asked whether the United States would repeat the fate of
empires such as France, the Ottomans, and Britain, these recent works are preoccupied with
questions such as “Since when has the United States been fading as a global superpower?” and
“What superpower(s) will take America’s place at the top?”
Yet a significant feature in United States decline narratives over the past decade is the use
of Henry Luce’s influential notion of “The American Century,” an idealized vision of the twentieth
century as an era of United States leadership and world dominance. In his famous 1941 editorial,
Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazine, emphasized the significance of Asia in his model
of post-World War II United States ascendancy. Situating Asia as the stage for the unfolding
of “The American Century,” Luce outlined a process by which the United States could adopt a
broad economic perspective that he deemed necessary to expand its reach into Asian markets and
manifest its destiny as a postwar global leader.1 Inscribing Asia as the key to United States’s shift
from a provincial nation to world power, Luce writes, “Our thinking today on world trade today
is on ridiculously small terms. For example, we think of Asia as being worth only a few hundred
millions a year to us. Actually, in the decades to come Asia will be worth to us exactly zero – or it
will be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year. And the latter are the terms we must
think in, or else confess a pitiful impotence” (171). As he suggests, conceptualizing Asia as an
exploitable resource was a prerequisite to developing the proper and necessary perspective for
realizing the US’s grander role in the emerging world order.
Paradoxically, the Philippines does not figure in Luce’s narrative, even though it is clearly
part of the Asian stage upon which Luce’s “American Century” will unfold and also a US territory
undergoing a ten year transition period mandated by the 1935 Tydings McDuffie Act that was
intended to result in Philippine independence. It is, on the other hand, implicitly present in Luce’s
figuration of the United States as a training site for workers who will eventually be exported
globally. “Closely tied to this model for United States economic expansion,” he explains, “is a US-
trained technocracy, a set of globally oriented experts that could convey a ‘picture of an America’
and produce the conditions that would enable the United States to accept its destined role of
global leadership.” Envisioning the United States as the “training center of the skillful servants of
mankind,” Luce suggested that an American-dominated world order—and by extension, postwar
democracy and liberty for all nations — could be secured through the development, reproduction,

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and dissemination of American expertise (171). By framing the flow of skilled workers as a
“humanitarian army of Americans,” Luce cast the United States as “the Good Samaritan” and
defined its central task in the postwar world as the dissemination of US trained experts and
knowledge practices (170). He thus identified knowledge production as the quintessential
American activity of the post World War II era in a way that inadvertently gave Filipinos, as US
colonial subjects, a purchase on United States identity. If American-style education was to be the
distinguishing feature of the “American Century,” then Luce’s model opened up a way to recognize
benevolent assimilation, the US colonial policy of tutelage for Filipinos, and to view Filipinos as
ideal subjects of the American Century.2
Ho Wi-Ding’s 2010 road movie Pinoy Sunday thematizes the “End of the American Century”
by jointly situating Filipino migration and Taiwan within a discourse of American empire. More
specifically, the film registers the trace of American influence in the Pacific by presenting the
dreams of Filipino migrant workers as intersecting a discourse of Taiwan’s modernity. Through
its focus on Filipino migration in Taiwan, the film engages Luce’s conception of Asia as a key site
for the “American Century” while also exploring its less visible possibilities for theorizing the
Philippines.
Pinoy Sunday is the story of Manuel (Epy Quizon) and Dado (Bayani Agbayani), two Filipino
migrant workers who find a discarded sofa on a Taipei sidewalk on their day off. Propelled by their
dream of having a comfortable seat for lounging, drinking beer, and gazing at the stars after long
days on the bicycle factory assembly line and lacking enough money for car transport, they attempt
to carry the sofa to their dormitory on the city’s outskirts before the evening curfew. The film is
inspired by Roman Polanski’s absurdist short film Two Men and a Wardrobe (Dwaj ludzie z szafa), the
story of two men who emerge from the sea carrying an enormous wardrobe. Whereas Polanski’s
1958 film focuses on how the two men are shunned and physically attacked by locals on their way
into town, Pinoy Sunday frames the journey of Filipino migrant workers through the city of Taipei as
one that is defined by hostile interactions to their status as foreign workers.
If cultural and political ties with the United States shape the superstructure of Filipino
migration in Taiwan, then the economic dependence of the Philippines and Taiwan might be seen
as defining their base. Pinoy Sunday contains numerous references to American slang, Hollywood
movies, advertising slogans, and commodities, but it also figures “America” as more than the
consumption of American culture and goods. By presenting “America” as a location that structures
both Taiwan and the Philippines, Pinoy Sunday reveals an Americanity that is articulated in Taiwan
through Filipino migration.
According to Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, Americanity is more than
a conception of America as a country or a place; it is also an idea that generates an image of

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modernity that is been disseminated throughout the world (549-56). If “America” signifies a
utopian dream, Quijano and Wallerstein argue that it is also a racialized nation and modern empire
that is founded on a history of conquest. This racialized and imperialist America, they contend,
is the underside of the American dream that is built on capitalist accumulation and uneven
development (Wang 138). Integrated into discourses of the American dream and Taiwan’s economic
development, Filipino migration in Taiwan emerges through capitalist accumulation and uneven
development (Quijano and Wallerstein 549-56).
As a story about Taiwan’s economic development and modernity, Pinoy Sunday is, I believe,
is especially concerned with what Quijano and Wallerstein identify as Americanity’s forward-
looking orientation. As they point out, the Americas were not incorporated into the existing
capitalist world economy; rather, the creation of the idea of the Americas was also the originary
moment of the modern world system. On the other hand, they also explain that the Americas gave
rise to a mode of cultural resistance to oppressive conditions that took its definition from the flight
forward to modernity than its claims of historicity. The Americas were the New World, a badge and
burden assumed from the outset (549).
Decline, Civilization, Neocolonialism
In recent narratives of United States decline, the end of the American Century is invoked
as a catalyst for global shift. Citing the Iraq War as a contributing factor to the steady erosion of
the United States’s image and stature in the world community and domestic well being, these
narratives envision the dynamic economies of India and China overtaking that of the United
States and bringing about a critical transformation of the global landscape (Mason). Attempting
to imagine what this transition will feel like for US citizens, historian Alfred McCoy remarks,
“When Washington’s global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what
such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As half dozen European nations
have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society,
regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political
temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.” Following McCoy’s formulation,
the effects of the “end of the American Century” will primarily be felt in terms of the domestic
economy and political stability, following the pattern of decline established by European imperial
nations. Whereas Luce, writing in 1941, emphasized the significance of Asia as a purportedly “new”
frontier for US economic expansion and the key to US prosperity and international ascendancy,
McCoy, writing in 2010, pegs United States decline to that of European empires.
The parallel that McCoy draws between the United States and Europe is not confined to

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economic explanations of decline, but also engages a discourse of civilization. The outpouring of
United States decline books also intersects a broader literary category of the Decline of the West.
Indeed, a comparable genre of writing is proliferating in Western Europe, composed of books that
explain the decline of European nations, often through racist arguments of national mission and
civilization. German economist Thilo Sarrazin’s bestseller Germany does away with itself, which
argues that Germany is being brought intellectually low by genetically inferior Muslim immigrants
and their children, and Eric Zemmour’s French Melancholy, a book that laments that France, under
pressure from immigration and outside influences, has lost touch with its Roman roots, are cases in
point (“Good Things Can Grow”).
To consider how “the Philippines” appears in contemporary narratives that take up the
“end of the American Century,” it makes sense to note that narratives that link the Philippines
with United States decline are hardly new. Indeed, turn of the century debates over United States
annexation of the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies took the form of a battle over
whether the Philippines would make or break the United States as a nation. Relating the idea of
the Philippines to the definition and future of American civilization produced questions such as:
Would annexing the Philippines enable the United States to rise from a provincial nation to a world
power? Was becoming an empire in opposition to the essence of American political ideals?
Just as recent European decline narratives figured racialized immigrants as a cause
of national decline, late nineteenth century United States debates over the annexation of the
Philippines linked the “Negro problem” in the continental United States to the problem of the “little
brown brothers” of the Philippines. The interpretation of Mrs. Jefferson Davis, also known as the
First Lady of the Confederate States of America, exemplifies this position:
The President probably has cogent reasons for conquering and retaining the
Philippines. For my own part, however, I cannot see why we should add several
millions of Negroes to our population when we already have eight million of them
in the United States. The problem of how best to govern these and promote their
welfare we have not yet solved ... The question is, What are we going to do with these
additional millions of Negroes? Civilize them? (qtd. in Newman 15)
Davies expresses anxiety over the difficulty of transporting racial policies yet unrealized in
the continental United States to the foreign “jungle” of the Philippines; in so doing, she frames the
nation’s failure to properly assimilate African Americans as a statement of dis-confidence in the
nation’s ability to assimilate overseas “primitives.”
As literary scholar Victor Bascara notes, “The ‘American Century’ would unfold not only

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despite a lack of direct American control throughout virtually the rest of the world,
but because of it” (30). Whereas direct colonization that involved the incorporation of
subjects deemed unfit for self-government was viewed as a contradiction of American
ideals, United States policy on commerce and trade in China and Asia could be described
as neocolonial in contemporary contexts. Although McKinley saw the commercial
opportunity as merely “incidental” in 1898, neocolonialism would become the answer
to the US “Philippine problem” (Bascara 30). But how does the “end of the American
century” exceed the territorial borders of formal US empire? Put another way, what is the
transnational imaginary of contemporary United States decline narratives?
At the Edges of the American Empire
Located at the edges of the United States empire, Taiwan is not a US territory but
has been deeply influenced by United States foreign policy and immigration history and
by the idea of America. Most historical accounts of post World War II Taiwan remark on
US influence in Taiwan through economic and military aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese
Nationalist party and non-military aid through investments in infrastructure projects and
especially in the textile industry from 1951 to 1964, towards the goal of developing an
export economy. As Pei-Chia Lan points out, the increasing prosperity of East Asia and
the Gulf countries has spurred a substantial international migration within the migratory
route from Southeast Asia to Taiwan since the mid-1970s (2).
How, the film asks, is regional migration and culture part of Taiwan’s history
of economic development and discourse of modernity? Rather than figuring Filipino
migrant workers are Pacific cousins to Taiwan’s inhabitants, Pinoy Sunday suggests that
the development of Taiwanese society is closely linked to the historic US presence in
East Asian geopolitics. “Figuratively speaking,” Chih-ming Wang contends, “Taiwan
as a postcolonial nation is also in the passage to America, as it struggles to shake off
the historical baggage of Japanese colonialism and KMT authoritarian rule.” While
Taiwan and the Philippines have been incorporated into United States Cold War and
Post–Cold War systems, Taiwan has shifted in status from the recipient of economic aid
from the United States from 1951-1965 to a major US trading partner following its rapid
industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s. By constructing a Filipino narrative as a journey
that passes through the United States by way of postcolonial Taiwan, the film makes it
possible to apprehend the geopolitical discourse that links the United States with Taiwan
and the Philippines in the last half of the twentieth century, or as what is known as the

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American Century.
Filipinos in Taiwan’s Transnational Imaginary
On the return journey to the factory dormitory, Manuel and Dado use the Taipei 101 tower
as a landmark. In making their way through Taipei’s unfamiliar streets, they become hopelessly
lost in the desolate areas surrounding the city. Remarking that they are “far away from Taipei 101,”
Dado registers their physical distance from the landmark and symbolic remove from attaining their
dream of prosperous modernity. More than a city icon, Taipei 101 symbolizes Taiwan’s affluence
and the international visibility of its economy. At 1,671 ft, Taipei 101 is was the tallest building in
the world from 2004 until the opening of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai in January 2010 and is
the city’s most prominent skyscraper. To achieve their dream of transforming the makeshift dorm
into a home, Manuel and Dado need to keep the tower as a navigational coordinate. While losing
sight of the tower will mean missing their curfew and possibly being deported, it would also
symbolically move them further away from Taiwan’s successful model of economic development.
In his review of Pinoy Sunday, film scholar David Bordwell interprets the sofa as the
“tangible emblem of not just material comfort but the men’s aspiration for a more stable life.”
Although Bordwell treats sofa as an expression of class, he misses the way that it visually and
discursively brings together Taiwan and the Philippines. In one scene, Manuel and Dado are drawn
to a billboard advertisement featuring the image of a man reclining on plush sofa, his head resting
in a beautiful woman’s lap. This image reignites their fantasy of finding a sofa for their dorm: for
Manuel, the sofa is a site of romance and seduction, as he imagines himself kissing a woman as if
he were in a movie. For Dado, the sofa conjures an image of peaceful domesticity, as he imagines
himself on the couch holding his wife and young daughter as they sleep. These fantasies appear
in color, with the look and feel of scene from a movie. In contrast, dreams of Manuel and Dado
that refer to the Philippines are presented as individual black/white still images of landscapes,
suggesting the many years that they have spent away.3
The images of Filipino migrant workers gazing at the Taipei 101 Tower and the luxury
furniture ad are not the only ones that link Filipino migrant labor to modern Taiwan in the film.
Indeed, the film brings two other images of Taiwan’s modernity into focus: in one, a handcuffed
Filipino contract worker is flanked by immigration police, as he is escorted away for deportation
to the Philippines; in the second, a Filipina domestic worker pushes the wheelchair of an elderly
Taiwanese woman. While Taipei 101 is the celebrated icon of Taiwan’s modernity, the film offers
the spectacles of deportation and modernity to suggest how the American Century. The spectacle,
as Debord writes, is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have

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supplanted relations between people. Following his formulation, spectacle is not a collection of
images, but rather a social relation mediated by images.
From the beginning of the film, Pinoy Sunday brings into focus the spectacular image of the
deportation of Filipino workers to the Philippines. At the airport in Taipei, Dado meets another
Filipino, who relates that he is “going home.” The camera follows Dado’s gaze as he takes in the
handcuffs around the man’s wrists. The deportation of migrant workers as an established part of
modern Taiwan’s economy is reinforced in another scene, as Dado witnesses a former co-worker
being chased through the shopping mall by immigration police, who tackle him to the ground
before attaching the handcuffs.
Parallel with the spectacle of Filipino deportation in the film is the less sensational, yet
ubiquitous image of the Filipina domestic worker in Taiwan. By framing Filipino domestic labor
as the subcontracting of filial duty in modern Taiwan, the film points to the negative consequences
for individuals and families in Taiwan and Filipinos. While it gives voice to the feelings of anxiety,
guilt, loneliness and frustration experienced by individual migrant workers and their families
abroad, it also reveals the greater isolation and vulnerability of live-in domestic workers. Whereas
the film’s title implicitly refers to Manuel’s and Dado’s six day work week at the bicycle factory,
Anna (Meryll Soriano), a Filipina domestic worker living in a private household as a maid and
caregiver for the elderly mother of her employers, complains about having worked for two months
without a day off. As Anna pushes the old woman’s wheelchair around town and puts her to bed
in their shared room, she closes the door to seal off the noise of her employers, who are arguing
in another room of the dingy flat. Another Filipina domestic worker, Celia (Alessandra De Rossi),
appears to be Manuel’s unattainable dream girl, but it is later revealed that she is having an affair
with her wealthy, married employer.
The film also suggests that widespread perceptions of foreign migrant workers as criminals
have distracted locals from recognizing the domestic problems that have accompanied Taiwan’s
financial prosperity. In another scene, Manuel and Dado save a Taiwanese boy who is threatening
to jump from the roof of a modern housing project. Rather than presenting Manuel and Dado as
traditional heroes, the visual spectacle of the two Filipinos carrying the bright red sofa serve as a
distraction to the suicidal boy, which in turn creates an opening for rescue workers to pull him back
to safety.
English in the Landscape of Decline
In Pinoy Sunday, English is elevated in a way that devalues the United States as a geographic
destination at the same time that it reinforces American cultural capital. Although the English

To l e n t i n o
spoken by Manuel, Dado, and other Filipinos reference benevolent assimilation in the Philippines,
the United States does not appear as a key destination or place in the film – an idea visually
manifested in the factory dorm décor, where a miniature US flag appears as just one in a series
from nations all over the world. To express his preferred effect in situations that are often bleak
and disappointing, Manuel draws phrases from American pop culture. Using phrases and slogans
such as “Chill…I’m The Man,” “For special occasions: steak dinner for two,” “See you when I see
you”; and “Just do it,” he acts out cinematic scenarios in which he successfully embodies masculine
American personas of the hero and lover, in ways that feel distant from his situation as a low-paid
migrant worker living under a strict curfew and policy of deportation.
In an analysis of narratives of British decline, John Marx contends that modernist novelists
such as Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad were more concerned with mapping a cosmopolitan
and interconnected world defined by a shared English language, rather than mapping the decline
of imperial Britain. What have largely been perceived as narratives of the decline of the British
empire, he explains, in fact mark the advent of modern globalization by presenting different
articulations of English. During their journey, Manuel and Dado rely on a combination of gestures,
English phrases, and situational logic to communicate with bystanders. Speaking English enables
Manuel and Dado to communicate in minimal ways, but does not necessarily constitute a shared
language that confers fellowship and connection onto them, as outsiders in Taiwan. In addition,
the film emphasizes the linguistic diversity amongst Filipino migrant workers. While Manuel and
Dado alternate between Tagalog, the dominant language in the Philippines, and English when
speaking to each other, Manuel speaks the regional language Ilonggo with a Filipina who stops
to help them on the side of the road and later translates the essence of the conversation for Dado.
By emphasizing regional alliances and language in the Philippines as a factor in the formation of
Filipino migrant worker networks in Taiwan, the film complicates dualistic conceptions of Filipinos
as either English-speaking US colonial subjects and Tagalog-speaking Filipinos.
Through language, the film registers the specificity of Taiwan as a location for Filipino
migration, asking us to explore the racialization of contract workers and domestic workers in
institutional and discursive contexts. How do Taiwanese view these darker-skinned foreigners?
When a drunk driver rams into the couch as they are carrying it across a street, he curses at them
in Hoklo (Taiwanese) and insists that they compensate him for the damage to his scooter. When
the police arrive to break up the fight, he quickly switches to Mandarin in order to argue that the
migrant workers hit him with the couch. Manuel and Dado use gestures and a few English words
(Drink … drive) to signal the driver’s drunkenness to the police in order to counter the distorted,
yet detailed account of the accident that he delivers to them in Mandarin.
More than once, interactions between Filipino migrant workers and locals, including a

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TV reporter, policewoman, and passersby, reveal the costs of not speaking Hoklo (Taiwanese)
and Mandarin and also of the limited benefits and mobility that English can secure for them in
their negotiations with factory security personnel and Taiwanese locals, such as the drunk driver
mentioned above. In contrast to the way that English enables them to express their frustrations and
dreams, Manuel and Dado have minimal knowledge of Mandarin, including “Please,” “Sorry,”
“Thank you,” and “Goodbye,” or words and phrases that are also specifically learned and deployed
to help them stay out of trouble with factory management and immigration and police officials
while also performing a subordinate and subservient status for Taiwanese locals that affirms the
First World – Third World hierarchal relationship between Taiwan and the Philippines in which
Taiwan is on top.
Taiwan’s language politics became a controversial issue in the film’s distribution. The
film received financial support through from a Subsidy for Film Production grant from Taiwan’s
Government Information Office, but its use of English and Tagalog was viewed as violating the
subsidy’s rules that Chinese dialects should be the dominant languages spoken in government-
funded films, as the projects are intended to promote Taiwan language and culture. Such arguments
about local language politics found expression in doubts over the film’s localness, as little local
language is spoken in the film even though the story is set in Taipei. The filmmaker’s response was
to release a version dubbed in Hoklo, a local language spoken by roughly 73 percent of the island’s
population.
In addition to Taiwan’s language politics, the distribution of the film brought the racialized
criminalization of foreign migrant workers to the surface. Though the film received positive
reviews at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, only two movie theaters in Taiwan initially
agreed to screenings. In an interview with the Taipei Times, director Ho Wi-ding recounted that
most movie theaters passed on the film after hearing that the story focused on OFWs (Overseas
Foreign Workers) and that the staff at one venue went so far to say that they didn’t want foreign
migrant workers hanging around in their lobbies and in front of the theater” (Ho Yi 16). It’s worth
noting, however, that newspaper reports of the movie theater’s racist views towards migrant
workers generated a burst in ticket sales for the film from outraged readers. In an interview, Ho Wi-
ding expressed the desire to talk with the Government Information Office about how to make the
regulations more flexible for movies about new immigrants.
Philippine Studies and Epistemological Critique
What is compelling about Pinoy Sunday is that it articulates critical linkages about the
Philippines and Taiwan in ways that open up intersections of language and Americanity in a

To l e n t i n o
transnational context. After losing sight of the Taipei 101 skyscraper, Manuel and Dado use
the river as a new landmark. Trading the modern icon for a natural one does not lead them
to their destination and dream of lounging on the sofa, but instead puts them on a new route.
Although Dado’s expression registers the gravity of missing the dormitory curfew, his verbal
acknowledgement of this fact conveys ambivalence about the prospect of remaining in Taiwan.
My purpose in this essay is not to add another site—in this case, Taiwan/Taipei—to
Philippine Studies. Rather, I have attempted to show how Luce’s “American Century” and
relatedly, narratives that identify the end of the American Century, provide a way of studying
the transpacific imaginary of informal US imperialism. In this sense, I suggest that the histories of
Taiwan and the Philippines are linked by immigration to the US, but also discursively linked by
the American Dream and Taiwan’s modernity. Taking an epistemological approach to Filipinos
and the Philippines allows us to consider how they are constituted as objects by the discourse of
the American Century, not only through the colonial policy of benevolent assimilation and the US
history of colonialism in the Philippines, but also through the passage to Taiwan.
In the dreamlike closing scene, Manuel and Dado play music side-by-side on the couch as
it glides across the sea and eventually, to the Philippines. The final scenes show them on a beach in
the Philippines, confirming their resettlement. To understand the significance of the end of the film,
we need to see these final moments not as a migrant’s return to the home country, but rather as a
transpacific passage that provides a new perspective on the Philippines and its relation to Taiwan
and the United States. To study the Philippines is to apprehend the ideological linkages between
Taiwan and the Philippines and to untie the contradictions of the discourse of the American
Century that Taiwan and the Philippines are part of.

