Category: Writers
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What is Islam (Shahab Ahmed, 2015)
First page of the manuscript of Hafez Shirazi’s Divan. Preserved in the Treasury of the National Library and Museum of Malek, Tehran Using encyclopedic historical and theological data, Shahad Ahmed criticizes the unsatisfactory ways Islam has been taken as an object and category, and conceptualized in popular and academic discourses. According to Ahmed, a valid…
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Semicoloniality, Agency and Occupation
The Bogor Botanical Gardens was officially established by the Dutch East Indies Government on May 17, 1817, which became an important part in the history of science in Indonesia. (Wikimedia Commons) In Race and the Education of Desire (1995), Ann Laura Stoler writes about the central role of the construction of race and empires in…
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Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis
Covering subjects outside the mainstream of early twentieth century swing and jazz music, the blues point to more than one kind of voice involved in the act of telling. Angela Davis suggests a multiplicity and fluidity prohibited by the homogenizing structuring of narration and community in mainstream music.[1] Through her transcription and analysis of the…
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The trouble with digitizing archives
There are several methods to organize documents. One of them asks what a document means; whether it is true, authentic or forged; whether it can be understood as a trace of an event that can be used for its reconstruction. Another method does not seek to interpret the document, but to arrange, organize, and add…
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Professor Salamanca and the prospect of American Studies in the Philippines
One of the articles I unearthed while researching for my literature review last semester was Professor Bonifacio Salamanca’s article on the attempt to institute a Department of American Studies at the University of the Philippines. Salamanca received his Ph.D. in American Studies in the early 1950s from Yale University where he was a scholar of…
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Sudden Death (Alvaro Enrigue, 2016)
A duel between Caravaggio and Quevedo, or how a tennis match connects worlds. Since when did people actually play tennis? And since when have tennis shoes been around, today the most socially acceptable and most widespread footwear worldwide? And how did you make the balls? The Mexican author Álvaro Enrigue, born 1969 in Guadalajara, México,…
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Protected: Origins of the US-Educated Filipino as Modernist Gadfly (1903-1946)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The Outsider Speaking for the Other
A serial reading of Andre Breton, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, might give the impression of a direct intellectual lineage. That’s not what I’m going to do here. I’d like to think of this as a commentary from the sidelines; of what would have been possible had these thinkers sat…
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Notable Lectures on Zoom
Indonesia’s Genocide: New Perspectives 55 Years On hosted by New York Southeast Asia Network, Oct 7, 2020, 8 PM EST I treat the study of the effects of Cold War strategies and policies of the United States on Southeast Asia as an extension of my research interest which focuses on the cultural legacies of American…
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The Metamorphosis of Narcissus as a Great Artist
on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s profile of Anselm Kiefer I first saw Anselm Kiefer’s artwork as an art student in Berlin nine years ago. It was the same fighter plane made from sheets of lead described by Karl Ove Knaussgard in his New York Times article published last February 2020. Exhibited inside the Hamburger Bahnhof, the…
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Notes on not publishing a book from a really extremist ultra-leftist
Guy Debord’s Biography in 45 Notes Think of how your book would look if you published a book. If it looks anything like any other book, do not publish that book. If by some reason you think of a book that has never been done before then caution yourself from thinking about what that book…
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Protected: Land of the Morning: The Philippines and Its People (Asian Civilizations Museum, 2009)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Protected: Outline of Philippine Mythology (F. Landa Jocano, 1969)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Protected: Cebuano Sorcery: Malign Magic in the Philippines (Richard Q. Lieban, 1967)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The decollage we live in
It’s hard to explain, even to myself, why an artwork from more than fifty years ago can speak to our time without resorting to clichéd notions of the timelessness and universality of artistic language. I try to think of concrete experiences that can constitute a right mindset to write about Jacques Villegle, a Parisian artist…
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Villem Flusser on Artistic Freedom
With his statements in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilém Flusser opened a new understanding of photography, and gave the term a new meaning. While he describes the photograph as a “flyer-like image distributed by the apparatus,” the Photographer for Flusser was a critic; a gadfly: “a person who attempts to place within the image,…
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Protected: A rainy day in New York (Woody Allen, 2019)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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A romance in the provinces (Kornel Filipowicz, 2017)
I just read A romance of provinces (1960), by the Polish poet, novelist and screenwriter Kornel Filipowicz (1913-1990), who was for more than twenty years, and until his death, life partner (each one, in his house) by the poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. The affinity of worlds and tones is…
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The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism (Vilém Flusser, 2013)
Vilém Flusser, a philosopher and communication theorist born in Prague in 1920, spent most of his life in exile. In 1940 he reached London on the run from the Nazis, from there he went to São Paulo after only a short time to settle in France in the early 1970s. He never saw his native city of…
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The Cave (Jose Saramago, 2000)
“Man never sees things themselves, but always only their shadows”, Plato once philosophized in his allegory of the cave. And before Saramago’s hero turns his back on the shadow on the wall of the cave and finds the exit from the cave, he must fear, doubt and hope for a long time – and the…
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Havelock in the Boondocks
Many accounts of Homer’s life circulated in classical antiquity, the most prevalent being that he was a blind bard from Ionia, in present-day Turkey. His biography, written by Pseudo-Herodotus is now considered legend, the story of a blind man trapped in eternal darkness, being led to a gathering of people to recite his epics.[1] Perhaps it was a…
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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015)
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel begins The Sympathizer with a riddle “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man with two faces”. What is he? Might we ask. The line was spoken by a double agent working for the North Vietnamese Communists as well as for the United States during and shortly after the…
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Tales for winter nights
Reading some of Olga Tokarczuk greatest hits Polish author Olga Tokarczuk once compared her books to music videos. This analogy applies both to her collection of short stories and novels: They are self-contained, and the narratives are dense and short, so there is not even a moment of digression. The narratives vividly construct imaginative vignettes of ordinary…
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Walter Benjamin’s Breadmaking
On the versatile interests of Walter Benjamin and making a living out of writing While revisiting some passages in Radio Benjamin published by Verso in 2014, I realized that I never once examined Walter Benjamin’s variegated interests. Specifically, how and why do his works exhibit a wide breadth of interests that borders on a diffuseness…
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North Atlantic White
A color walk piece inspired by William Burroughs. Originally written for Emmanuel Iduma’s class on narrative criticism. One similarity that struck me with Burroughs and a Filipino painter named Juan Luna is that they both killed their wives. In Luna it was the heat of passion and jealousy but for Burroughs it was the blur…
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Maria Ressa temporarily arrested, again
Journalist Maria Ressa reports critically on the drug war of President Rodrigo Duterte. The authorities accuse her of slander as specified. The government-critical Filipino journalist Maria Ressa has been temporarily arrested six weeks after her release. “I’m being treated like a criminal, even though my only crime is to be an independent journalist,” Ressa told…
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The Buru Quartet (Pramoedya Ananta Toer 1980-1988)
The Buru Quartet refers to the the volumes Bumi Manusia (“This Earth of Mankind”, 1980) , Anak Semua Bangsa (“Child of All Nations”, 1980), Jejak Langkah (“Footsteps”, 1985) and Rumah Kaca (“Glass House “, 1988). The books were banned by the regime of long time Indonesian president Suharto and his successor B.J. Habibie. The ban…
Geronimo Cristobal 