Archipelagic Imaginaries in Philippine and ASEAN Literary Production

ABSTRACT

Building on the recent issue of Cha Journal — Writing the Philippines (June 2018) where I served as the guest co-editor, this paper explores the question of borders in contemporary Philippine literature in English. It revisits selected texts from this special issue and examines how these suggest particular trends in contemporary Philippine writing, but more importantly reveals potential tensions in current literary production. The paper examines in particular the role of writing produced outside of established centers of literary production: both outside the Philippines, through the multiple diasporic Filipino writing communities, and within it, via the regional writing that comes from the Visayas and Mindanao. The paper attempts to trace the possibilities presented by this “circumferential” writing to redefine held notions of “Filipino writing”, and to suggest ways of extending its traditional canon. 

BIO

Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is a poet and essayist from Cebu, Philippines. He received an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St Louis on a Fulbright Scholarship. His first book of poems, The Highest Hiding Place (2009) was given the Madrigal Gonzalez Best First Book Award. His upcoming book There received the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize and will come out in Spring 2019. He teaches creative writing at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

ABSTRACT

Though I have edited an Asia-focused literary journal—Cha: An Asian Literary Journal—since 2007, the first time I encountered writing from the Philippines in a more intimate and substantial way was through my participation as a foreign panellist in the 2015 Silliman University National Writers Workshop (SUNWW), the oldest of its kind in Asia. Additionally, editing and publishing the “Writing the Philippines” issue (July 2018) of Cha earlier this year afforded me the opportunity to read a wide range of texts by writers from the Philippines, many of them emerging ones. Drawing on these two experiences, I would like to offer some observations on reading literature from the Philippines from an ‘outsider’ perspective, as well as outlining some of the ways in which I have found the literature challenged and even surprised me, and to give an idea of the impressions of the country I have formed through its myriad texts. Another strand of the presentation centres on some reflections on the complicated interdependent relationship between Hong Kong and the Philippines as seen in the short sci-fi film Come to Me, Paradise (directed by Stephanie Comilang, 2017). How are the stories of those from the Philippines currently living in foreign lands (such as Hong Kong) told? For whom are they narrated? How are realities made more fantastical and palatable?

BIO

Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is a founding co-editor of the Hong Kong-based international publication Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, an editor of the academic journal Hong Kong Studies, and the English Editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. She has also edited or co-edited seven literary books and her literary translations have been published in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, among other places, and by the Chinese University Press. Her first poetry collection is Hula Hooping, for which she won the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts in Hong Kong. She is an Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and she serves as the Vice President of PEN Hong Kong, a Junior Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities and an Advisor of the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. She has creative and academic books forthcoming from Delere Press, Math Paper Press, Palgrave and Springer.

ABSTRACT

Both the fact and the idea of an archipelago are premised on the fact and the idea of islandness. My paper will provide a series of reflections on islands and archipelagos as concepts in perpetual negotiation between the realities of geography, history and ecology on the one hand, and with the human needs and desires that cause humans to imagine islands and archipelagos as more than their geography, history and ecology. I hope to contextualize some of the specificities of Southeast Asian archipelagos within a broadly global framework, where both similarities and differences between islandness and the archipelagic imagination play a vital part in ordinary life and in the life of writing.

BIO

Rajeev S. Patke was educated at the University of Pune, and the University of Oxford. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University. He has worked at the National University of Singapore for over two decades and is currently Professor of Humanities and the inaugural Director of the Division of Humanities at Yale-NUS College. He is the author of The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens (Cambridge, 1985), Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford, 2006), Modernist Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh, 2013), and Poetry and Islands: Materiality and the Creative Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). He has also co-authored The Concise Routledge History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (Routledge, 2010), and co-edited several other books including an Anthology of Southeast Asian Writing in English (NLB Singapore, 2012).

ABSTRACT

Taking off from the Philippine experience, this paper will take a preliminary look at how translational practices work in an archipelagic setting from an historical point of view. How does translation take place between islands? Does the specific geographical character of archipelagos impede or facilitate translational practices? What material practices generate the need for translation in these contexts? Are trading ports the contact zones which generate the most pressing need for translation (or “interpreting”)? This presentation hopes to raise these and similar questions in the hope of surfacing a longer submerged history of translation in the Philippines within a Southeast Asian context which takes into account its archipelagic nature.

BIO

Ramon Guillermo is professor of Philippine Studies at the Department of Filipino and Philippines Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman. He earned his MA in Philippine Studies (History and Literature) from UP Diliman and his PhD in Southeast Asian Studies (Austronesian) from the University of Hamburg, Germany. His current work is mainly in the areas of translation studies and digital humanities. His novel, Ang Makina ni Mang Turing (Mang Turing’s Machine) (UP Press 2013) won the Gawad Gintong Aklat (Golden Book Prize)

ABSTRACT

Does cultural diplomacy work? According to a 2005 report of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy of the U.S. Department of State, “America’s cultural riches played no less a role than military action in shaping our international leadership, including the war on terror.” When regarding cultural diplomacy in its singular instances, say, the U.S. Embassy’s sponsorship in the Philippines of a writing workshop or a conference, or its support for Filipino writers to attend a writing program in the United States, it seems absurd to claim an effect on American international standing comparable to military force. Can what appear to be such minor investments influence their beneficiaries in any consequential way? Can this influence cumulatively produce an impact that, as the report claims, strengthens the U.S.’s “national security in subtle, wide-ranging, and sustainable ways”?

In addressing these questions, this presentation focuses on the deployment of the International Writing Program (IWP) based in the University of Iowa as an apparatus of American cultural diplomacy in the Philippines. Filipinos were among the first fellows of the IWP in 1967, and a total of 43 Filipinos to date have gone to the United States as IWP fellows. In recent years, IWP has developed stronger visibility in the Philippines through programs based in Manila. By looking at IWP in relation to institutionalized creative writing in the Philippines in the aftermath of U.S. colonization, the presentation tracks the role of U.S. cultural diplomacy in the spread of a de-historicized creative writing pedagogy in Philippine academia, which has in turn cultivated a strain in Philippine literary production often described as “apolitical.” It examines the “ambient discipline” (to borrow from Joshua Clover) embedded in literary opportunities that are also openly framed projects of U.S. cultural diplomacy.

BIO

Conchitina Cruz is an associate professor of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman, where she teaches literature and creative writing. A recipient of Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundation grants, she earned her Ph.D. in English at State University of New York (SUNY) Albany. Her books of poetry include Dark Hours (winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in the Philippines), elsewhere held and lingered, and There is no emergency. She helps run the DIY/small press expo Better Living Through Xeroxography (BLTX).