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NOTES
1
Henry Luce defines the measure of US “virility” in terms of the US’s ability to exploit Asia: “Our think-
ing today on world trade today is on ridiculously small terms. For example, we think of Asia as being
worth only a few hundred millions a year to us. Actually, in the decades to come Asia will be worth to us
exactly zero – or it will be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year. And the latter are the terms
we must think in, or else confess a pitiful impotence” (171).
2
I have analyzed the ways that Luce’s American Century references the US colonial policy of benevolent
assimilation and addresses Filipinos in a previous piece. See Chapter 3 in Cynthia H. Tolentino’s Ameri-
ca’s Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology.
3
These images operate almost like pillow shots, or images that do not contribute to the progress of the nar-
rative, but instead linger on inanimate objects in ways that refer to a character by re-presenting it out of a
narrative context. “The essence of the pillow shot,” Noel Burch observes, “lies in the tension between the
suspension of human presence and its potential return” (161).

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WORKS CITED
Bascara, Victor. Model-Minority Imperialism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006.

Bordwell, David. “Dragons, Tigers, One Bear.” David Borwell’s Website on Cinema. 3 Oct. 2010 <http://www.
davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=10304>.
Burch, Noel. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979.
“Good Things Can Grow from the West’s Malaise.” The Economist 17 Dec. 2010: n.p.
Ho Yi, “Film Review: Hidden in Plain Sight.” Taipei Times 7 May 2010: 16.
Kupchan, Charles A. The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First Cen-
tury. New York: Knopf, 2002.
Lan, Pei-Chia. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham and London:
Duke UP, 2006.
Luce, Henry R. “The American Century.” Diplomatic History 23.2 (1999): 159-71.
Mann, Michael. Incoherent Empire. London: Verso, 2003.
Marx, John. The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire. New York and London: Cambridge UP, 2005.
Mason, David S. The End of the American Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
McCoy, Alfred. “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Four Scenarios for the End of the American
Century by 2025.” The Huffington Post 6 Dec. 2010 < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfred-w-mccoy/
the-decline-and-fall-of-t_1_b_792570.html>.
Newman, Louise Michele. White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of American Feminism in the United States.
New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
Quijano, Anibal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept; Or the Americas in the Modern
World-System.” International Social Science Journal 1.134 (1992), 549–56.
Todd, Emmanuel. After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
Tolentino, Cynthia H. America’s Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Decline of the American Power: The US in a Chaotic World. New York: New Press,
2003.
Wang, Chih-ming. “Thinking and Feeling Asian American in Taiwan.” American Quarterly 59.1 (2007): 135-55.

Kritika
Ku ltu r a
forum kritika
Empire and Globalization:

On the Recent Study of the Philippines in the United States
Vicente L. Rafael
University of Washington
[email protected]
Abstract
This short paper traces two of the more important developments in the study of the Philippines in the United States
in the wake of critiques regarding American Orientalism in the late 1990s. The first is a rediscovery of the American
empire at the heart of US national history, and by implication, of the buried significance of overseas colonies
to metropolitan developments. Second is the emergence of robust cultural critiques of globalization from the
perspective of those who have been globalized from below. The paper talks these developments with reference to
Paul Kramer’s Blood of Government and Neferti Tadiar’s Things Fall Away, books that mark critically important advances
not only in Philippine Studies in the US, but of American Studies in the age of imperial globalization.
Keywords
affective economies, colonialism, feminized labor, history from below, immigration, war and race
About the author

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of Contracting
Colonialism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, The Promise of the Foreign, and has edited Discrepant
Histories and Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam. He has also written a number
of essays on such topics as the politics of photography, and digital technologies in the contemporary Philippines,
Filipino overseas workers, sovereignty and revolution the Spanish Philippines, and most recently on the link between
translation and empire in the current US “war on terror.” Prior to the University of Washington, Rafael has taught at
the University of California, San Diego, Stanford, the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and at the Ateneo de Manila
University.
What are the more recent developments in the study of the Philippines in the US or if you
like, of American Studies of the Philippines in the last decade? I’d like to suggest at least two related
but no less distinct tendencies. One has to do with the rediscovery in the wake of the so-called
US global war on terror, of the American empire at the heart of American national history and
by implication of the buried significance of overseas colonies in the formation of the metropole.
Second, is the emergence of robust cultural critiques of globalization from the perspective of those
who have been globalized from below. Taken together, these two tendencies open up pathways

Rafael
Empire and Globalization
to reconsider not just the persistent oppressiveness of empire but also the utopian conceits of
the nation-state. I’d like to talk about these developments with reference to two books which
to my mind exemplify some of the most promising approaches to the questions of empire and
globalization: Paul Kramer’s Blood of Government and Neferti Tadiar’s Things Fall Away.
Let me first look at the question of empire by way of Paul Kramer’s, The Blood of Government.
Kramer shows how US colonialism involved a double invasion: on the one hand, Americans
forcibly established their presence in the archipelago by way of a brutal and protracted war; on
the other hand, Philippine products along with Filipino laborers “invaded” America, at least
from the perspective of white nativists, farm lobbyists, American academics and politicians from
the 1920s-1930s. The history of this double invasion suggests three things. First, that the Filipino-
American war whose end was officially declared by Theodore Roosevelt on July 4, 1902 in order
to speed the transition to a civilian administration and quell anti-imperialist protests in the US,
was never really over. Indeed, the experience and legacy of war continued to shape the limits
and possibilities of American policies and practice and Filipino collaboration and resistance both
in the Philippines and in the United States. Second, that despite efforts to repress its memory
and gloss over its effects, the war forces us to think of Philippine and American history within a
common optic of imperial expansion, and thus of the trans-national orientation of the histories of
both countries. Such makes a purely nationalist view of either US or Philippine history untenable
as each is always already contaminated by the legacy of the other. And third, that US colonialism
considered as a double invasion allows us to revise the history of racial formation from a more
comparative perspective. The American presence in the Philippines and the Filipino presence in
America amounted to what Kramer calls the “racial re-making of empire” as well as the “imperial
re-making of race.”
The mutually constitutive relationship between empire-making and race-making is richly
documented in the history of the war and its aftermath. The idea of empire as a white man’s burden
realized in the violent encounter with non-white others had at least two effects. It not only added
new terms to the rich and ever-expanding lexicon of American racism; it also resulted in the ethnic
specification of the very meaning of whiteness itself. Given the ethnically diverse composition of
the US army confronting Filipino fighters, American forces, with the exception of course of African
American troops, came to be homogenized as “Anglo-Saxons.” But just as empire re-made race,
so too, did race shape the consolidation of empire. For example, during the war, Filipinos were
subject to the most vicious racial invectives—“gooks,” “niggers” “Injuns”—and subjected to what
Kramer refers to as a war of “racial extermination” (not to be confused with “genocide). After the
war, however, these racial slurs were transmuted into the more familial though no less patronizing
term “little brown brother” in the interest of securing Filipino collaboration and promoting colonial

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tutelage. At the same time, Filipinos were also classified into “civilized” and “uncivilized” groups,
conflating religious with racial differences which determined whether they were to be ruled by a
civilian or a military government.
By focusing on both the contingency and structuring agency of race, Kramer debunks
the view that US imperialism was exceptional and different from Europe’s. The unstable yet
powerful significance of race helps to explain why the US decided to set its colony on the path of
independence after a decade and a half of occupation. Kramer argues convincingly that the two
independence laws, Jones Law of 1916 and the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1935 were in fact politically
expedient responses to American nativists’ desire to exclude Filipino workers as much as they
were calculated ways to redefine colonial hegemony without the political complications of colonial
occupation. These laws were less about granting the Philippines independence (for it has continued
to be a neo-colony of the US) as they were about making the US independent of the Philippines.
Where earlier scholarship had almost completely ignored or downplayed the significance of
race, Kramer thus shows how race invariably and contingently figured in every aspect of colonial
occupation.
Kramer’s work along with several other recent works are all joined precisely by the task
of making visible the workings of empire—as a way of life, as the context for redefining race and
citizenship, as the pathway to bureaucratic and academic careers in and out of the metropole, as a
conduit of disciplinary power, and as a determinant of metropolitan state formation. Nonetheless,
while marking a significant advance over earlier works, much of the recent work on the American
empire share with previous scholarship a common shortcoming. This has to do with the failure
to engage vernacular source materials and the alternative views of empire, nation, and everyday
life which these contain. Much of the new scholarship is based on archival resources primarily in
English and Spanish. With rare exceptions, American scholarship, unlike British, French or Dutch
scholarship on empire seems unable to invest the time and cultivate the sensibility required to
develop a degree of fluency in the languages of the colonial periphery. Unlike the study of other
regions in the world, the American study of the Philippines still tends to set aside the importance
of local languages. Hence, much of the focus of the new scholarship on empire continues to be
on colonial elites—American and Filipino—as well as metropolitan actors. This brings up the
question: is there perhaps a danger that the critical study of empire with its inability to hear and
read vernacular languages risks annexing the study of the Philippines into merely another branch
of the postcolonial study of America? If a postcolonial understanding of US history requires the
unearthing of the imperial as a structuring force of the national, and therefore of the ineluctable ties
that bind colonial and metropolitan histories, what are the risks in continuing to set aside the varied
worlds contained and conveyed by the vernacular languages of the former?

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It is precisely the question of the vernacular and its potential for opening other routes to
understanding the work of empire as globalizing power that is the subject of the second book
I’d like to consider. Neferti Tadiar’s Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience in the Making
of Globalization, in some ways takes up the cultural remainders of Kramer’s book. It seeks to
understand globalization from the perspective of those who suffer, in all senses of that word,
its production. Focusing on the Philippines from the 1970s to the 1990s, Tadiar asks what we, its
anonymous, cosmopolitan addressee, can possibly learn from the historical experiences and literary
productions of Filipinos struggling with and against the demands of interlocking hegemonic forces.
These forces include: an aggressively expansive global capitalist network, a Philippine nation-
state in both its authoritarian and post-authoritarian moments, varieties of liberal cosmopolitan
identities proposed by feminist, gay liberation as well as the new social movements; and an on-
going marxist revolutionary movement under the aegis of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
The author examines how these hegemonizing forces draw their sustenance from the living labor of
Filipinos and how the latter in turn absorb and parry the shocks of hegemony’s demands. She does
so through a sustained reading of a wide range of writings: novels, poetry, journalism, as well as
different strands of academic scholarship over the last thirty years, situating her project within the
broad ambit of what has come to be known as subaltern studies.
What emerges from her analysis is a welter of contradictory practices. Such practices
produce not only dominant forms of sociality and hierarchies of power. They also put forth
alternative ways of being ordered towards other historical possibilities. Tadiar begins by arguing
that the globalization of capitalist modes of production hinge on the conversion of living labor into
something that is pliant and “feminized.” Tadiar sees the feminization of labor as the realization
of what Marx had observed to be the universal tendency towards the prostitution of labor power
in the face of capital. Reduced as such, labor becomes homogenized into a resource for servicing
the unceasing need for surplus value. The nation-state profits from this gendering of living
labor. Tadiar shows how the discourse of nationalism similarly situates women’s reproductive,
domesticating labor as subordinate and merely derivative of masculine productive labor. But
rather than reiterate the feminist-marxist condemnation of capitalism’s reproduction of generalized
prostitution and nationalism’s patriarchal subordination of women, the author instead inquires
into the productive capacities of the prostitute – which here includes the overseas contract worker--
herself. In explicating the stories and poetry of Fanny Garcia, Ruth Mabanglo, and Luna Sicat,
among others, she seeks to demonstrate the ways by which women reconfigure the terms of their
subjugation and thereby resist their reduction into mere objects of value by both capital and the
state.
These acts of self-fashioning, however are never unitary. They instead open up into different

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tendencies. Such include: the invention of “woman” (babae) as a liberal subject, detached from
its earlier social connections; the invocation of the self as a performative being, that is, a kind of
medium which is hospitable to the comings and goings of otherness harking back to pre-colonial
and Catholic practices of spirit mediumship; the embracing of contingency that makes for an
ethic of risk and an erotics of gambling as a condition for freedom. Each possibility is implied in
the other. Tadiar leads us to see from her consideration of Filipina writing the emergence of what
she refers to as “pluri-subject”, a subject that is essentially plural, always a “part-subject” (Kapwa)
oriented towards proximate affiliations, not oedipal identification with others. In this way, the
“prostituted”, deracinated woman, whether at home or abroad, is shown to be not only the basis for
the extraction of surplus value as well as the ground for the erection of nationalist identity. She also
realizes herself as an agent and locus of historical experience, capable through her labor of creating
a mode of being, an alternative temporality that “falls outside” the time and space circumscribed
by capitalist progress and nationalist citizenship. And further, that it is precisely these experiences
that “fall away and outside”–experiences that are regarded as marginal, the “accursed share” of
capitalist and nationalist productions–which simultaneously invite domination and evade its full
force.
The rest of this powerful book consists of tracking the obscured and suppressed practices
which resist the assimilative pull of dominant systems for making subjects and objects. Tadiar
looks at the literature of dissent produced during the period of Martial Law, for instance. In
her close reading of the texts of Jun Cruz Reyes, Jose Lacaba and Tony Perez, she maps a set of
responses to the pressures of an authoritarian modernity imposed by Ferdinand and Imelda
Marcos at the bidding of transnational corporations and lending institutions and fed by an overt
identification on the part of Filipino elites with the desires of and for Western modernity. These
writers, Tadiar argues, situated their work amid the failed promises and debris of development
that marked the city. They wrote to contest the “magical” capacities of martial law to make itself
felt everywhere in the country. They parodied the fascist-like spectacles that accompanied tourism
development. And they undermined the erection of novel metropolitan forms which sought to re-
organize Metro Manila’s spaces to speed the flow of capital by hastening the “liquification” and
“social pulverization” of laboring bodies. Negotiating around the regime’s censorship laws, these
writers sought to register the traumas of development on the level of everyday lives. Narrating
the quotidian struggles of male prostitutes, low level office workers, squatters, xerox machine
operators, among others, their stories and poems relayed the shock effects of dispossession and
unaccounted losses.
But in articulating loss and trauma, such writers also made manifest what the regime sought
to conceal and contain: the excess of desire and the overflow of affect produced by the sheer living

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of life even, and especially, under the most oppressive conditions. There is exhilaration and release,
compassion and sharing, intensities of grief and explosions of rage that punctuate the dullness
and “noise,” the pollution and the seeming abandonment of the city’s streets and its population.
And once again, contradiction. As Tadiar so astutely points out, the writers of this period share
a common skepticism regarding Martial Law’s claims of exercising a transcendent power over
people’s lives. They varied, however, in their tactics for addressing such claims. Their approaches
included for example, ironic commentaries and sardonic word play of the regime’s slogans.
Writers rummaged through traditional aesthetic forms and reshaped these to serve avowedly
modern, anti-authoritarian aims. Each literary strategy presented limits as well as possibilities.
In her masterful reading of a novella by Tony Perez, for example, Tadiar shows the pitfalls of a
psychologizing approach that tacitly prescribes a normative “emancipated” and individuated gay
subject over traditionally constituted homosexual subjectivities (bakla). Perez’s story concerns the
lives of male prostitutes prowling the newly built shopping malls for homosexual johns to make
money with which to satisfy their desire for imported consumer goods. One day, they stumble
into a Christian revival meeting and are drawn to the preachings of a white American evangelist.
Seeking redemption, they renounce not only their prostituted lives but also denounce the bakla
as the source of their oppression. This tale of “liberation” and conversion ends with the author’s
plea for replacing the “degrading” sexual and cultural proclivities of local homosexual practices in
favor of a Westernized, emancipated gay individualism. Thus does the story ironically reveal the
ethnocentric, racist and homophobic grounds on which a kind of middle class, white-identified
gay subjectivity can be erected. Yet, in another short story by the same author, Tadiar points out
how the painfully routinized life of a lowly xerox worker brings moments of intense caring for
cast-off objects such as a torn poster advertising a fast food chain. There is in other words always
a contrapuntal tendency nesting within every literary work. This is because literature does not so
much mirror life as it extends and intensifies modes of being otherwise ignored, marginalized and
thrown away by dominant forms of existence.
The notion of literature as that which does not reflect life but instead preserves it from
forgetting and destruction, extending and amplifying it, partaking in its production and therefore
furnishing its readers and writers with a technology of social memory: such is a key insight
proffered by Tadiar. For her, following the line of argument laid out by such thinkers as Martin
Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Giles Deleuze and Antonio Negri, the literary is that which insures not
only the survival of life as particular living labor; it also provides assurances of an afterlife as the
“sur” in “survival” already intimates. She refers to these matters of life and afterlife in literature as
“historical experience.” One of the most compelling contributions of this intensely practical (which
is to say densely theoretical) book is its cultivation of the notion of “experience” as particular

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living labor that is always doubly productive. On the one hand, it constructs and registers the
conditions of oppression characteristic of modernity; on the other hand, it is also that which exceeds
and thereby potentially subverts such conditions. Experience, to the extent that it is productive
of agency, insures us against the end of history, as well as against the ends of those who seek to
end historical change. In the last two chapters of her book, Tadiar shows the utility of this notion
of experience as the power of producing history (and not simply as prostituted labor producing
surplus value) in her analysis of revolutionary writings.
In looking at the revolutionary writings of Emmanuel Lacaba, Kris Montanez, Communist
Party founder Jose Maria Sison, Felipe Granrojo and Ruth Firmeza, among others, Tadiar
demonstrates how writing at its most radical becomes indistinguishable from what it writes about.
The literature of the revolutionary movement, whose tortured history and shifting ideological
tendencies Tadiar traces, yields modes of writing that are styled as instruments for uprising.
Dissent here is ordered towards violent transformation meant to overturn the violent impositions
of an oppressive order. Literature as a weapon of the revolution calls for a literary criticism that
safeguards and furthers the aims of the movement. When it is successful, Tadiar points out,
revolutionary writing not only envisions but effectively enacts a startling continuity among acts of
literature, literary criticism, social critique, and everyday life. Unlike bourgeois notions that insist
on the separation of literature from life, the policing of writing by criticism, and the reification
of experience through its generic representations, the revolutionary texts Tadiar examines are
sustained by other cultural logics and historical imperatives. Such literature emerges not only from
the mandate to furnish weapons for the struggle emanating from the Party’s ideologues. It is also
wedded to more traditional modes of imagination ranging from the Catholic passion play, the
colonial and nationalist melodramas, and indigenous forms of story telling. The latter are reshaped
not only in response to the conditions confronting guerilla fighters. They are also deployed in
producing the tactical exigencies and modalities of the fighters’ lives. In this way, revolutionary
writing occasions the emergence of those “pluri-subjects” that Tadiar had written about in the
earlier chapters. Rather than stand out as authors of their own lives, as sovereign individuals vested
with the social and economic capital with which to distinguish themselves from the masses, the
characters in revolutionary texts seek to become one with the masses. This becoming one with the
masses is in fact a becoming many, a dissolution of the notion of self-possessed individualism in
favor of a self possessed by the movement of a multitude. Hence the common term of fighters for
addressing one another, “kasama” (being as being with an other, as a being together with others),
is also a term for denoting the filiation and relationality among things and people. The individual
as “kasama” is one who is known and knows him or herself in terms of a seething, moving
collectivity. Here, Tadiar illuminates this new kind of revolutionary subjectivity by situating it away

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from the dialectics of identity and difference and towards the experience of finitude and infinity.
The dialectics of identity and difference produce subjects who struggle for recognition and thereby
find themselves in a hierarchical relationship, dominating and subordinating one another, while
beholden to a transcendent source that underwrites their subjugation. By contrast, the experience
of finitude and infinity that Tadiar sees working in revolutionary texts constitutes subjects as
open ended rather than agonistic. They exist as beings proximate to rather than identical with one
another. The revolutionary subject in literature is thus a part-subject integral to ever expanding
“assemblages” of other part subjects.
Yet, revolutionary texts are also freighted with all sorts of contradictions. As Tadiar astutely
points out, the Party’s attempt to order literary expression as continuous with the everyday life
of struggle at times recreate the very figures and conditions of oppression such a struggle had
sought to overthrow. Indeed, the desire for the masses on the part of student activists and Party
members of petty bourgeois origins often enough effect the instrumentalization of the “people.”
The masses as instruments for alleviating and overcoming the alienation of the bourgeois subject
turned revolutionary is a common enough trope in revolutionary writing. In the Philippine
case, the masses are at times idealized even as they are rendered silent. The real heroes are the
fighters who support, live with, and die for the masses even as they are wholly dependent on the
labor of the masses to sustain their movement. In a series of astute critiques of this tendency in
revolutionary writing, Tadiar points out the ways by which even the most radical pieces of writing
rely on the most conventional of tropes. For example, they associate the masses with the land,
and both with a kind of feminine body on which to erect the heroic, sympathetic and masculine
figure of the fighter. The militarization of the struggle places fighters in direct contact with the
soldiers of the state. It is not surprising then that both in literature as well as in historical fact,
the New People’s Army would at times come to mimic the behavior of the Armed Forces of the
Philippines, even if revolutionary writing systematically seeks to disavow such an identification.
The violence of the revolution is overwhelming and contagious, as seen in the disastrous campaign
to rid the movement of suspected counter-agents that resulted in mass killings in the 1990s. In
order to contain what it regards as “irrational”, “atavistic” and “feudal” practices, the Party
has sought to privilege a masculinized and rational subject devoted to the masses yet acting to
domesticate their practices and desires. The literature of the movement, however, continues, like
the movement itself, to produce characters and stories that foreground experiences in excess of this
normative revolutionary subjectivity. It is as if there is not one revolution, but several going on at
the same time; not one radical project of transformation, but many, whose horizons are far from
foreclosed. Thus does literature show the movement to be fissured. On the one hand, it invests in
the messianicity of the masses–the masses as embodying the very movement of their emancipation

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located at some imminent future; on the other, it seeks to sit in judgement of the masses,
domesticating its excesses and uplifting it from its backwardness. Fetishized, the masses become the
objects of desire constitutive of the revolutionary subject. Rather than become one with the masses,
the fighter here becomes an agent of the Party, seeking instead to be the univocal representative of
the very multitude on which it depends.
Related to but distinct from Paul Kramer’s The Blood of Government, Neferti Tadiar’s
engagement with the imperialism of globalization moves away from a focus on governing elites
to the point of view of those who produce globalization’s conditions of possibility: living labor.
Where Kramer’s work is informed by Anglo-American cultural studies and the more progressive
strains of US social history, Tadiar’s book comes across as an assemblage of theoretical practices
that include post-structuralist Marxism, existential phenomenology, feminist epistemologies
and postcolonialism. Kramer excels at weaving together Spanish and US sources, comparing
each other’s colonial projects with those of other European, especially British, powers to deflate
American imperial exceptionalism. Tadiar picks up where Kramer leaves off. In her close readings
of literary texts, she exemplifies an ethical concern for the vernacular particularities of Filipino
experiences (where her incisive translation of Tagalog texts, for instance, extends and safeguards
the survival of these texts for new, ever emergent readership). In Kramer’s book, we see new
ways of articulating areas of historical inquiry—the imperial and the national, colonialism and
immigration, war and racial formation, American, Asian and Asian-American histories—in
ways that are as inventive as they are compelling. In Tadiar, we read highly textured and lyrical
evocations of the affective economies of various texts, as the author dwells in the very excesses
she finds thematized in those things that “fall away.” Both books thus mark critically important
advances not only in Philippine Studies in the US, but of American Studies in the age of imperial
globalization.
Works Cited
Kramer, Paul. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill: U of
North Carolina P, 2006.
Tadiar, Neferti. Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience in the Making of Globalization. Durham: Duke
UP, 2009.

Kritika
Ku ltu r a
forum kritika
the new challenge of the mother tongues:

the future of philippine postcolonial language politics
T. Ruanni F. Tupas
National University of Singapore
[email protected]
Abstract
For much of postcolonial language politics around the world, the fight has largely been between a foreign (read:
colonial) language and (a) dominant local language(s). This is true in the Philippines where the debates have
focused on English and Filipino, the Tagalog-based national language. In recent years, however, the mother
tongues have posed a challenge to the ideological structure of the debates. Although local languages have long
been acknowledged as positively contributing to the enhancement of learning in school, they have been co-opted
mostly as a nationalist argument against English, American (neo)colonialism and imperialist globalization. The
current initiatives to establish mother tongue-based education reconfigure the terms of engagement in Philippine
postcolonial language politics: it must account for the fact that the mother tongues could be the rightful media of
instruction. In the process, it must tease out issues concerning the decoupling of Filipino as the national language
and Filipino as a/the medium of instruction, and deal with the politics of inclusion and exclusion in “bilingual” and
“multilingual’” education. Nevertheless, this paper ends with a general critique of language debates in the country,
arguing that “content” has been sidelined in much of the discussion. The future of postcolonial language politics in
the Philippines should not be about language per se, but about how the entanglements of language with the larger
(neo)colonial infrastructures of education where medium, substance and structures are needed to advance the
nationalist imagining of the multilingual nation.
Keywords
Alternative Learning System (ALS), Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Instruction (MLE), national language,
politics of education
About the author

T. Ruanni F. Tupas is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for English Language Communication, National University of
Singapore, and the 2009 Andrew Gonzalez Distinguished Professorial Chair Holder in Linguistics and Language
Education awarded by the Linguistic Society of the Philippines.
INTRODUCTION
If one is to take stock of work done in postcolonial language politics around the world (e.g.,
debates, policy-making practices, research), the problem has been expressed essentially in terms
of the tension between imperialist languages and local languages (Watson; Clayton; Ramanathan).

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T h e N e w C h a l l e n g e o f t h e M o t h e r To n g u e s
More often than not, the question has either been how to de-center the colonial/imperial languages
from social life or how to slowly (re)introduce the mother tongues into the centers of power in
society such as political governance and the educational system.
In this paper, the role of mother tongues in Philippine postcolonial language politics will be
explored. Specifically, it will trace the reconfiguring of language politics in the country in recent
years through an investigation of a range of mother tongue initiatives and discourses from national-
level policy debates to grassroots projects around the country. The paper will show that, while the
argument for mother tongues in education and social development is definitely not new, recent
multi-sectoral, multi-level work in the area has opened up possibilities of a different discursive
configuration of language politics in the country. These are the displacement of English and
Filipino as media of instruction, the decoupling of Filipino as national language and as medium
of instruction, and the re-mapping of the “nation” through the supposedly more inclusive mother
tongues. The paper, however, also argues that postcolonial language politics in the Philippines
should not be about language per se, but about the entanglements of language with the larger
(neo)colonial infrastructures of education where medium, substance and structures are needed to
advance the nationalist imagining of the multilingual nation.
MOTHER TONGUE INSTRUCTION AROUND THE WORLD
The literature on the use of the mother tongues or the first languages of learners has been
overwhelmingly positive (Thomas). The Global Monitoring Report of UNESCO (Education for All)
summarizes the rich field thus far:
The choice of the language of instruction used in school is of utmost importance.

Initial instruction in the learner’s first language improves learning outcomes and
reduces subsequent grade repetition and dropout rates. (17)
However, this seemingly unproblematic fact about mother tongues becomes a highly
politicized argument if it is located in specific sociopolitical contexts. Indeed, the role of mother
tongues in society and education depends on whose society and education we are talking about.
Benson, for example, notes that in many ex-British colonies mother tongue schooling has been a
historical by-product of separate and unequal development, for example the institutionalization
of Bantu education during the apartheid era of South Africa, although pedagogical strategies
emerging from this discriminatory practice have become potential agents of change towards
equitable education. Similarly, mother tongues have served as compensatory tools to reverse the

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trend of illiteracy and high school dropout rates in many marginalized communities and countries
around the world, for example in Guatemala where only less than half of its rural Maya language-
speaking population is enrolled in school and further half drops out after first grade.
Moreover, still according to Benson, mother tongues have also served as representations
of new political ideologies of many societies around the world, for example the explicit political
valuing of pluralism in the constitutions of Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia; while
clearly educational development objectives drive the institutionalization of mother tongue
instruction such as the ones used in Mozambique, Nigeria, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea.
The point here is that, while mother tongue instruction has proved to be pedagogically sound,
its valuing differs across communities and societies. The many layers of ideology and politics which
undergird it reveal, in particular, a specific politics of language and education and, in general, a
sociopolitical landscape characterized by tension between inclusionary and exclusionary policies.
Mother tongue instruction does not and cannot happen in a vacuum; even as it argues for its
superiority over other modes of instruction, it is enmeshed in many other social issues. Unpacking
these issues surrounding mother tongue instruction can reveal rich information about postcolonial
language politics in many societies today.
MOTHER TONGUE INSTRUCTION IN THE PHILIPPINES
Recent initiatives on mother tongues revolve around Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual

Education or MLE. It was institutionalized on July 14, 2009 through Order No. 74 of the Department
of Education (DepEd), therefore it is believed to have supplanted the country’s bilingual education
policy (English and Filipino as media of instruction) which has been in place for close to three
decades now. The difference between MLE and bilingual policy can be understood essentially
in terms of which languages should be the media of instruction. Philippine bilingual education
requires English and Filipino, the national language, as media of instruction depending on which
subjects are being taught (see Gonzalez; Luzares). MLE, on the other hand, pushes for the mother
tongues of students as media of instruction in all subjects. Currently, however, the debates seem to
be limited to MLE and bilingual policy issues in the primary grades.
Order No. 74 is based explicitly on assumptions about the “superiority” of the use of mother
tongues in education based on successful projects and empirical research which include the Lingua
Franca Project of DepEd begun in 1999, an immediate precursor of MLE; the longitudinal study
of the Lubuagan Experiment (Walter and Dekker; Dekker and Young) which showed that the
educational performance of Primary 1-3 pupils taught in the local language outperformed those
taught in English; and the DepEd study (e.g., Lim and Giron) which affirmed international studies

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showing that pupils taught mathematics in their mother tongues performed relatively well in
international tests.
Support for MLE (though limited to primary education as earlier mentioned) has come from
a diverse range of sectors in Philippine society, creating an increasingly coalescing network of
initiatives and alliances working for various levels of advocacy for mother tongue instruction, such
as macrosystem values, policies and funding, research, and training and resources (Ball). There is
currently a pending bill in congress supporting the vision of MLE. It is entitled “The Multilingual
Education and Literacy Act of 2008” filed by Valenzuela Representative Magtanggol Gunigundo
founded on similar premises as the DepEd Order No. 74. An opposing bill, also known as House
Bill 4701 or the “Gullas Bill” (after its main sponsor Rep. Eduardo Gullas of the First District of
Cebu), filed in 2006 but which has evolved into several versions through the years, attempts to
re-instate the use of English as the sole medium of instruction in all levels of the educational
system. This English-only bill currently has the support of the large majority of the members of the
House of Representatives. The opposing bills (English versus the mother tongues as medium of
instruction) deviate from past frames of debates in Philippine Congress during which the fight was
mainly between English and Filipino.
Similarly based on the same assumptions about the superiority of mother tongues in
the facilitation of effective learning in schools, several individuals, government agencies, and
professional organizations have also taken an unwavering stand in favor of MLE. These include
the Philippine Business for Education, Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino and the Linguistic Society
of the Philippines. But what is perhaps more meaningful are the many regional, provincial and
school-based initiatives to implement the MLE. These include the National Training of Trainors
(TOT) spearheaded by the Department of Education, the formation of new coalitions such as
Akademiyang Bisaya Inc (ABI), and the holding of significant conferences such as the 1st Philippine
Conference-Workshop on Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education sponsored by the 170+
Talaytayan MLE Consortium in Cagayan de Oro City and the MLE-themed Annual Conference and
General Assembly of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines in Metro Manila, both in 2010.
It must be highlighted, however, that the MLE framework is really not new (see UNESCO The
Use of Vernacular Language). As will be discussed in a section below, mother tongue instruction has
been vigorously pursued in non-formal/indigenous/minority schools in the country. The mother
tongues in these schools have not only served as tools for effective learning, but also as channels
for the expression and affirmation of local cultures and identities. These uses of the mother tongues
have rarely been questioned because of possibly at least two reasons. The first is that the MLE
framework in these places has usually been a part of a larger framework of social and community
development where the mother tongues are the “natural”: choice; the second is that it has been used

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“outside” the mainstream education system where the bilingual education policy was put in place
(Canieso-Doronila “The Emergence of Schools”; Tupas “Kalayagan”; Dekker and Young).
THE MOTHER TONGUE ARGUMENT THEN AND NOW
The “mother tongue argument” simply means the argument that mother tongues facilitate
learning more effectively than non-local media of instruction based on empirical research
(Cummins “Bilingual”; “Language”). This argument, however, takes on highly political and
ideological dimensions if contextualized in specific situations and periods of time.
For example, the mother tongue argument in the Philippines has largely been used as
part of the political ammunition against so-called imperialist English in Philippine classrooms
(Tupas “Bourdieu”) which, thus, must be replaced with Filipino, the national language. In other
words, Filipino was packaged as “the mother tongue” which was superior to English, “the second
language” (Fuentes and Mojica 54) in terms of facilitating better learning outcomes in school.
Moreover, this local national language as “mother tongue” also represented the values, cultures,
and dreams of the Filipino people, a role which English, being a foreign and colonial language,
presumably could not assume (Tupas “Back to Class”). In short, historically the national language
as mother tongue was used as one argument for the re-examination of the dominant role of English
in “mainstream” Philippine education and society, especially in the light of the decolonizing and
anti-elite agenda of different sectors in the country (Tollefson; R. Constantino) and the heightening
of liberalizing infrastructures of neocolonialist globalization within which English serves as the
major lingua franca (Ordoñez).
In the process, this argument provided a broad framework for the use of Filipino, the national
language, as medium of instruction leading to the institutionalization of bilingual education in the
early 1970s where English and Filipino would be used as media of instruction in particular subjects
in school (Luzares; Gonzalez). Therefore, the terms of engagement in postcolonial language politics
meant that the fight would be between English and P/Filipino, with the latter forming “part of the
cultural project on the development of a nationalist consciousness” (Sugbo 5). Meanwhile, the rest
of the mother tongues were “being completely lost from sight” (Smolicz 98) relegated to secondary
roles to play in literacy development and in the imagining of the nation; or, were left to be used
in MLE-based schools for marginalized communities such as minority ethno-linguistic groups
(Dekker and Young; Hohulin).
Recent MLE-related articulations also draw on the effectiveness of mother tongue instruction.
However, instead of arguing for the use of Filipino, the national language, as a/the medium of
instruction by virtue of it being a mother tongue, these articulations push the mother tongue

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argument further by arguing that, if indeed mother tongues are more effective tools of learning,
then they should be the media of instruction, not English and/or Filipino. If Tagalog-based Filipino
happens to be the mother tongue of a particular community of students, it should also be the
medium of instruction for this group of students. It is this push for mother tongues as languages of
education which has posed a new challenge to existing configurations of issues related to language
politics in the country.
THE NEW CHALLENGE OF MOTHER TONGUES
Thus, while there is indeed nothing new with the assumptions of recent MLE work which
argue that empirical research since the 1950s has consistently affirmed the positive contributions
of mother tongues to learning in Philippine classrooms (see UNESCO), the same argument used
earlier to rally support for the national language as medium of instruction is now deployed more
vigorously to argue for the use of the mother tongues as media of instruction. The argument
draws on the fact that Filipino is not the mother tongue of most Filipinos, thus its use as medium
of instruction (together with English) still marginalizes those who do not speak it as their first
language as has, in fact, been empirically proven in research. If the superiority of the mother
tongues in education is brought to its logical conclusion, then indeed the first or local languages of
communities, provinces and regions should be the languages of instruction.
The Displacement of English and Filipino as Media of Instruction
Perhaps the most obvious implication here is the displacement of English and Filipino as
media of instruction at least in primary schools. This is one reason why DepEd Order No. 74 is
believed to have both supplanted the official bilingual education policy of the country which
has been in place for almost three decades now, and ushered in the possibility of a multilingual
education in the Philippines. Whether MLE succeeds in the end still remains to be seen because
of the many challenges it must hurdle (Nolasco), but one factor that needs to be recognized is that
MLE claims to be additive (as opposed to subtractive) in its approach to multilingual education.
That is, MLE does not treat multilingualism as a problem to be solved (Cummins “Bilingual”;
“Language”) but as a resource which can be tapped into in educating Filipino pupils.
Thus, while English and Filipino are displaced as media of instruction, they remain important
languages that must be taught as subjects in school. In its most idealistic account, MLE envisions
the flourishing of all languages in society through their promotion in school both as media of
instruction and as subjects to be learned. MLE claims, for example, that its framework allows for a

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more efficient learning of English and Filipino as subjects in school. The Lubuagan experiment has
shown that primary pupils taught English through the mother tongue performed better in official
government tests (in English) than those who were taught English through English. Similarly,
Nolasco reiterates the importance of teaching Filipino as the national language through the mother
tongues of pupils across the country. Thus, MLE claims that its framework not only supports the
learning of both English and Filipino, but more importantly it can lead to more improved and
successful learning of both languages. It only displaces these languages as media of instruction in
primary grades but not as important languages of education and society.
The Decoupling of Filipino as National Language and as Medium of Instruction
A less obvious and less discussed implication of MLE is the decoupling of the twin issues of
national language and medium of instruction. The status of Filipino as the national language has
changed through the years, especially because its role as the country’s inter-national lingua franca
is increasingly becoming an undeniable fact to many, if not most Filipinos. Despite high-profile
opposition to it even in recent years, the sentiment on the ground seems to have shifted in favor
of the acceptance of Tagalog-based Filipino as the country’s national language (Espiritu; Kobari).
This shift could also relate to the fact that Filipino is widely used as the language of communication
among Filipinos in the country and abroad.
A bigger problem, however, emerges if this “fact” about Filipino as the local lingua franca of
the nation is used to argue for its (continuing) institutionalization as medium of instruction. If the
mother tongues under the MLE framework are to serve as media of instruction because of the now
familiar argument about their superiority in the facilitation of learning, then Filipino should cease
to be a medium of instruction except in places where it is the mother tongue of majority of learners.
MLE, therefore, de-links the national language question from the issue of medium of instruction.
Filipino as the national language need not be a/the medium of instruction; to put it in another way,
Filipino can still remain the national language even if it ceases to be a medium of instruction.
The Re-Mapping of the Nation through the Mother Tongues
The third implication of MLE is the possibility of re-mapping the nation through mother
tongue instruction. But to fully understand this point, we need to locate multilingual education
within the broader politics of education in the country.
First, aside from the fact that the essential argument upon which MLE is based is not really
new, its implementation is also not novel. While the “bilingual debate” (between English and

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Filipino) was raging on for decades, and while part of Filipino’s legitimacy as national language
and medium of instruction was based on the mother tongue argument as discussed above, the
MLE framework had actually been put in place in many non-formal/indigenous/minority primary
schools across the country (Dekker and Young; Hohulin). Therefore, what the recent DepEd Order
No. 76 attempts to accomplish is to “mainstream” mother tongue instruction in formal, arguably
non-marginalized, schools across the country where bilingual education has been the dominant
framework.
A specific case in point is the institutionalization of the Alternative Learning System
(ALS) Curriculum for Indigenous Peoples (IPs) Education through DepEd Order No. 101 issued
on September 14, 2010. This laudable effort to develop a curriculum to respond to the needs
of indigenous communities began in 2006 and was prepared with the help of the National
Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) and various indigenous cultural communities (ICCs).
The learning competencies are based on the nationwide ALS curriculum, but the content is drawn
from the Indigenous Peoples Right Act of 1997 which means that the content should be responsive
to the specific needs and desires of indigenous communities and which can be modified further as it
is used by different groups of IPs.
A key feature of the ALS curriculum – which differentiates it from the formal bilingual
education curriculum – is the multilingual support provided by learning resources which are
written in the mother tongues. The curriculum, in other words is framed within an MLE approach
to education where the mother tongues, not English and Filipino, are the media of instruction
through which identities are created and/or sustained. Indeed, while this “may be a positive
development” (Sayed 25), the ALS curriculum is by itself not part of formal bilingual education
and mainstreaming it into formal education is very difficult because of lack of certification and
equivalency. “The danger,” continues Sayed, “is that the ALS is seen as a second-best separate
education track for indigenous peoples” (25).
Thus, while national imagining was envisioned by bilingual education through the use of the
national language as medium of instruction to foster national unity and develop a sense of national
consciousness (Sibayan and Gonzalez), people from minority or indigenous communities were,
and perhaps still are, not part of this collective imagining. In a sense, many schools in marginalized
minority communities have got it “right” through the mother tongue argument which has also been
fundamentally espoused by bilingual education in its accommodation of Filipino as a medium of
instruction. Yet in the process of getting it “right,” the mother tongues have also been marginalized
by bilingual education. In reality, then, there have in fact been two strands of education in
the country for at least three decades now – the “mainstream” bilingual strand and the “non-
mainstream” multilingual strand.

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The issue in this case is not simply the fundamental mother tongue argument (which almost
everyone does not seem to question), but the possibility of mainstreaming MLE in so-called formal
education platforms. While the resistance is more explicitly about the need to sustain the efforts
of the national language project in fostering national unity and national consciousness among
Filipinos, the MLE challenge to bilingual education surfaces the covert ideological boundaries
between those who are included and excluded in the collective imagining of the nation.
THE FUTURE DEBATES
Indeed, the new challenge of mother tongues requires new terms of engagement in
postcolonial language politics in the country. As discussed in the earlier section, debates on
language must account for the fact that the mother tongues could be the rightful media of
instruction if the argument on their superiority in the facilitation of learning is pushed to its logical
conclusion (Smolicz). In the process, the debates should attempt to tease out issues concerning
Filipino as the national language and Filipino as a/the medium of instruction; can we speak of
Filipino as the national language without necessarily speaking of it as a language of instruction?
Moreover, it is also imperative for postcolonial language debates to deal with the politics of
inclusion and exclusion in Philippine education. Who can imagine the nation through bilingual or
multilingual education? And to widen the field of inquiry even further, does imagining through
the mother tongues translate to puncturing (or perhaps broadening of) the social base of the (re)
production of knowledge and power in country, usually dominated by those who are fluent in both
Filipino and English? Can this begin with assertive or disruptive voices made audible through the
mother tongues? (See Ileto; Rafael; Villareal.)
Thus, put together, how can a nationalist language argument, firmly grounded on the
need for a national language to foster a national unity and a collective imagining of the nation,
grapple with this challenge of the mother tongues? Can the mother tongues serve as the bulwark
of nationalist ideals, capable of uniting the nation through a more inclusive politics of education?
After all, the “telling and the re-telling of the narratives of demons and saviours of a people,”
dominant themes in Hiligaynon literature, is also “to engage in imagining the nation” (Villareal 65).
Perhaps then even a more fundamental question should be this: do we need a national language?
There are, however, more questions that need to be asked, the most critical of which is
perhaps the issue of content in Philippine education. If we scrutinize the network of issues
concerning bilingual and multilingual education in the country, much discussion revolves around
the (re)placement and (dis)placement of languages in schools as part of the country’s struggle
with its (neo)colonial legacies. This does not mean that the role of content has not been part of the

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discussion; in the early 1960s and 1970s, the “mis-education” of the Filipino people (R. Constantino)
was at the core of the nationalist argument against English and, in a more general sense, against
the endemic colonial trappings of Philippine society. The bilingual education policy of 1974 thus
became the first formal education platform to accommodate a local language, P/Filipino, as a
medium of instruction, together with English, as a political solution to the enduring problem of
(neo)colonialism in the country. Yet, the same bilingual education infrastructure was used by the
Marcos dictatorship to consolidate its power through the propagation of its myths and through
the institutionalization of neoliberal “manpower” programs put in place by its acquiescence to
dictates of US-led global economic institutions such as the World Bank (Bello, Kinley, and Elinson;
Schirmer and Shalom).
Similarly, at the same time when bilingual education was re-affirmed and Filipino was
installed as the national language in the post-Marcos 1987 Constitution, Philippine education
continued to be plagued by imperialist content. In a pioneering research, Canieso-Doronilla
(The Limits of Education Change 74) found among pupil-subjects of her study an absence of
ethnocentric affiliation with Filipino nationality, pride of country, support of nationalism before
internationalism/globalism, and commitment to decolonization and national self-reliance. Canieso-
Doronilla concludes that it “is fair to say that the young respondents have as yet no conception of
what it means to be a Filipino, identifying instead with the characteristics and interests of other
nationalities, particularly American” (74) (see also Mulder; L. Constantino). In short, postcolonial
language politics must take into greater consideration the role of content in Philippine education.
CONCLUSION
As late as 2003 during which former President Gloria Arroyo issued a memorandum that
would put English back as the “sole” medium of instruction in the country, the issues raised did
not substantially advance the ideological structure of the debates. Those in favor of English as the
main language of instruction justified it on grounds that English is the language of globalization,
social mobility and global competitiveness; those against it (thus in favor of the “bilingual” status
quo) argued that Filipino, the mother tongue and the national language, would be more effective in
facilitating learning among pupils and in fostering national unity and a nationalist consciousness.
The charge against Filipino came from “non-Tagalog” critics who claimed that Filipino is divisive
and is indicative of Tagalog imperialism. The ideological genealogies of these arguments can be
traced back to the linguistic battles of the 1930s, early 1970s, and mid 1980s during which questions
about national language and medium of instruction framed the debates. In all of these, the “mother
tongue” argument was central to many positions.

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The recent challenge of the mother tongues, however, substantially reconfigures the terms of
engagement in postcolonial language politics. Who can imagine the nation and how can this be done
through bilingual (English and Filipino, the national language) or multilingual education (MLE)?
Crucially, it is also important not to forget the polemics of content vis-à-vis the role of language
in the reconfiguration of such politics. It should likewise account for what can be imagined in the
unrelenting postcolonial project of (re)making the Philippine nation. The medium and substance of
nationalism should animate the future of postcolonial language politics in the country.

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Kritika
Ku ltu r a
forum kritika
decolonizing knowledges: asian american studies,

carlos bulosan, and insurgent filipino diasporic imagination
Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao

Bryant University
[email protected]
[email protected]
Abstract
The current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have compelled interdisciplinary scholars to seek new methods of
engaging US Empire. This essay will attempt to outline an emerging critique-al strand of Filipino Cultural Studies that
challenges the limitations of the “cultural turn” through its connection to the larger goal of creating movements for
social justice. Over the past few years, new forms of Filipino American scholarship have advanced a unique tradition
of class analysis developed by earlier generations of Filipino cultural workers and activists. In addition to this new
development, Filipino American cultural workers have created politically conscious art through their participation in
social justice movements. I argue that this new form of Filipino Cultural Studies – one that is not strictly ensconced in
the academy – might provide useful and timely suggestions for alternative and transformative ways of knowing and
being.
Keywords
Filipino American public intellectuals, social activism
About the author

Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant
University. He received his BA in English and Cross-Cultural Ethnic Studies from Oberlin College, his MA in Asian
American Studies from UCLA, and his PhD in English from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. During the 2006-
2007 academic year, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at Kalamazoo
College. His teaching and research focus on US Ethnic Studies (specifically comparative approaches to Asian
American and African American Studies), Cultural Studies (literary and cultural theory, critical pedagogies), and
Women’s Studies (feminist movement and social change). He’s particularly interested in the relationship between
interdisciplinary formations, cultural production, and social justice movements in the United States. Current research
projects explore how the work of Filipino American author and activist Carlos Bulosan and the emerging field of
Filipino American Studies might offer new ways of developing racial literacy in a “post-racial” United States.
During my undergraduate years at Oberlin College in the 1990s, I found myself involved in
passionate discussions with classmates about the function of intellectuals in society. At that time we
were involved in a national student movement to establish Asian American and US Ethnic Studies
programs in colleges and universities east of California. This involved the occupation of buildings

Cabusao
Decolonizing Knowledges
and the formation of teach-ins and hunger strikes. Our student organizing on the Oberlin campus
provided hard-won opportunities to invite renowned intellectuals, academics, and activists to our
campus for discussion: Ronald Takaki, Cornel West, Angela Davis, Delia Aguilar, Yuri Kochiyama,
E. San Juan, Jr., Ward Churchill, Elaine Brown, Bhairavi Desai, Edward Said, Evelyn Hu-DeHart,
Urvashi Vaid, Karin Aguilar-San Juan, and bell hooks (On Strike!; Kochiyama appendix 18; Cabusao
“The Social Responsibility”). Within and outside of the classroom, we engaged a variety of writers
who provided different approaches to examining the function of race in US society from Toni
Morrison to Carlos Bulosan. Some of us engaged the writings of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha
in search of theoretical tools to help us make sense of the world. A running joke among student
activists who were assigned Homi Bhabha was: “Yeah, Homi Bhabha is his name. But is Homi really
your homey?” This kind of response to Bhabha’s writing was symptomatic of a noticeable gap—
within some forms of postcolonial scholarship—between theoretical articulations of “speechless”
subalterns and the harsh material realities of US racialized Others coming to terms with the
Winter of Civil Rights in an age of neoliberal globalization: corporate attack on worker’s rights,
the intensification of racialized poverty across the nation, and a rollback on Affirmative Action
programs (Omatsu; Drucker; Duggan; Wolff).
Now as a teacher, I’ve become very aware of the contradictions of knowledge production
within the contemporary academy. Oftentimes an institution’s commitment to socially engaged and
innovative intellectual production (especially in the humanities) is at odds with its commitment to
its financial well being, especially at this time of severe financial crisis with nearly twenty percent
unemployed in the United States (“A Superpower in Decline”; O’Hara; Chapman and Kelderman).
A variety of institutions are now in the process of eliminating their liberal arts programs or
redefining liberal arts to include some form of professional training as a way to attract more
students who are interested in programs that will eventually pay off with a job after graduation
(McSpadden). What this process of redefinition means is that liberal arts are to be restructured
within the context of job training. Although I understand the circumstances (the extreme pressure
placed on young people who must grapple with the increasing costs of a college education), I can’t
help but feel alarmed at the ways in which students are increasingly positioned as consumers
instead of producers of knowledge. Faculty members themselves become commodified and
the knowledges they produce reified. Today, graduate education in the humanities is also in
the process of rethinking and “re-branding” itself for the 21st century (“Graduate Humanities
Education”).
The combination of a deep financial crisis, the destruction and privatization of public
education, the emergence of a consumer model of higher education in the age of neoliberal
globalization, and the absence of sustained mass movements for social change has created the

Cabusao
context for what US cultural critic Lewis Gordon calls the “market colonization of intellectuals.”
What Gordon means is that academics are trained – pressured – to “align the university with the
sociology and norms of the market.” The privatization of the academy and the subsequent rise of
a managerial academic class have created the conditions within which academics produce their
work. What Gordon means when he says that “[m]arket potentiality governs [what academics]
produce” is that the view of what’s possible—specifically the possibility of connecting academic
inquiry with sustained public intellectual engagement—has become severely limited. According to
Gordon, one consequence of the market colonization of the humanities is the privileging of form
over content or the “appearance of education through textual familiarity” (technique or “textual
marketability”) over “research that challenges texts, produces new kinds, and may even transcend
textual virtuosity” (innovative knowledge production). Another consequence is the silencing of a
rich tradition of intellectual dissent that has informed the development of various interdisciplinary
fields such as African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, Lesbian and Gay
Studies, and Cultural Studies. Gordon cites several examples of engaged public intellectuals that
might offer useful alternative narratives for developing a socially engaged humanities: W.E.B.
DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Gordon’s critique, in many ways, builds upon the sentiments of French intellectual historian
Francois Cusset who stated a few years ago in The Chronicle of Higher Education that “one of the
saddest things about the immediate post-9/11 climate in the United States’ public space” was the
fact that intellectuals, theorists and “campus radicals didn’t have much to say about George W.
Bush, Iraq, terror, national pride, and global democracy, apart from a distant feeling of horror
and disarray.” At this year’s annual conference of the American Historical Association, a panel
discussion was organized to address the silence of historians on the global “war on terror.” Peter
Schmidt at the Chronicle highlighted history professor Carolyn Eisenberg’s comments at the event:
“a great number of historians are profoundly at odds with the thrust of the ‘war on terror’ but their
opposition ‘has scarcely registered in the public debate – it is barely a peep.”
When I think of hard-hitting public intellectuals who have critiqued the US war on Iraq, it’s
difficult for me to think of many coming from the contemporary academy. I think of investigative
journalists like Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges, Amy Goodman, or progressive sportswriter David
Zirin. There are, of course, those of an earlier generation like Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis,
Terry Eagleton, and the late Howard Zinn. Promising developments exist among a few younger
academics, which must be nurtured and sustained. Asian Americanist Vijay Prashad and political
scientist Melissa Harris Lacewell in the United States and feminist philosopher Nina Power in the
United Kingdom are examples of those who have combined innovative knowledge production with
their engagement with traditions of intellectual dissent.

Cabusao
With regard to Filipino American public intellectuals, I’m hard-pressed to think of a

handful. There are, of course, E. San Juan, Jr. and Delia Aguilar who continue to write, lecture, and
mentor young people. But who are the public intellectuals among younger Filipinos? There is the
conservative commentator Michelle Malkin. If we count Malkin, how about Manny Pacquiao? Or
Oprah’s favorite Filipina singer Charice Pempengco? I’m being a bit facetious here. To be sure,
progressive minded Filipino intellectuals exist within the academy. My point is that we must be
critical of the larger context within which a new generation of Asian Americanists and Filipino
academics is conditioned to produce knowledge – a context that prevents progressive minded
academics from developing and nurturing a collective approach to innovative intellectual and
creative production that draws on traditions of intellectual dissent.
REFLECTIONS ON CARLOS BULOSAN AND ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES:

INSTITUTIONALIZATION WITHIN THE ACADEMIC INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
One of our most prominent Filipino public intellectuals is Carlos Bulosan (1911-1956), a
prolific writer of essays, poems, and fiction and a major figure of American, Asian American, and
Philippine literary canons.1 In this section, I’d like to explore a connection between the market
colonization of Carlos Bulosan in the academy and the market colonization—or institutionalization
of—Asian American Studies. Carlos Bulosan provides a point of departure into a brief examination
of different methodologies of reading Filipino agency and subjectivity in Asian American Studies.
I’ll end by offering a few suggestions for engaging Bulosan as a model for producing decolonized
intellectual work.
Through World War II, Bulosan worked on some of his most widely recognized works:
Laughter of My Father (1944), a satirical indictment of Philippine class society, and America is in the
Heart (1946), his classic “ethno-biographical” testament to the resourcefulness and militancy of
the Philippine peasantry and Filipino workers. Bulosan occupied a prominent position on the US
Cultural Left as well as in the popular imagination of the American public.2 Though blacklisted
in the United States and by CIA-supported Philippine President Magsaysay, Bulosan reaffirmed
his political and artistic vision during the Cold War period. In 1949, he defended the rights of
Filipino labor organizers charged for membership in the Communist Party, USA.3 In 1952, Bulosan
edited the International Longshoreman’s and Warehousemen’s Union, Local 37 Yearbook (Seattle), which
includes a passionate call to release imprisoned Philippine-based poet/labor union leader Amado V.
Hernandez. Around 1955, inspired by Luis Taruc’s Born of the People (1953), Bulosan wrote The Cry
and the Dedication, which dramatizes the anti-imperialist Huk peasant insurgency in the Philippines.
It was posthumously published and edited by E. San Juan, Jr. in 1977 and 1995.4

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Given Bulosan’s rich history of involvement in working class struggles, I’m very concerned
about the ways in which Bulosan has been read and remembered in the academy. Here I think of
two literary anthologies that I’ve looked at for my courses in literature and Asian American Studies:
Paul Lauter’s Heath Anthology of American Literature (contemporary period from 1945 to the present)
and Jessica Hagedorn’s updated Charlie Chan is Dead 2: At Home in the World. In Lauter’s 2010
edition, two chapters from part two of America is in the Heart are included. Bulosan is remembered
primarily as an immigrant who, although subjected to multiple forms of racist violence, continues
in his determination to make something of himself in America (the Asian American model minority
in the making). While Lauter’s selection introduces readers to the Filipino migrant experience in
the United States (students are exposed to an inventory of racial and class inequalities from the
perspective of the protagonist), Hagedorn’s selected piece titled “Homecoming” commemorates
Bulosan primarily as an exile yearning for home. The protagonist of “Homecoming” returns to the
Philippines scarred and broken after years of brutal racist violence in the United States as a migrant
worker.
Whether it’s the postwar American literary canon or the post 9/11 Asian American literary
canon, the figure of Bulosan as dissenting public intellectual is silenced either through the
obscuring of the history of the US colonization of the Philippines (the conditions of possibility
for the migration of Filipino workers and for the racialized exploitation of Filipinos in the United
States ) or the ahistorical framing and juxtaposing of Bulosan with contemporary Asian American
writing that envisions empowerment through consumption and sexual desire/pleasure. I do,
however, applaud Lauter and Hagedorn for including Bulosan in their anthologies. Their challenge
of including Bulosan opens a space to consider larger challenges that confront all of us within
American, Asian American, and Filipino/Philippine Studies: 1) the project of confronting and
critiquing a history of US Empire (the Philippines was a colony of the United States beginning
in 1899 and continues as a US neocolony); and 2) the project of exploring a history of Filipino
intellectual dissent, progressive working class struggle, and sustained collective struggle for
Philippine national sovereignty.
INTERROGATING THE CULTURALIZATION OF RESISTANCE
When I was assigned Hagedorn’s anthology Charlie Chan is Dead (first edition) in an
undergraduate Asian American literature course in the early 1990s, I was elated. I felt empowered
because it spoke to my own experiences of marginalization as an Asian American/Filipino
American college student who desired new ways of reading US literature and society. What’s
stunning about Hagedorn’s collection is its representation of an extremely rich diversity of voices

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(differences) within the Asian American literary community. While the collection was useful for my
own process of identity formation and intellectual development, I soon yearned for other notions
of empowerment (especially as the sounds of a youthful anti-globalization movement entered our
classrooms)—an empowerment beyond affirmation of my multiple intersecting identities (race,
class, gender, sexuality).
Hagedorn’s approach to categorizing Asian American literature organized around the
notion of “differences within” resonates with the theoretical assumptions of a key essay titled
“Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity: Asian American Differences” (1991) by Asian
American cultural theorist Lisa Lowe.5 This pioneering essay in the field of Asian American Studies
(one of the first in the 1990s to concretize a cultural materialist analysis of Asian American cultural
production) “emphasizes the gender, class, and cultural differences within the Asian American
community.” Lowe challenges the essentialism of US racism that obscures the differences within the
broad Asian American community and seeks to develop an understanding of how Asian American
differences could be used to create new forms of pan-Asian ethnic solidarity in a post-Civil Rights
era.6
A central concept for Lowe is material hybridity, which is an attempt to connect an analysis
of culture with an analysis of capitalism. Material hybridity is the convergence of two processes.
The “material” part of material hybridity highlights unequal social relations of power within
capitalism. The “hybridity” part highlights strategies of “living, inventing, and reproducing
different cultural alternatives.” One example that Lowe uses to illustrate the idea of material
hybridity is the “racial and linguistic mixings in the Philippines and among Filipinos in the United
States,” which function as the “material trace of the history of Spanish colonialism, US colonization,
and US neocolonialism” (428). Lowe affirms the cultural (racial and linguistic) diversity (hybridity)
within Philippine society and among Filipino Americans as that which “marks the history of
survival within relationships of unequal power and domination.” An affirmation, however, of
cultural hybridity (difference) as a mode of survival (form of agency) within Philippine society and
among Filipino Americans without an engagement with the history of subaltern struggles within
the Philippines for national sovereignty inadvertently gives more power to colonialism in shaping
Filipino identity and culture than it deserves. If Bulosan as dissenting public intellectual is forgotten
under the sign of sexual pleasure in Hagedorn’s anthology, the Filipino people’s struggle for
national sovereignty (as an alternative form of existence) is silenced (and deferred) under the sign
of difference/cultural hybridity in Lowe’s project.
According to feminist theorist Teresa Ebert, Lowe’s material hybridity can be read as a form
of discursive materialism “grafted onto deconstruction” (see also Mojab). What this means is that,
given the theoretical underpinnings of “material hybridity” and deconstruction, the very system of

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capitalism itself is reduced to a closed text within which a critique of its contradictions is produced.
An immanent critique (a critique produced from within the closed confines of a text) can only
destabilize and disrupt the dominant ideologies that give shape and form to a text; however, it can
not create an alternative beyond the text.
The assumptions of Lowe’s “material hybridity” are advanced in another key text in Asian
American Studies by Yen Le Espiritu titled Home Bound (2003), a sociological study on the various
ways in which Filipino Americans attempt to claim a home within a country that continues to
sustain neocolonial relations with the Philippines. In her study, she challenges the dominant mode
of knowledge production within immigration studies. This is one that is individualist and places
the “immigration problem” onto immigrants themselves (6-7). In an attempt to produce a systemic
critique of global capitalism, Espiritu develops the idea of a “critical transnational perspective.”
According to Espiritu, a “critical transnational perspective” focuses on “the global structures of
inequality” that shape “Asian immigration and Asian American lives in the United States” (5).
On one hand, Espiritu is concerned with the materiality of global capitalism and imperialism; on
the other, she posits “immigration [as] a cultural system … that naturalizes unequal patterns of
mobility and uneven integration into the nation” (208).
What’s at issue here is that the “global structures of inequality” are themselves reduced
to a closed cultural text within which everyday forms of survival of Filipino Americans in San
Diego, California (creating communities, homes, and complex transnational identities within an
inhospitable, racist environment) are read to deconstruct, destabilize, and denaturalize global
capitalism and imperialism as totalizing forces on the lives of people of color.
By living their lives across borders, Filipino immigrants, in effect, are challenging
the nation-state’s attempt to localize them; that is, to mold them into acceptable and
“normal” subjects. As such, Filipino transnational activities must be understood in
part as an act of resistance. (Espiritu 212)
In her admirable desire to resist positioning Filipinos as complete victims and to grant them
some form of agency, Espiritu reads global capitalism through the lens of “scattered hegemonies,”
a network of power that is also culturalized—“modes of representation are themselves forms of
power rather than mere reflections of power” (201). To be sure, hegemony is never totalizing;
however, if power is diffuse and culturalized (discursive materialism), then resistance emerges
along similar lines (destabilization from within): it’s dispersed, scattershot, individualist, and
within every existing interstices. In other words, everyday acts of getting by (survival) within global
capitalism are read and affirmed as resistance.

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Despite the culturally deterministic moments in her analysis, I appreciate Espiritu’s effort
to bring attention to the Filipino community in San Diego. One of the extremely useful aspects
of Espiritu’s text is its reminding us of the global context within which US racism functions.
For example, the racialization of Filipinos is a process that is intertwined with the US colonial
occupation of the Philippines. Also, I’d like to acknowledge Espiritu’s opening a space to examine
new forms of subject making among Filipino American youth and students in California.
In her final chapter, she interviews three young Filipino American women who, in the
late 1990s, were radicalized by the Philippine Integration/Exposure Program “hosted by the
Los Angeles-based League of Filipino Students” (218). Espiritu sheds light on the new forms of
identity that these young women were able to create once exposed to the concrete conditions and
various forms of activism in the Philippines: “the young women were most inspired and awed by
the level of activism and political consciousness exhibited by the people and organizations in the
Philippines” (220). Many young people who participate in the Integrate/Exposure Program hosted
by the League of Filipino Students are able to work closely with social justice organizations in the
Philippines committed to national sovereignty.
The information that Espiritu gathers about these women’s experiences in the Philippine
Integration/Exposure Program is extremely rich: working with indigenous organizations, urban
workers, peasant farmers. What occurs, however, in her analysis is a privileging of the process of
identity formation—specifically the formation of transnational identity—as a form of resistance
within global capitalism. What’s highlighted is the women’s ability, upon returning to the
United States from the Integrate/Exposure Program in the Philippines, to affirm their racialized
and gendered identities (“to claim a ‘sense of ownership’ over one’s Pinay identity”) and to
reconceptualize their sense of belonging to the United States and to the Philippines, both of which
eventually lead all three to become committed to US-based social struggles for change. These
developments are positioned as “new ways of living, seeing, and fighting … the tools of home
making,” while the question of Philippine self determination (as a key to imagining an alternative
beyond the text, imagining home making beyond capitalism) is marginalized and deferred. To be
fair, Espiritu provides detailed information about the vibrant connection between the Integrate/
Exposure Program and the mass movement for Philippine national sovereignty. Unfortunately,
this information is found in her endnotes to the chapter and not fully integrated into her analysis
of how these young women are creating new forms of Pinay subjectivities (245-46). The US
neocolonial subjugation and violent containment of the movement for Philippine sovereignty,
which has intensified in our post 9/11 era, cannot be disconnected from Filipino Americans’
yearning for identity, home, and belonging.
What’s at stake in my critique here is the ability to understand the world that we inhabit so

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that we can change and transform it – not just destabilize it from within with forms of discursive
materialism. What’s interesting to me is that the young Filipino American women who returned to
the Philippines attempted to do what Bulosan did in his writings, which is to connect the struggles
of oppressed people in the United States with subaltern struggles in the Philippines. This particular
form of global cognitive mapping may help us come to grips with the contours of the contemporary
Filipino diaspora.
The Philippines has a population of over 90 million attempting to survive within a society
that’s literally falling apart due to US military and economic intervention, the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and various Structural Adjustment Programs (San Juan On the
Presence of Filipinos; Aguilar “Class Considerations”). Over nine million Filipinos are scattered
around the world as Overseas Contract Workers (OCWs). Approximately 70% are women.
Each day an average of four Overseas Contract Workers, branded as “supermaids,” return in
coffins to an increasingly militarized Philippines that has witnessed, over the years, the return
of US troops under the Visiting Forces Agreement and the intensification of the global “war on
terrorism” (San Juan On the Presence of Filipinos; Aguilar “Class Considerations,” “Imperialism”;
Modern Heroes).7 Massive abuses (from imprisonment to death) of progressive human rights
activists from various sectors of Philippine society (youth and students, teachers, lawyers, clergy,
indigenous communities, workers and peasants) occurred daily under the Arroyo administration
(Macapagal). Since 2001 in the Philippines, over 1000 lives have been claimed by extrajudicial
violence (KARAPATAN; People’s IOM).8 The situation has not improved under the new Aquino
administration (Roxas).
On other side of the diaspora, we find that Filipino Americans live a contradictory existence
as one of the largest Asian Pacific American groups; yet, their history, culture, and identities are
rendered almost invisible. (Several semesters ago, one of my most intellectually curious students
asked to meet with me. In the email message, I was asked two questions: What are your office
hours? How do you identify in terms of race?) Filipino Americans, as ethnically indeterminate
Others, are invisible on one hand, yet targeted by the state on the other: approximately 85,000
Filipinos have been racially profiled and targeted for deportation under the USA Patriot Act (San
Juan On the Presence of Filipinos ). In a corporatized, consumer culture, Filipino Americans have
struggled to create a link between the formation of identity (politics of representation within the
United States) and the formation of a genuinely independent Philippines (politics of redistribution
within a global context).
FROM TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY FORMATION TO GLOBAL FORMS OF RESISTANCE
I’d like to highlight a significant development among young Filipino American academics

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and intellectuals, which opens a space for us to reflect upon ways of transforming academic
scholarship into forms of intellectual dissent—of challenging the market colonization of the field
by acknowledging the significance of collective forms of resistance. The Critical Filipina & Filipino
Studies Collective (CFFSC), “a group of scholars and activists seeking to interrogate and challenge
the legacies of Empire (US and Spanish Imperialisms) for past and present communities both in the
Philippines and in the Filipino diaspora,” was formed in California in response to the global “war
on terror,” specifically its consequences on the everyday lives of Filipinos in the United States and
in the Philippines.9 Members of the CFFSC have been involved in various campaigns to support
Filipino immigrants targeted for deportation, Filipino American activists blacklisted by the US and
Philippine governments, and campaigns to expose massive human rights abuses by the Philippine
government.10
The CFFSC’s critical analysis of the global “war on terror” challenges us to reflect upon
how the legacy of US Empire gives shape to contemporary forms of domestic and international
racism. Their work in the early and mid-2000s resonates with the ways in which scholars, artists,
and intellectuals in other fields such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Critical Theory were
challenging, at that time, the market colonization of intellectual production by questioning existing
theoretical paradigms. African American feminist writer bell hooks and Chicana feminist artist
Amalia Mesa-Bains in Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism (2006) argue that the reality of post
9/11 forms of racism within the United States and its connection with the US occupation of Iraq
“call into question all of our academic theories about postcoloniality” (132). Mesa-Bains states,
“we’re not ‘over’ colonialism. Just think about the undocumented workers who died on 9/11; their
names were never added to any lists, and their families were never given any reparation” (hooks
and Mesa-Bains 132). Literary theorist Terry Eagleton in After Theory (2003) questions how the
institutionalization and professionalization of “theory” have led to the erasure of class analysis and
the rise of forms of historical amnesia regarding the contributions of mass movements for social
change in the Global North and South. In “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?” (2004),
theorist Fredric Jameson pushes against the idea that we’ve reached the “end” of theory and argues
for the necessity of developing theories that illuminate the process of creating collective forms of
subjectivity.
In summer 2004, Robyn Rodriguez and Nerissa Balce, two members of the CFFSC,
published an essay titled “American Insecurity and Radical Filipino Community Politics” in
the Peace Review. This was one of the first essays produced by a younger generation of Filipino
American scholars that pushed against the historical amnesia that informed dominant approaches
(discursive materialism) in Asian American cultural studies by acknowledging the significance
of collective forms of resistance and subject making. In addition to examining the everyday lived

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experiences of Filipino Americans in a post 9/11 landscape (from Filipino airport screeners to the
case of conscientious objector Stephen Funk), they highlight the ways in which Filipino American
activists are able to connect the US occupation of Iraq with the long history of US-Philippines
colonial and neocolonial relations.
Rodriguez and Balce document creative forms of anti-war protest and progressive Filipino
community formations that enabled Filipino Americans to bridge their experiences of racial
profiling with the political repression in the Philippines—from a vibrant “People’s Choir” that
performed songs/chants of global solidarity at multiple anti-war rallies in San Francisco to the
development of Filipinos for Global Justice Not War Coalition, a broad network of Filipino “campus
and community-based youth organizations, human rights organizations [supporting the rights of
the people of the Philippines], immigrant worker organizations, and scholars’ groups” (137). They
argue that these progressive Filipino community formations build upon a legacy of struggle from
an earlier generation of Filipino labor organizers in the United States that forged connections with
movements in the Philippines. Rodriguez and Balce state,
By the second half of the 1930s, as Filipino laborers were organizing farm workers
strikes in California and across the United States, Filipino peasant farmers in Central
Luzon organized chapters of the National Society of Peasants in the Philippines
(Katipunang Pambansa ng mga Magsasaka sa Pilipinas), which staged farmers’
strikes, pickets, rallies, and even armed uprisings in the Philippine countryside. (139)
Rodriguez and Balce interpret these forms of global cognitive mapping of two generations
of Filipinos—the Manong generation of the 1930s and post 9/11 Filipino American activists—as
transnational Filipino radicalism. Unlike Espiritu’s “critical transnational perspective” that brackets
the question of Philippine sovereignty in her theorization of Filipino American identity, Rodriguez
and Balce see grassroots struggles for racial and economic justice in the United States and the
struggle for Philippine national sovereignty as inextricably interconnected and central to the
process of “becoming Filipino”—of creating forms of collective Filipino subjectivity.11
Dylan Rodriguez, another member of the CFFSC, published an essay titled “The Significance
of 15 March 2005: On the Bagong Diwa Prison Massacre” in Left Curve (2005) that examines the case
of twenty two Filipino Muslim prisoners who, as a response to their rebellion against inhuman
treatment within the prison system, were murdered by the Philippine National Police “[a]ided
by US-trained Philippine paramilitary and SWAT-style units” (20). Advancing the notion of
transnational Filipino radicalism in Robyn Rodriguez and Nerissa Balce’s essay, Dylan Rodriguez
urges diasporic Filipinos to develop a “kinship of captivity” that will enable them to become

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critical of the ways in which the US prison industrial complex, in its global expansion as part of the
“war on terror” (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo), has reemerged in new forms in the Philippines, a US
neocolony, under the Arroyo administration. This transnational Filipino radicalism (Rodriguez’s
“kinship of captivity”) can also be discerned in the popular culture of Filipino Americans. For
example, Blue Scholars, a hip hop duo at the forefront of the underground Filipino American hip
hop scene, have situated the everyday lived experiences of working class Filipino Americans within
the context of the anti-war organizing efforts of Filipino American youth and students across the
country. In the song “Back Home” (2007), they give voice to the experiences of Filipino and other
working class communities that have sent their children to Iraq. Michael Viola’s excellent essay
“Filipino American Hip Hop and Class Consciousness: Renewing the Spirit of Carlos Bulosan”
explores the ways in which other Filipino American hip hop artists such as Kiwi and Bambu not
only advance this notion of transnational Filipino radicalism but also engage the specificity of
Carlos Bulosan’s unique tradition of Filipino intellectual dissent.12
TRANSFORMATIVE KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION: LIBERATING BULOSAN AND

SUSTAINING AN INSURGENT FILIPINO DIASPORIC IMAGINATION
The formation of the CFFSC is a significant development among Filipino American

academics for its commitment to examining the formation of collective Filipino subjectivity as a
process of struggle for Filipino self determination in the Philippines and throughout the diaspora.
The CFFSC’s interrogation of US Empire, specifically US-Philippines neocolonial relations, opens a
space for reassessing Carlos Bulosan’s work and life in ways that might be useful in challenging the
market colonization of intellectual production that has become the hallmark of the contemporary
academy. Here I’d like to highlight three dimensions of Bulosan’s literary vision for further
exploration in our work as teachers, scholars, and activists.
1) Bulosan’s “Filipino subject-in- revolt”: on race, class, and empire
If the figures of the assimilating immigrant or the homesick exile are privileged by Paul
Lauter and Jessica Hagedorn’s anthologies, it’s the figure of the Filipino as subject-in-revolt that’s
central to Bulosan’s America is in the Heart. E. San Juan, Jr. defines the Filipino as subject-in-revolt in
the following passage from his essay “In Search of Filipino Writing: Reclaiming Whose ‘America’?”:
Called “little brown brothers,” barbaric “yellow bellies,” “scarcely more than
savages,” and other derogatory epithets, Filipinos as subjects-in-revolt have refused

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to conform to the totalizing logic of white supremacy and the knowledge of “the
Filipino” constructed by Orientalizing methods of American scholarship. Intractable
and recalcitrant, Filipinos in the process of being subjugated have confounded US
disciplinary regimes of knowledge production and surveillance. They have challenged
the asymmetrical cartography of metropolis and colony, core and periphery, in
the official world system. Interpellated within the boundaries of empire, Filipinos
continue to bear the marks of three centuries of anticolonial insurgency. (443-44)
Bulosan’s text resists a major convention of naturalism (where the protagonist is a mere
victim of social forces) by bearing witness to the formation of a worker-peasant subjectivity
critical of the unequal colonial relationship between the United States and the Philippines. In
parts one and two of America is in the Heart, Allos is thrust into a “world of brutality and despair”
and is in a “constant flight from fear” in the Philippines and later in the United States. As the text
unfolds, Allos is able to break out of this despair and “flight from fear” by developing a systemic
understanding of the social forces that have shaped and distorted his life. Later in the narrative
(parts three and four), Allos immerses himself in the US labor movement and creates friendships
with radical Filipino labor organizers who “bear the marks of … anticolonial insurgency” (who
sustain memories of peasant revolts in the Philippines) and with progressive white labor organizers
who understand that the process of abolishing their possessive investment in whiteness is essential
to forging working class solidarity across racial boundaries. Allos’ participation in the multiethnic
US labor movement gives new meaning to the struggles of the Philippine peasantry during his
childhood (part one of the narrative).
Part one of the text can be read as Allos’ (and Bulosan’s) homecoming, a return to the
Philippines to recover a tradition of peasant revolt and insurgency, which also functions as a
prelude to Bulosan’s later novel The Cry and the Dedication. The entire narrative can be read as
Bulosan’s imaginative theorization of collective Filipino subjectivity that is only possible by
grasping the interconnectedness of complex class struggles in the Philippines and the United States.
As the narrative unfolds, the narrator learns through ideological and material struggle to fuse his
multiple identities—Allos/Carlos/Carl as subject-in-revolt—that evoke different moments in time
in the Philippines and the United States. Bulosan’s radical internationalist—or global—perspective
was influenced by some of the most militant Filipino American labor organizers who integrated
radical traditions of subaltern struggles from the Philippines into the multiethnic labor movement:
Pedro Calosa (who led the 1931 Tayug peasant revolt in the Philippines), Pablo Manlapit, Danny
Roxas, Chris Mensalvas, Ernesto Mangaoang, Ponce Torres, Casimiro Bueno Absolor, and Joe
Prudencio.

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2) Bulosan’s “Filipino subject-in- revolt”: on gender and class in the Global South
In his skillful introduction to a collection of Bulosan’s short stories, essays, and letters
titled On Becoming Filipino (1995), E. San Juan, Jr. provides insightful comments on the short story
“Passage into Life,” which illuminate Bulosan’s method of dramatizing the processes by which
the Filipino subject achieves class consciousness (19). “Passage into Life” is a series of vignettes
in which the young protagonist of poor peasant origins, also named Allos, comes to terms with
various class conflicts of Philippine society.13 One dimension of Bulosan’s imaginative theorization
of the Filipino subject-in-revolt that has gained attention by other scholars in recent years is a class
analysis of women’s oppression and exploitation in the Philippines (Alquizola and Hirabayashi;
Higashida). I’d like to build upon San Juan’s comments by shifting our focus to gender and class
in order to consider the contributions of “Passing into Life” to the formation of “Third World”
feminism.14
“Passage into Life” dramatizes the interconnectedness of gender and class in Philippine
society. In one vignette, Allos’ sister Marcia sits by her window every day until midnight waiting
for a husband. He notices how this process has dehumanized Marcia by reducing her to her
exchange-value on the marriage market: “Her eyes were lifeless when she looked at [Allos]” (55).
When he asks his mother why it’s difficult for Marcia to find a husband, she responds, “Because we
are poor, son … Nobody wants to marry a poor girl” (55). Upon acknowledging this reality, Allos
is compelled to question the world: he “rushed out of the house wondering why there were poor
people.” Allos’ observations and his mother’s response situate the specificity of Marcia’s experience
within a larger context—it is through gender (as a social relation) that Marcia experiences class
oppression and exploitation in Philippine society.
Bulosan’s examination of women’s oppression in Philippine society anticipates the feminist
movement and the creation of women’s organizations such as MAKIBAKA in the late 1960s/early
1970s, which advanced the national sovereignty movement. In the 1980s, Filipina feminist scholar
and activist Delia Aguilar began the groundbreaking task of concretizing an historical materialist
critique of women’s oppression and exploitation within Philippine society. In dialogue with fellow
activists and cultural workers in the Philippines, Aguilar encouraged a dialectical approach to
analyzing the economic exploitation and ideological oppression of women. She highlights the
contributions of Marxist Feminists in the following:
[Marxist Feminists] argue that the oppression of women and the sexual division of
labor are entrenched in capitalist relations of production and must be analyzed in this
light, stressing that Marxism must take into account women’s domestic labor, their

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role as poorly paid workers in the labor force, and the familial ideology that heightens
their oppression. (“Four Interventions” in San Juan’s Filipina Insurgency 172)
Merely transforming the economic base is not enough. Sustaining the two ends of this
dialectic—gendered exploitative social relations of production and patriarchal ideology—is crucial
for understanding women’s oppression and exploitation. This kind of analysis is necessary not only
for the full participation of women in the Philippine movement for national sovereignty but also for
the total and complete emancipation of women.
In vignette ten of “Passage into Life,” we learn that there is “one thing that drove Allos to
thinking, and it was watching his mother work all day and half of the night” (53). The vignette
provides a lengthy and detailed inventory of the non-wage domestic labor that his mother must
perform on a daily basis. She awakens at five in the morning to prepare breakfast. She cleans the
house and begins to wash the laundry at the river—all before noon. She then prepares lunch and
returns to the river to continue the wash. By evening, she prepares dinner and cleans up afterwards.
When all family members are asleep, she irons the day’s laundry by lamplight. By midnight, she
retires only to awaken at five to repeat the labor intensive cycle. When Allos discovers that his
mother has seriously injured her knee while carrying a large basket of vegetables to the market,
he approaches a crisis in his worldview. His mother’s cries of excruciating pain compel Allos to
question the existence and purpose of God and humanity. Allos becomes cognizant of the ways in
which his mother’s productive and reproductive labor provide the necessary sustenance for the
entire family.15 Traumatized by the thought of losing his mother, Allos begins to distance himself
from the oppressive ideologies of two patriarchal ideological state apparatuses—the church and the
family.
In another vignette, in a desperate attempt to save his father’s life, Allos runs to his wealthy
cousin’s house for assistance. Without speaking a word, the cousin throws a dime at Allos and
speeds off with his wife in their expensive car. As his father dies, Allos “pick[s] up the small silver
dime,” which symbolizes the exchange value of his father’s life, and “look[s] at it for a long time”
(57). The death of his father is followed by two vignettes in which Allos encounters a stranger who
tells him that death is not the end: “No one is really an orphan as long as there is another man
living. As long as there is one man living and working and thinking on earth.” The stranger escorts
Allos to the top of a mountain where he encounters “an impenetrable darkness … a silence that
had no voice… and [he] knew at last that there was a life without end.” This moment of distancing
crystallizes the narrative’s process of denaturalizing the oppressive and exploitative ideologies of
Philippine class society, which Allos questions throughout. In other words, Allos, now critically
distanced from patriarchal and religious ideologies, is able to see that the collective human struggle

Cabusao
for new forms of social organization and new forms of subjectivity will sustain the memory of
his father. This struggle will enable Allos to recover the true meaning (use value) of his father’s
life in relation to the lives of other members of his family who have suffered under the conditions
of a semi-feudal society. Toward the end of the short story, Allos emerges with a new form of
consciousness:
Now Allos knew: there in the known world he must go to seek a new life, seek it
among the living until he would have enough time to pause and ponder on the
mystery of the dead. (58-59)16
In addition to the disintegration of the patriarchal family system, it is Allos’ unique

sensitivity toward women’s oppression (which is central to his developing class consciousness in
the narrative) that enables him to grasp the international scope of the stranger’s call for solidarity—
to venture beyond familial and national boundaries in order to seek others with whom he may
struggle so that those very inhuman conditions that took the life of his father and destroyed the
lives of his mother and sister might be radically transformed.
3) Bulosan’s “Filipino subject-in- revolt”: on culture and public intellectual work
It is within the context of forging international solidarity between workers in the United
States and workers and peasants in the Philippines that Bulosan developed into a Filipino subject-
in-revolt. While his imaginative writings (novels, short stories, and poems) dramatize the collective
Filipino experience in the United States and in the Philippines, his essays and letters offer insight
into his ability to theorize cultural production and the function of the public intellectual. Essays
such as the “The Growth of Philippine Culture” and “Filipino Writers in a Changing World” lay
out Bulosan’s approach to producing and engaging literature and culture as part of the national
struggle for Philippine independence. For Bulosan, literature is a realm within which women
and men attempt to make sense of the contradictions of class society. In his essay “The Writer as
Worker,” Bulosan explains the function of the writer (or intellectual) in society. His theorization
of the function of writers as public intellectuals is framed within a larger understanding of the
dynamic relationship between cultural production and social transformation.
Culture [is] a social product … Since any social system is forced to change to another
by concrete economic forces, its art changes … also to be recharged, reshaped, and
revitalized by the new conditions. Thus, if the writer has any significance, [he] should

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write about the world in which he lives: interpret his time and envision the future
through his knowledge of historical reality… My making as a writer and poet is not
mysterious, neither was I gifted by an unknown power. It was hard work and hard
living. Suffering, loneliness, pain, hunger, hate, joy, happiness, pity, compassion—all
these factors make me a writer. Plus, of course, my tenderness, my affection toward
everything that lives. Plus, again, my participation in the people’s fight for peace and
democracy … I don’t care what some writers in the Philippines think of me. That is
their privilege. But I care about what they write, for or against war, for or against life.
(On Becoming Filipino 144)
Sound of Falling Light: Letters in Exile, edited by Dolores Feria and published in the
Philippines in 1960, is another rich resource for students, teachers, and scholars interested in
exploring the formation of Bulosan’s political consciousness and radical literary imagination. In his
correspondence with close friends, Bulosan shares his thoughts on various writers and artists such
as John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Hart Crane, and Paul Robeson as well as his
thoughts on the process of using Philippine history and folklore in his own writings. While many
of the letters shed light on Bulosan’s view of cultural production (“I hope [America is in the Heart]
will help arouse the consciousness of other Filipino writers toward social realities”), others provide
insight into his view of society. Here is an excerpt from his letter to Dorothy Babb in March 1953:
Human life could truly be paradise, in many respects, if the money spent for
destruction were used for the elimination of disease, schools propagating tolerance,
factories for necessary consumer goods, and research centers, clinics, hospitals,
maternity wards, etc. In fact, we should have a Department of Peace in the cabinet,
instead of a Department of War. Hate, greed, selfishness—these are not human nature.
These are weapons of destruction evolved by generations of experimenters in the
service of ruling groups … These destructive elements have finally become so subtle,
so intricate, so deeply rooted in men’s minds in our time, the era of international
finance, that many people sincerely, though ignorantly believe them to be the guiding
forces of nature. (Sound of Falling Light 264)
Bulosan’s call for a Department of Peace and his critique of the commodification of everyday
life (the naturalization of “hate, greed, selfishness”) remain fresh and relevant close to fifty years
after its publication in Feria’s edited collection.
Bulosan continues to be relevant not only because of our current conditions—the market

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colonization of intellectuals, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a decade of human rights
abuses in the Philippines under the global “war on terror”—but also because young Filipino
American intellectuals, academics, artists, and activists are yearning for new ways to create
collective forms of Filipino subjectivities-in-revolt that are inextricably interconnected with
the struggle for Philippine national sovereignty. When we grasp the significance of Bulosan
as a dissenting intellectual, we’ll be able to look at his work as a useful model for decolonizing
intellectual production. The efforts of a new generation of insurgent Filipino intellectuals and artists
to reclaim Bulosan as engaged artist and public intellectual remind us that, borrowing from African
American philosopher and activist Angela Davis, empowerment will remain powerless if structures
and relations of power are not radically transformed.

Cabusao
NOTES
1
“Carlos Bulosan was born almost a decade after brutal US colonization of the Southeast Asian
archipelago (Spanish American War 1898; Filipino American War 1899–1902). Uprooted from the
Philippine countryside, Bulosan joined thousands of Filipino migrant workers on US plantations
(100,000 in Hawaii and 30,000 in California) and in fish canneries along the West Coast during the
Depression era. Arriving in 1930, Bulosan forged an alternative education, as an organic intellectual,
through his involvement in the labor movement. Bulosan “died in poverty and obscurity” in 1956 (see
Amy Ling and King-Kok Cheung in the Heath Anthology of American Literature). Bulosan participated
in the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, and developed a lasting
friendship with Filipino labor organizer Chris Mensalvas. In 1934, he edited the worker’s magazine
The New Tide, which connected him to Sonora Babb, Richard Wright, William Carlos Williams, and
others. Hospitalized in Los Angeles for serious health issues (including tuberculosis) from 1936 to
1938, Bulosan received encouragement from his brother Aurelio, friend Dorothy Babb, and Poetry
editor Harriet Monroe to nurture his craft. He enthusiastically studied a wide variety of authors
including Gorky, Neruda, Tolstoy, Rizal, Bonifacio, and various Marxists literary critics. According
to friend Dolores Feria, Bulosan sharpened his political analysis with issues of New Masses, The New
Republic, and Nation” (Cabusao “Carlos Bulosan”).
2
“[Bulosan] was listed in Who’s Who, and commissioned by President Roosevelt in 1943 to write
‘Freedom from Want,’ which was displayed at the San Francisco Federal Building and published in
the Saturday Evening Post with a Norman Rockwell illustration” (Cabusao “Carlos Bulosan”).
3
Leading Filipino figures of the Local 7, FTA-CIO: Ernesto Mangaoang, Chris Mensalvas, Ponce
Torres, Casimiro Bueno Absolor, and Joe Prudencio.
4
“Scholars and activists continue to reclaim Bulosan’s imagination, which fuses US proletarian
literary aesthetics and Third World subaltern resistance. In the late 1980s, revered Philippine-based
playwright Bienvenido Lumbera created an opera in Filipino, the national language, based on
America is in the Heart. During the 1990s, Bulosan was a prominent subject of dissertations (Timothy
Libretti) and landmark publications in American Studies (Michael Denning) and US Ethnic/Cultural
Studies (E. San Juan, Jr.).” (Cabusao “Carlos Bulosan”).
5
This essay is significant in that it is one of the first major theoretical pieces emerging from Asian
American Studies in the 1990s that, in a sense, Asian Americanized a key concept in British Cultural
Studies—Raymond Williams’ notion of cultural materialism.
6
Heterogeneity is used to “indicate the existence of differences and differential relationships [class,
gender, national origins] within a bounded category.” Hybridity refers to “the formation of cultural
objects and practices that are produced by the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations;”
thus, we can read Asian American cultural production/practices as exhibiting the “marks of the
history of survival within relationships of unequal power and domination.” And, finally, multiplicity
designates “the ways in which subjects located within social relations are determined by several

Cabusao
different axes of power, are multiply determined by the contradictions of capitalism, patriarchy,
and race relations, with particular contradictions surfacing in relation to the material conditions of a
specific historical moment.” Using the concepts of “heterogeneity,” “hybridity,” and “multiplicity,”
Lowe also challenges the limitations of the Asian American Movement of the late 1960s/early 1970s,
its tendency to privilege masculinist cultural nationalist discourses, without abandoning its legacy of
struggle.
7
In her 2002 essay “Imperialism, Female Diaspora, and Feminism,” Aguilar states: “Fully 10% of the
population of 82 million is overseas; 70% of OCWs are women, large numbers serving as domestic
workers for families in 162 countries. These women have been lauded by Presidents Aquino and
Ramos as ‘the country’s new heroines,’ and by Ramos as ‘the Philippines’ contribution to other
countries’ development. Without the remittances these workers send home, $7 billion in 2000, the
government would not have managed its debt-service payments to financial lending agencies. It is a
widely acknowledged fact in the Philippines that the survival of the economy has been made possible
by the remittances of OCWs, which represent the largest source of foreign exchange.”
8
The militarization of the Philippines is connected to other forms of violence, especially against
women. Consider the 2005 Subic Rape case in which a young Filipina (Nicole) in her early twenties
“was gang-raped by four US military servicemen; one of the soldiers was found guilty in a trial …
December [2006], only to be whisked away from a local prison by the US Embassy in the middle of
the night” (Aguilar “Class Considerations”).
9
“Critical Filipino/Filipina Studies Collective (CFFSC), a group of scholars and activists seeking to
interrogate and challenge the legacies of Empire (US and Spanish Imperialisms) for past and present
communities both in the Philippines and in the Filipino diaspora” <http://cffsc.focusnow.org/>;
<http://www.barnard.edu/wmstud/bio_tadiar.html> <http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/sociology/living.
html>.
Vision and goals of the CFFSC: “Since Marcos, many scholars, politicians, and commentators
argue that the Philippines has become more democratic in its government and that social equality has
been decreasing. In contrast, the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective (CFFSC) is compelled
to present evidence that the US, its political and economic allies, and global capitalist interests
dominate in new … ways the Philippine government, society, and economy than ever before.
“As result, this neocolonial domination and the further weakening of the Filipino state have
produced conditions forcing Filipino workers and their families to leave the country and search for
jobs and security. As Filipinos sought work and security elsewhere since the 1970s, they have created
and transformed Filipino communities in Europe, Africa, North America, the Middle East, and other
places in Asia and the Pacific. These diasporic communities nonetheless have faced racism, further
social and economic hardships, and other forms of systemic oppressions.
“Today the Filipino struggle against the global and national elites remains ever more
committed and vigilant, challenging social, economic, and global injustices. Its quests for social
equality and economic justice continues.”
10
See Critical Filipina & Filipino Studies Collective’s “U.S. Government Post 9/11 Actions Threaten

Cabusao
Filipino Immigrant Rights,” which is a pamphlet that includes overview of impact of US Patriot Act
on the Filipino community in the United States as well as information for support and assistance
from the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns/NAFCON and the National Lawyers Guild. See
also Rodriguez and Balce: “In one major campaign, the CFSC [Critical Filipina/o Studies Collective]
introduced an anti-war resolution at the 2003 Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Annual
Meeting in San Francisco, which was successfully passed” (138).
11
Rodriguez and Balce: “Filipino radicalism in America has been transnational in its organization and
consciousness, as Filipinos have worked in solidarity with radical movements of the Philippines
and have articulated their critiques of American domestic policy as linked to the project of U.S.
imperialism” (139).
12
See other hip hop artists such as Suheir Hammad (Palestinian American) and Lupe Fiasco (African
American) who are using the genre of hip hop to critique the global war on terrorism. Hammad’s
“Refugees” powerfully connects the Hurricane Katrina disaster (displacement of African Americans)
with the displacement of Palestinians. See also Lupe Fiasco’s “American Terrorist,” which situates
the notion of “internal colonialism” within the contemporary context of US racism under Homeland
Security.
13
Published in San Juan’s On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan. This short story is
from the personal collection of Dolores Feria.
14
In the introduction to On Becoming Filipino, E. San Juan, Jr. provides some excellent comments on
“Passage into Life.” It is my hope to advance San Juan’s reading by focusing on how this short story
generates a “Third World” materialist feminist critique.
15
Delia Aguilar reminds us that “we need to look at what Marxist economist Lourdes Beneria refers
to as women’s ‘reproductive work,’ that is to say, the sum total of the work performed in the home
setting in which gender division of labor is often distinctly elaborated. What does the woman
do in the home? She not only produces children but also reproduces the social relations and the
existential basis of daily life; and produces and reproduces the working capacity of the wage earner
(increasingly, the category of wage earner includes herself). Household work involves meeting
the needs of the wage worker in tangible (e.g., feeding and clothing him) and in less tangible ways
(servicing the husband’s emotional needs, managing psychological tensions, creating a ‘good family
environment,’ etc.). The woman is responsible for socializing the children congruent with society’s
requirements, her own enactment of what the culture defines as ‘feminine’ and her husband’s playing
his ‘masculine’ role serving as models for them to imitate. In doing so, she also reproduces the social
relations necessary to maintain the hierarchical, gender-based structures of our semi-colonial and
semi-feudal society” (“Four Interventions” in San Juan Filipina Insurgency 180).
16
See also page 19 of the Introduction, San Juan. The urgency underlying the protagonist’s desire to
forge local and international forms of solidarity (“there in the known world he must go to seek a
new life”) stems from the ways in which the narrative unrelentingly dramatizes (through multiple
vignettes) the (gendered) processes by which poor peasants are exploited as well as complicit in their
own oppression (hegemony through consent). The narrative simultaneously opens a space to theorize

Cabusao
how the peasantry is able to negotiate their collective agency (hegemony is never totalizing).
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Kritika
Ku ltu r a
forum kritika
what, and where, is philippine studies? a response
Charlie Samuya Veric

PhD cand., Yale University
[email protected]
Abstract
The paper responds to the papers on Philippine Studies presented in the 126th MLA Annual Convention. The panel
consists of T. Ruanni F. Tupas, Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao, Cynthia Tolentino, and Vicente L. Rafael. The paper contends
that what is most instructive of these papers is their cogent treatment of Philippine Studies as a problem, a mode
of critical inquiry, more than a field of studies. The paper challenges scholars to explore Philippine Studies in a truly
transnational perspective, to look for Filipino imaginaries beyond the United States, in unexpected sites.
About the author

Charlie Samuya Veric is a PhD candidate, member of the Working Group on Globalization and Culture, and poet. He is the
editor of Anticipating Filipinas and co-editor of Suri at Sipat, and has published in American Quarterly, Rethinking History,
Common Knowledge, and Kritika Kultura, among others. His current projects include a dissertation on the techniques
of the face, which looks at the everyday uses of the face from a postcolonial perspective; a study of planetary forms of
imagination from below; and an English translation of the selected poems of E. San Juan, Jr. He had been educated at
the University of the Philippines and Ateneo de Manila University prior to coming to Yale University for his doctorate
in American studies.
I want to start with a bit of provocation. What exactly, and where, is Philippine studies?
I raise this question in order to imagine what Philippine studies can be like from a transnational
perspective. So, can we divorce the Philippines from its geography and deny the temptation of
turning space into history?
Indeed, the papers inquire into the cultures of Philippine studies as a transnational practice
and limit the contours of a borderless study. But what is most instructive, it seems to me, is how the
papers compel us to see Philippine studies not so much as a field, but rather as a problem, that is, as
a mode of critical inquiry.
For Rafael, for instance, the problem entails the work of making empire visible. The
problem of Philippine studies, in that sense, is a problem of historical and cultural excavation.
For Rafael, moreover, works such as Paul Kramer’s The Blood of Government and Tadiar’s Things
Fall Away embody this kind of work because they not only show the salience of comparative
and transnational scholarship, but also the importance of attending to the nuances of vernacular
experiences.

Veric
What, and Where, is Philippine Studies?
If Rafael suggests the necessity of historical and cultural excavation, Tolentino suggests the
importance of what she calls the work of interpreting the barely apprehended. She explores this
idea by closely reading the film Pinoy Sunday. For her, to read the film is not only to apprehend the
lives of Filipino migrant workers, but also to see the hidden narrative of the end of the American
century in which Taipei displaces Washington as the new site for the dreams of migrant workers
like Manuel and Dado.
Meanwhile, Tupas shows us that the apprehension of the nation is not the sole property of
official Philippine languages such as English and Filipino. The Filipino nation, he suggests, is also
imaginable in other Philippine languages. Here, I think, is where Tupas departs from Rafael and
Tolentino. If Rafael and Tolentino imagine the study of the Philippines as a critical inquiry, Tupas
illustrates that Philippine studies is also, rightly or wrongly, a political project.
It is precisely in this light—in imagining Philippine studies as a political project—that
Cabusao’s paper is able to speak to Tupas’s. That is to say, if Tupas suggests the importance of
recovering the many marginalized mother tongues in the Philippines, Cabusao suggests that the
project of recovering the radical hope of Bulosan’s works in the US should be connected to the
project of self-determination in the Philippines. On the face of it, Tupas and Cabusao’s papers may
seem unrelated. Upon a closer analysis, however, they share a deep affinity, one that has to do
with how multiculturalism in empire, as signified by the battle over the reading of ethnic literature,
actually coincides with linguistic multiculturalism in the postcolony in which regional linguistic
communities contest the legitimacy of the nation by insisting on the utility of marginalized mother
tongues.
Thus, what appear to be unrelated issues—the inclusion of other languages as the medium
of instruction in Philippine schools and the recovery of radical ethnic literary traditions in the
US—are, in fact, mirror images of each other in that both are profoundly inspired by the spirit of
multiculturalism. A connection such as this can only be made, however, if we denaturalize the
boundaries of Philippine studies, that is, if we open the floodgates of transnational inquiry in the
hopes of making unsuspected connections in impossible places.
Indeed, the transnational is invoked in all four papers—say, the movement of ideas between
the US and the Philippines in Rafael and Tolentino, the politics of English in Tupas, and the
transnational legacy of Bulosan in Cabusao. But is Philippine studies really transnational if it deals
almost exclusively with the relations between the Philippines and the US and the languages that
bridge these two polities? What about the Philippines and the rest of the world? The Filipino, after
all, is all over, blanketing the planet.
Ultimately, then, Philippine studies can call itself truly transnational only when its scholars
go beyond the US and start looking for Filipino imaginaries in unexpected sites. So, are we ready

Veric
What, and Where, is Philippine Studies?
for Philippine studies in Dubai, Tokyo, Beijing, Milan, Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Bangkok,
Rio de Janeiro? For Philippine studies in Mandarin, French, German, Swahili, Arabic? Having
started this discussion with a provocation, I wish to end with another provocation.

Kritika
Ku ltu r a
kolum kritika
confession as a narrative mode in gay indie films
Gary C. Devilles
Department of Filipino
[email protected]
Abstract
This paper is interested in confession as a narrative mode of media, specifically gay independent films, and the
specific codes and mechanisms inherent in a confession that enable one to generate pity over the viewing public.
I would discuss four gay indie films, Ang Lalaki sa Parola, Daybreak, Sagwan, and Selda, and look specifically at how
these films use confession in their narration, as a cinematic style to develop their characters, and ultimately as a form
of politics of viewing by which gay films in general become a sort of “public confession” constituting their viewers as
their preferred “confessors.”
Such understanding of confession as a narrative mode therefore will have a bearing on the notion of “independence”
in gay indie films—in particular, how these films advance the cause of being “independent” from mainstream films
oftentimes characterized as commercial and lacking in artistic merits. My point is that confession as a narrative
mode is still not enough and what is considered as a “gay indie” can ultimately be contained within the culture of
homophobia caused by the uneven relations of power between these films and their target audience.
Keywords
contrition, politics of viewing, pornography, recall
About the author

Gary C. Devilles teaches Philippine Literature, Art Appreciation, Literary Criticism, and Political Economy of the Mass
Media at the Ateneo de Manila University.
My decision to keep quiet is not because my brother Noynoy will be sworn in on June
30…Who knows, with the help of science, I may still look good. But then again, six years
from now, maybe I’m the one who’ll be sworn in.
- Kris Aquino on national TV regarding her split with husband James Yap
That said, let me tell you how I personally feel. I recognize that making any such call was
a lapse in judgment. I am sorry. I also regret taking so long to speak before you on this

Devilles
Confession as Narrative Mode
matter. I take full responsibility for my actions and to you and to all those good citizens
who may have had their faith shaken by these events.
- President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on national TV on June 2005
INTRODUCTION
The confession of Kris Aquino about her break up with husband James Yap on national
TV three days before her brother’s proclamation as president of the Philippines is indicative
of how media constructs and influences people’s consciousness. All of the sudden, Kris can
steal the limelight from her brother, and whatever political will or insight that ensues from our
experience of the recent election is oftentimes sidetracked by controversial gossips and news
on personal lives of actors. Kris knows how to handle the media since she has been hosting a
program that generates gossips on media personalities for quite some time. Her confession on
TV therefore should be seen as a media apparatus in itself by which viewers are conditioned to
think about her and by extension, her family. Kris is not the only one who uses confession to her
advantage; former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo uses the television also to confess her
lapse of judgment1 over election protocol almost five years ago. Both Kris and GMA try to win
public consent using specific speech codes and mechanisms that generate pathos for their target
audience.
This paper then is interested in confession as a narrative mode of media, specifically gay
independent films, and the specific codes and mechanisms inherent in a confession that enable
one to generate pity over the viewing public. I would discuss four gay indie films, Ang Lalaki sa
Parola, Daybreak, Sagwan, and Selda and look specifically at how these films use confession in their
narration, as a cinematic style to develop their characters, and ultimately as a form of politics of
viewing by which gay films in general become a sort of “public confession” constituting their
viewers as their preferred “confessors.” Such understanding of confession as a narrative mode
therefore will have a bearing on the notion of “independence” in gay indie films, in particular,
how these films advance the cause of being “independent” from mainstream films oftentimes
characterized as commercial and lacking in artistic merits. My point is that confession as a
narrative mode is still not enough and what is considered as a “gay indie” can ultimately be
contained within the culture of homophobia caused by the uneven relations of power between
these films and their target audience.
CONFESSION AND SUBJECTIVITY
Confession as a religious practice is not unfamiliar to a country where Catholics are

Devilles
majority and had been colonized for almost three centuries by Catholic Spain. For Catholics,
confession is the Sacrament of Penance, a method of the Church by which individual men and
women may confess sins committed and have them absolved by a priest. Only the priests are able
to absolve penitents with their sins and such is the power they wield based on the tradition and
history the Catholic Church.
One of the earliest Catholic manuals on confession is one written by Fray Sebastian Totanes.
His work is instructive as a historical document that records not only his view of Filipinos back then
but also a way of understanding the efficacy of such practice in their lives (73). Such understanding
of the power wielded by priests then and now in extracting truth or demanding confessions will
enable us to understand how we become complicit and enamored by any truth-telling discourse, or
why there is a fascination among Filipinos for controversies and gossips.
Totanes wrote a guideline on how to examine penitents for confessions. Some of the
questions listed in Preambulo de la Confesion are attempts in extracting recent memories of the
penitent such as “Cailan ca nag compisal? (When was your last confession?)” or “Hangan sa huli
mong pagcocompisal, ilan nang taon magpangayon? (Since your last confession, how many years
have passed?)” However, some questions can be extremely probing such as “Ynubus mo cayang
sinaisay ang lahat? (Did you tell everything?)” or “Mey ipinagcaela ca bagang tiquis alin mang
casalanang malaqui doon sa pagcocompisal mong huli? (Is there anything that you withheld in
your last confession?)” (75).
These questions are not only meant to set remorse; they are predicated on a more
fundamental speech in the art of speaking in Christian spirituality and pastoral, namely, Revelation,
such that all manner of speaking must always refer back to these fundamental truth of revealing
or revelation. Since God is truth then it is necessary that men must aspire to these truths and that
truth-telling must somehow be part of their regimen, their Christian upbringing and formation.
Confession therefore is a truth-telling device by which penitents are subjected and taught of
the fundamental speech in Christianity. Totanes further wrote in his guideline, “Ang tunay na
catotohanan (anac co) ang sasabihin mo dito paran naalaman nang P. Dios. Cun totoong iquinahiya,
cun iquinatacot mo sa Pare, at caya di mo ipinagcompisal, sabihin mo: ipinagcaela mong tiquis.
Houag cang mahiya, houag matacot sa aquin. (My child, you tell me only the truth because God
knows everything. If you are ashamed and afraid not to confess, then exert with utmost effort.
Do not be bothered, and be afraid of me.)” (76). The priest therefore attains absolute power by his
sense of command among penitents. Their belief in God is a belief in truth and forgiveness becomes
possible only if one remains truthful. Shameful acts should be confessed to the priest and they are
to be pardoned only by God through him.
The Church has in its disposal this truth-telling device in confession and it is not surprising

Devilles
that some of these confessions were used primarily for knowledge-production so that the Church
would have a firm control of their subjects, a better way of dealing with them. Any form of secrecy
among natives would be considered as a threat to the Church’s power. It must be noted that one
of ways by which the Katipunan, a secret society of Andres Bonifacio that revolted against the
Spaniards, was discovered through an alleged confession of a wife of a member of that society.
Vicente Rafael discussed in his The Promise of the Foreign how all secret societies such as the Masonic
lodges or Liga Filipina were banned since their secrecy would always be interpreted as a threat to
the truth-revelation speech act of the church and the government (167-68). Our confession therefore
assumes an Althusserian ideological apparatus2 in which the relation between the confessor and the
penitent was uneven, the former demanding truth and loyalty while the latter submits to his power.
Again in Totanes, this power can be incredibly probing especially on the mores and sexual
practices of the Filipinos such as incest, masturbation, bestiality, and orgy. Some of the questions
to be asked are “At mey guinaua ca caya anomang cahalayan sa alin mang hayop? (Did you have
any filthy acts committed with an animal?) At cun ano caya yaon? (And what is that exactly?) At
kung macailan? (And how many times you commited this act?) At mey caharap na tauo? (Did you
do it in front of somebody else?) Ylan catauo? (How many were watching you?)” (112+). These
questions not only hint at bestiality but also on the possibility of orgy. The last question about
doing the sexual act in the presence of other people will be repeated in other questions such as the
one intimated in this question “At paano caya yaon? (How did you do it?) Nag aaglahian, at nag
dorocotan cayo, at nag hihipoan caya, cun nagpaquitaan naman cayo doon sa inyong catouaan?
(Were you playing with yourselves and were you showing your naked bodies to one another?) At
nilabasan ca nang marumi? (Did you experience orgasm?) Cun pinalabasan mo caya ang manga
cabiroan mo? (Did you help your lovers to orgasm also?)” (112+). These questions are definitely
questions that elicit not only truth but graphic depiction of sexual acts of the penitents. To answer
these questions therefore is not just to admit guilt and be remorseful but to perpetuate and perform
the act for a particular and special audience, and in this case, to the priests, who together with the
theatricality of the church and the confessionary, are able to wield power against the performing
penitents. Confession becomes a performance as the guidelines of Totanes become the very script
by which penitents are transformed into unwilling actors.
However, the extent of power of confessor can also be gauged not only in the manner
of questioning but also in the supposed act of contrition of the penitent that proceeds from his
confession. Accordingly, contrition is an admission of sin and the resolution not to sin again.
To seal this act of contrition, the penitent is asked to pray for forgiveness. It is important to note
that Totanes used the word “pagtitica” and this is given as a form of command from the priest:
“Nasonor mo caya ang parusa nang Pare sa iyo sa confesion mong yaon? (Were you able to follow

Devilles
all the instructions during your last confession?)” (76). The power to forgive sins is a privileged act
accorded to priests only, as to how this power has been secularized and utilized by the media and
indie films can only be understood in the context of the proliferation of radio programs that later
turned into TV programs that highlight public confessions of common folk and actors during the
late 70s and early 80s, the height of Marcos era.
CONFESSION AS A NARRATIVE DEVICE
It is quite surprising that the 70s would be the time when truth-telling or confessionary
radio and TV programs flourished. Eddie Ilarde’s Kahapon Lamang that started on radio in the 50s
was later turned into TV program from 1976 to 1986 and Helen Vela’s Lovingly Yours which also
started in DZBB was later turned into TV anthology program from 1980 to 1996. Both shows would
actually feature the life stories of their letter senders and occasionally at the end of the show, the
hosts would actually give an advice. There were TV shows that would concentrate on the lives of
actors. These were shows started by Inday Badiday or Lourdes Carvajal in real life, also known as
the “queen of showbiz talk shows” and “queen of intrigues.” She began her broadcasting career as
a radio host who talked about the private lives of Filipino actors. One of her first shows was Nothing
but the Truth and later See-True and Eye to Eye.3 These showbiz talk shows would appropriate the
mechanism of confession, from the recall of past deeds to narration and elaboration, and finally
through an appeal for understanding and help in which case the host readily dispenses an advice or
words of wisdom to audience, usually accompanied by a melancholic music.
The proliferation of showbiz talk shows up to the present can be one of the factors that
influence the narrative techniques of most gay indie films, primarily because these talk shows have
already a sizeable and target audience, so the adaptation from TV to movies can easily be facilitated
without much resistance from their audience since they were also the former radio listeners as
well. However, it is also important to note that the fascination for gossips and such shows has
been cultivated during the Marcos regime, when there was a systemic repression of freedom by
Martial Law, thus creating an overwhelming desire of the people to be informed and to know
what’s going on. The confession of ordinary people and actors fill this void that made institutional
churches irrelevant and obsolete. As the number of confessional TV programs grew, including the
branching out of media to public service, people would naturally gravitate to TV as the relevant
institution that educates, informs, and gives them livelihood. It is not surprising that TV networks
would necessarily have an influence on the formation of a national consciousness.4 Furthermore,
both radio and television mimic the confessionary box of the church. An ordinary confessionary
box preserves the anonymity of the penitents because the window by which a penitent confesses is

Devilles
partly covered. This anonymity is important in so far that radio and television can actually disguise
their letter senders with aliases and reenactments or dramatization.
Gay Indie Films like Ang Lalaki sa Parola, Daybreak, Sagwan, and Selda, despite their
claims of being independent from mainstream cinema, will also appropriate confession in their
narrative styles. In Ang Lalaki sa Parola, the story of Mateo’s alienation from his father and pitiable
relationships with Suzette and Jerome is intermittently interrupted by the confession of the old
man, Tisho, who according to the story has seen the fairy in the lighthouse. In Daybreak, William
discloses to his lover JP his plans to leave him and migrate to Australia and live with his wife,
and it is in this disclosure that the story becomes complicated, with the two characters struggling
against the truth about their relationship. Despite being drawn to each other, William and JP call it
quits in the end. In Selda, the confession of Rommel comes towards the end of the movie when his
relationship with Esteban begins to bother him and he accidentally kills his own daughter. The last
scene of Selda shows Rommel trying to write a letter. In Sagwan, Alfred is haunted by a traumatic
incident in his childhood that will be revealed in the end when his relationship with his girlfriend
Cecilia and fellow boatman Emman is finally consummated.
In these films, we have the confession within the story itself. The confession of the main
characters will necessary involve a remorseful recall of past events. In Ang Lalaki sa Parola, Tisho is
expectedly bothered and haunted by a past that he is confessing to Mario. The story itself is clearly
demarcated by the constant question-and-answer dialogue of Tisho and Mateo. Their dialogue
will also be crucial in the whole story itself since what is happening to Mario is already intimated
or suggested in Tisho’s confession. His confession somehow constitutes Mario’s story and this
narrative device tells audience that what Mario is going through is something pardonable and
understandable. In this way the audience is conscripted to sympathize with Tisho and by extension
to Mario. Such device is already imbedded in the story that makes Mario’s story a reiteration and
therefore familiar, something not entirely otherworldly and bizarre. Viewers then accept Mario’s
story as a reiteration, something that has already happened in the past and is happening now.
Confession in Daybreak is more subtle yet equally powerful since confession is not only
used as a narrative device but the crux of the story where William is hesitant to tell JP his plans.
William’s disclosure of his plans to migrate to Australia will end their relationship and this ending
only affirms the power of confessionary discourse that characters can wallow on their sins and
guilt, tell their stories and then in the end make a remorseful exit via a moral closure or a tragic
ending. I was told by film critic Yason Banal that there were two versions for the ending of the
Daybreak, one ending with a break up and the other with their reunion. These versions only attest
to the power and efficacy of confessionary mode of the film. Confession as a performance needs an
audience. In this case, it is important to ask to whom the film is actually making a confession? Why

Devilles
is there a need for an alternate ending? Could the alternate ending be a ploy to a specific audience
so that confession becomes pleasant or agreeable?
In most confessions like in Selda and Sagwan, the voice over of the main characters intrudes
in the story. In Selda, towards the end, we hear Rommel reiterating something that Esteban told
him while they were still in prison, a sense of being dead, trapped, and without any direction in
life. It is in this form of confession that the film makes a closure or moralizes. From the onset, the
characters are already guilty of their sins, they are forced or compelled to narrate their stories, and
in the end, their remorse or pagtitica would always be articulated in the form of a moral lesson. In
the case of Selda, Esteban would ask the rhetorical question, “Sino ang mananagot? (Who will be
responsible?)” and we see towards the end, Rommel, smoking, quite distraught, writing a letter
inside a dilapidated room. Again the ending is quite convenient, the tragic ending of gay characters
is the very formula for making their story palatable and agreeable. One gets the impression that
gay stories are okay as long as in the end we know the moral lesson; gay characters end up as
loonies looking for fairies, as repressed or closeted, prisoners, or being butchered or killed. In
Sagwan, Alfred who is confessing is also explaining everything from his sense of alienation to his
problematic relationships. Just like in Selda, Alfred’s confession is seemingly structured in his guilt,
his exposition and narration of the sex trade in his area, and his attempt to moralize and rationalize
his fantasies towards Cecilia and Emman. The convenient ending of their ménage â trois is the
very formula by which their target audience must have a disavowal of the film and submit to a
prescribed morality.
CONFESSION AS A HOMOPHOBIC DISCOURSE
Laura Mulvy in her seminal work Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema argues that viewers
must be able to break the cinematic codes of films constituted by the overpowering male gaze and
the illusion it creates and invokes to viewers. The cinema depends on three gazes: the camera,
audience, and the characters. Illusion is achieved by downplaying the first two and enhancing the
third. In most of the gay indie films, there is a tendency for the whole film to become the penitent
while the audience becomes the priest who will absolve the gay film in the end. In other words,
a politics of viewing is created, a politics of uneven relations where like before, Filipinos were
expected to remember their sinful acts, be remorseful, and ask for forgiveness while the priest in
return must listen and absolve.
With the proliferation of confessional type of TV programs and gay indie films, the function
of the priest is relegated to the viewers. However, this does not result in a sense of empowerment
of the audience. This simple role reversal in which the audience assumes the role of the priest only

Devilles
reaffirms the uneven character of confessional discourse. Unlike before when the priest asks the
probing questions, this time the film has been hailed enough to answer even if not being asked.
The films and media in general have internalized this act of probing, have set the questions asked
by priests as their rubrics, have studied their target audience and marketing strategies, and fully
utilized the mechanisms of confession.
Gay films therefore become a matter of one variety after another, one daring role and scene
after another, a bit different in performance but ultimately uniformly recognizable. Gay films
with tragic characters only reiterate and such reiteration has the ideological effect of containing
the radicalness of gay lifestyle and philosophy. This is the illusion that a lot of gay indie films are
trying to project, primarily that they are free of any commercial value, but with the plethora of
confessionary films they have only succeeded in visualizing the pleasures of gay lifestyles and their
concomitant commodification. The representation of tragic gay characters in these films is a ploy
for sympathetic reading or identification. But what is achieved by the repetitiveness of these tragic
representations is not a critical engagement on the part of viewers but rather a sense of disavowal.
Gay films create the illusion of the free play of desire yet such desire must also be ironically
contained in a moral dilemma and tragic ending of characters.
One should take note how recent these films have eroticized and exoticized the provinces
and remote rural barrios such that the setting is not so much about the story but only an expedient
backdrop in reinventing a familiar story. At some point the audience need not identify therefore
with the gay characters; the film has already made a fetish out of this sympathy such that whatever
anxiety the audience has is already controlled and determined. This kind of manipulation is
teetering on homophobia, or the fear of gays and their lifestyle can only be accepted in certain
agreeable situations and terms. One can recall the famous TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
At the onset one can see the boldness of such program in relation to a very conservative public,
yet such shows reinforce only the conservative attitude of their target audience. Gay lifestyle is
acceptable only if it is in the service of the straight guy, the very norm by which queer is actually
being “straightened” so to speak. Similarly, characters in gay indie films are straightened out: Tisho
and Mario are remorseful repentants seeking absolution, William and JP are the star-crossed lovers
who will find love somewhere in their memories and dreams but not in their present situation,
Rommel is the prisoner asking for an understanding of his failures and struggles, and Alfred and
Emman are the unwilling victims of the flesh trade in their community. In each of these characters,
their confession as the very mode of most gay indie films tend to be a “straightening” technique,
making their attitudes, lifestyle and way of thinking palatable and agreeable to a conservative
audience.
At some point as well, this straightening technique compels the audience to renounce gay

Devilles
indie films as pornographic. They have no choice but to become like the priest hearing a public
confession, only this time more theatrical and spectacular. Like the priest, the audience is compelled
to absolve and forgive the gay character since the gay character has a tragic ending. Ultimately, gay
indie films are definitely complicit to a culture of homophobia by structuring their narratives as
confessions with all the mechanism of recall and the act of contrition, evoking a dual formulaic and
cathartic effect of pity and fear.
Martin Manalansan discusses in Global Divas how his interviewees, all AIDS victims, use
imaginative terms and coinages for their illness, sometimes using tragic heroines or characters to
engage their subjectivity and agency. However, he also cites the problem of such identification
with suffering for some gays in the US that with the advent of possible treatment of the disease,
pathos is something associated with the gays in the Third World, gays who simply cannot afford
the medication for their illness (180-82). Pity, in as much as it is a powerful emotion, can also bring
about the unevenness of social relations. As in the case of films depicting suffering, pity can only
heighten the unequal relations of the viewers and the object of their gaze. It is not surprising that
sometimes films exploit tragedy for such commercial purposes and in history, the so called Third
World has been the site of producing colonial fantasies and postcolonial identities. Sometimes it
is within these desires and fantasies that the suffering gay character is depicted, and all because
such depiction is an elaboration of masculinity of the West (Chari 277+). This is when gay indie
films become pornographic, not because of graphic depictions of sexual acts and gay lifestyles, but
because of the coerced pathos generated from viewers, pathos that does not critically engage their
worldview but pathos that reinforces their conservative outlook, their superior stance, and their
irrational fear of gays. One can argue, however, that pathos worked with Lino Brocka’s gay films
in the 70s, but then again one must also remember that pathos generated by Brocka’s films has a
politico-social context, it militated against the state-sponsored image of Manila and the Philippines
back then. At a time when the Marcoses were promoting Manila as the city of man, a progressive
city, etc., Brocka’s films provided an alternative view of Manila. In other words, Brocka knew his
politics; even if he is using the conventions of tragedy or confessionary mode in storytelling, he
knew his purpose. The demand for gay indie films today do not necessarily adhere to Brocka’s
philosophy, although a lot of these films are direct copies, if not derivatives, of Brocka’s films.
There is a growing need for the gay indie films today to articulate their politics, their way of
thinking, and their specific intervention. The renewed interest in gay indie film and their continued
exhibition abroad in various international film festivals, where they reap recognition and awards,
are not enough to advance the cause of queer politics. They have to engage the viewing public to
question their beliefs, norms, and values. If not, then what else is a gay indie film for?

Devilles
NOTES
1 Part of the text read by President GMA over national TV on June 2005: “That said, let me tell you how I
personally feel. I recognize that making any such call was a lapse in judgment. I am sorry. I also regret
taking so long to speak before you on this matter. I take full responsibility for my actions and to you
and to all those good citizens who may have had their faith shaken by these events. I want to assure you
that I have redoubled my efforts to serve the nation and earn your trust. Nagagambala ako. Maliwanag na
may kakulangan sa wastong pagpapasya ang nangyaring pagtawag sa telepono. Pinagsisisihan ko ito nang lubos.
Pinananagutan ko nang lubusan ang aking ginawa, at humihingi ako ng tawad sa inyo, sa lahat ng mga butihing
mamamayan na nabawasan ng tiwala dahil sa mga pangyayaring ito. Ibig kong tiyakin sa inyo na lalo pa akong
magsisikap upang maglingkod sa bayan at matamo inyong tiwala.
2 Louis Althusser is a French Marxist philosopher. His contributions to the theory of ideology as
interpellation and his concept of the ideological apparatus have been very influential among
psychoanalyst and Marxist critics. See Louis Althusser’s Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
3 See Vicente Rafael, “Your Grief is Our Gossip,” in White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, pages
204+.
4 Benedict Anderson believes that the birth of nationalism is catalyzed by the breakdown of religious
communities and political dynasties on one hand, and the emergence of capital and technologies of
communication, on the other. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism.

Devilles
WORKS CITED
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism London: Verso,
1983.
Chari, Hema. “Colonial Fantasies and Postcolonial Identitites.” Post-colonial Queer: Theoretical Intersections. Ed.
John C. Hawley. New York: State U of New York P, 2001.
De Totanes, Fray Sebastian. Manual Tagalog Para Auxilio de los Religiosos de Esta Santa Provincia. Binondo,
Manila: Imprenta de Miguel Sanchez, 1865.
Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981-1982. New York:
Picador, 2001.
Manalansan, Martin F. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures: Theories of Representation and Difference. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1989.
Rafael, Vicente. The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines.
Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil, 2006.
—. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila UP, 2000.
Scott, William Henry. Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History. Quezon City, Philippines:
Ateneo de Manila UP, 1984.

Kritika
Ku ltu r a
LITERARY SECTION
FIVE POEMS
Michael M. Coroza
Department of Filipino
[email protected]
About the author

Michael M. Coroza is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Filipino, School of Humanities, Ateneo
de Manila University. He has received numerous national and international awards for his poetry, essays, and short
stories for children. In 2007 he received from the Royal Family of Thailand the prestigious SEAWRITE or Southeast
Asia Writers Award. He holds a PhD in Filipino from the University of the Philippines and is constantly engaged in
language, literary, and cultural studies aside from creative writing and performing the kundiman and other vintage
Filipino songs. He is the newly elected Secretary General of the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (Writers Union
of the Philippines).
1)
Dalitiwan Dalitiwan1
Lagaslas mo ay eternal Your rustling: the eternal

Na pagkabasag ng kristal; Breaking of crystal;
Banyaga kong talampakan My alien feet
Ay naakit, nasugatan. Are seduced, bruised.
Sa daloy mo ay lumahok Into your stream

Ang tumagas kong himutok; Spill my resentment;
Sa pampang nang makaabot, As I reach your bank,
Ang dibdib ko’y nagkalumot. My heart gathers moss.
Translation by Marne L. Kilates
1
A place name in the town of Majayjay in the province of Laguna, actually a river, which combines, felicitously, the words dalit (a
Tagalog poetic form of lament) and iwan (which means to leave or abandon).

Coroza
Five Poems
2)
Palaging May Ulan It Rains Always
Palaging may ulan ang pamamaalam It rains always as farewells are bid
Kaya binabaha ng lungkot ang lungsod and so sadness floods this city
Ng panandaliang pagsasama’t lugod. of fleeting unions and delight.
Huwag kang lilingon at baka malusaw Do not look back for it may dissolve
Na asin ang mithing pagbabagong-loob. like salt, this yearned for change-of-heart.
Kaya binabaha ng lungkot ang lungsod. and so sadness floods this city.
Bangkay na lulutang ang panghihinayang Regret will float like a carcass

Ngayong nalunod na ang lahat ng pusok now that all passion has been drowned,
At kuyom sa dibdib ang basang alabok. and a wet fistful of ash is clenched in the chest.
Kaya binabaha ng lungkod ang lungsod and so sadness floods this city
Ng panandaliang pagsasama’t lugod. of fleeting unions and delight.
Translation by Mikael de Lara Co

Coroza
Five Poems
3)
Paslit Child
May paslit na pinapaslang natin There is a child that we slay

Sa isip, nilulula sa mga panaginip, In our minds, make dizzy with dreams,
Tinatagtag sa mga pagsisikap. Mula Jerk with our labors. From
Sa tore ng pananagumpay, inihuhulog The towers of our victories, we drop

Natin siya sa limot, ngunit hindi Him into oblivion, yet
Namamatay. Lingid sa atin ang kaniyang He does not die. We know not of his
Pamamahay sa kamalig ng malay, bumabalangkas Nostalgia for the storehouse of thought; he outlines
Ng mabibisang hakbang sa pagsalakay upang Effective schemes of attack to
Mabawi ang kaniyang teritoryo na mula Wrest his territory which since
Nang ating sakupin ay nawasak ang pagiging We conquered was stripped of

Payak at panatag. Sa sandaling naglilibang Simplicity and calm. In the moments we amuse
At nahihibang tayo, darating siyang Or drive ourselves to insanity, he arrives
Isang dambuhala. Walang kamuwangan A leviathan. Knowing nothing

Sa lupit at sákit, ibubuwal niya ang lahat Of cruelty and suffering, he topples all
Ng ating itinindig. Mapapabungisngis, That we have built. Snickering,
Aakalain niyang ang lahat ng nangyari He thinks everything

Ay laro, samantalang tayo ay walang A game, while motionless we are left
Katinag-tinag at nakatitig sa malayo. To stare at the distance.
Translation by Mikael de Lara Co

Coroza
Five Poems
4)
Magnanakaw Thief
Tulad ng nasusulat, dumarating Like what’s written, he comes

siyang ni walang pasabi without warning
kung kailan sinlalim ng gabi when, deep as the night,
ang ating kawalan we simply lose
ng pag-intindi. our guard.
Dilim siyang nakapaglalagos He is the darkness

sa lahat ng ating pasadyang barging, no matter how
pag-iingat, nakapaghahalungkat cautious we are,
sa bawat lingid na silid o sulok shuffling through
ng ating mga lugod at pag-iimbot. every secret nook and shelter
of our joys and loathing.
Ginigising tayo ng alinsangang
dulot ng kaniyang pangahas We’re startled where his warm
na hininga ngunit dagling breath dares,
naglalaho siya sa pagmulat but quickly he darts
ng ating pangamba. off even as our trembling
stirs, its eyes wide open.
Napapabalikwas ang ating
takot, at kahit bantulot, Our terror comes
hinahagilap natin ang ikinubling alive and quite fickle,
tapang, iniuumang saanman we fumble for the secret courage,
may hinalang kumaluskos. pointing it at every place
where conspiring noises stir.
Ngunit tulad ng dapat
asahan, tanging tagumpay niya But expect it,
ang ating nasusumpungan to meet his victory, at last,
sa pinto o bintanang on the door or window
kaniyang dinestrungka. through which he has broken.
Malaking puwang sa ating A gaping void he

loob ang iniiwang bakas leaves within
ng kaniyang pagdalaw sapagkat when he comes visiting,
tinatangay niya pati ang liwanag taking even the torch
sa palad nating binutas ng bagabag. that slips off our palm,
. all shot through with fear.
Translation by D. M. Reyes

Coroza
Five Poems
5) 5)
Matanda sa Bintana Old Man at the Window
Mahusay sa kulay ang kamay The hand that framed you

na nagkuwadro sa iyo, abuhing knew color—a grayish
anino na parang sinadyang shadow consecrated at will,
iadorno, lapat na lapat, sa pagitan placed well between
ng mga kapis na panarang babahagyang the nacre shutters, now parted
binuksan. Agaw-buhay ang araw a little. In your eyes, the sun
sa iyong mga mata, lusaw na ang ingay is fading while, down the street,
at gulo sa kalsada. Sayang at hindi ko the rush and din have slipped away. Too bad,
marinig ang ritmo na iyong tinitipa on the ledge your fingers tap
sa pasamano: marahill pananabik sa isang a rhythm I can’t hear: perhaps a longing for some
pagbabalik o pagkainip sa katuparan return or your sweet impatience, while
ng malaon nang panaginip. waiting for an old dream
to happen.
Sadyang mahusay ang kamay
na nagkuwadro sa iyo, napatigil Fine hands framed you;
ako at nagawang mapaglimi sa kabila despite my rush, I
ng aking pagmamadali. Kumakaway stopped and begun musing.
ang lumbay ng iyong mga kulay, Your pensive colors
yumayakap sa malay nang napakahigpit: Wave, clinging to my mind,
gumuguhit ng alinlangan sa aking noo, Etching doubts on my forehead,
nagtatatak ng takot sa aking anino. and against my own shadow,
impressing fear.
Dalubhasa ang kamay na nagkuwadro
sa iyo: nagbubukas ng bintana Masterful hands framed you,
ng kaluluwa, nakapagpapadungaw parting open the soul’s
ng pag-alaala. Nilulusaw ng pusyaw shutters, asking me to look out
ang aking kasibulan na ngayon and to strain. As you gaze on,
ay nakakuwadrong iyong pinagmamasdan. your fading colors shame
my youth, which stands
framed, as well.
Translation by D. M. Reyes


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ISSN 2094-6937

a refereed electronic journal

Kritika Kultura is an international refereed journal acknowledged by a host of Asian and

Published twice a year (February and August)

Copyright © Ateneo de Manila University

AIMS, FOCUS, AND SCOPE

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

EDITORIAL STAFF INTERNATIONAL BOARD OF EDITORS

Ivery de Pano Michael Denning

Roy Agustin Regenia Gagnier

E. San Juan, Jr.

5 Where and When is Modernism: Editing on a Global Scale

15 Global Feminisms and the Polish “Woman”:

Childhood and Family in Contemporary Children’s Fiction:

Homo Tropicus: A Yearning

Philippine Studies and the End of the American Century

Empire and Globalization:

The New Challenge of the Mother Tongues:

122 Decolonizing Knowledges: Asian American Studies, Carlos Bulosan,

145 What, and Where, is Philippine Studies? A Response

148 Confession as a Narrative Mode in Gay Indie Films

159 Five Poems

Where and When is Modernism: Editing on a Global Scale

About the author

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Jameson understands modernity as representing something like the time-space

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sensorium corresponding to capitalist modernisation. In this sense, it is, like the

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GLOBAL FEMINISMS AND THE POLISH “WOMAN”:

About the authors

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FIG. 1 Andrzej Mleczko, “Polska wraca do Europy”

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MAKING MOTHERS, VIRGINS, AND FEMINISTS: A MOSAIC OF FEMININE ROLE MODELS

We wrote a guidebook on how to win elections … I initiated contacts with the

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OUR STORIES, OURSELVES: GROWING UP BETWEEN COMMUNISM AND (CATHOLIC) CAPITALISM

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FIG. 2, Anna Gruszczyńska, “Let Them See Us”

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