South East Asian Literature

Memory, Trauma and Affect: The Implicated Subject in Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North

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Atri Majumder1 & Gyanabati Khuraijam2
1Research Scholar, Dept. of Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Agartala, India, E-mail: atri.cal@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2624-5703
2Assistant Professor, Dept. of Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Agartala, India, E-mail: khgyan79@yahoo.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2312-6787

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 4, December, 2022. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n4.14 
Abstract Full-Text PDF Issue Access

Abstract

In A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam invades the consciousness of the protagonist to reveal the subliminal enmeshed spaces of the personal and the political. The distance between the traumatic events of the Sri Lankan civil war and the alienated individual who has apparently remained aloof, is obliterated through the refracted memories that have embedded the subject in the matrix of his country’s political history. The individual memory thus coalesces into the fabric of collective memory as the narrative unfolds. The concatenation of the traumatic realities and the sequestered psyche, untethers the individual from its ensconced private sphere and situates it within the macrocosmic and pervasive sociopolitical structure. The transmutation of subjectivity is attuned to the affective sites of collective trauma. The dichotomy of proximity and distance elucidated by the apprehensive reflections of the survivor is symptomatic of the subterranean intensities that elude corporeal presence and agency. The memories of the individual become resonant with the affective (un)lived experiences of traumatic violence, that deconstruct the tension of presence/absence, and consequently reconfigure the preconceived notions of subjectivity. The theoretical framework of this paper would foreground Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization of the implicated subject, to limn the trajectory of identities who are indirectly implicated in traumatic legacies. This paper argues that the trauma of the genocidal war and its aftermath is transcribed into affective memories, that bear the potential to reconstitute identity by recognizing and transcending the state of implication.

Keywords: memory, affect, trauma, implicated subject, identity, Sri Lankan civil war

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Apostol’s Creed: Unveiling the Political Fictions of Colonialism and Nation in the Diasporic Novel

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Marikit Tara Alto Uychoco [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.15

Abstract received:  8 Feb 2021 | Article received: 1 June 2021 | Revised: 12 August 2021 | Accepted: 6 Sept 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Apostol’s Creed: Unveiling the Political Fictions of Colonialism and Nation in the Diasporic Novel

Abstract

Gina Apostol is a Philippine-American writer whose novel, Insurrecto, gives important insights into the political fictions of colonialism and the nation-state. Using postmodern readings of metafiction and historiographic metafiction, as well as postcolonial readings of hybridity and postcolonial doubles, this paper will unearth the political fictions that were used by the United States in rationalizing the Philippine-American War, and the political fictions used by the Philippines in rationalizing extrajudicial killings. This paper follows the argumentation of Ania Loomba, who argues that nation-states have used the same violence as those used by colonizing powers, and that after the colonizing powers left, the nation-state excluded and silenced marginal peoples. Philippine-American Literature distinguishes itself against Asian-American Literature because it discusses the Philippine colonial experience under the U.S., lending itself to important reflections regarding hybridity, historiography, and solidarity.  This paper will use the postmodern theories of Patricia Waugh when it comes to metafiction, Linda Hutcheon’s and Michel Foucault’s theories regarding historiographic metafiction and suprahistorical history, and the postcolonial theories of Homi Bhabha and Gloria Anzaldua regarding hybridity.

Keywords: Philippine-American Literature, Diasporic Literature, Metafiction, Historiographic Metafiction, Hybridity.

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Traversing Paths/Pasts: Places of Filipino Philosophy

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Hazel T. Biana [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Department of Philosophy, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–13. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.08

Abstract received:  19 Feb 2021 | Complete article received: 3 June 2021 | Revised article received: 25 Aug 2021 | Accepted: 29 August 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Traversing Paths/Pasts: Places of Filipino Philosophy

Abstract

Place is a vital framework of human experience and is essential to the configuration of experience. It is more than the mere geography or arrangement of things in a particular spatial location. As a concept and not merely as a specific instance, place moulds human experience and contributes to the understanding of oneself and the world. Philosophers have long tackled the unravelling of these significant experiences, and the importance of theorizing about the place. As such, understanding philosophy also necessitates looking into its place. Regrettably, Filipino Philosophy has not yet been examined closely in this regard. To address this gap, this paper inquires about the development of Filipino Philosophy as it has been shaped by the places of its pioneers. It uncovers the connections between the development of Filipino thought and the places of Filipino philosophers who emerged in the 1970s-80s. By culling these philosophers’ paths/pasts, homage is paid to a significant resource often ignored, viz., the places of philosophy.

 Keywords: Philosophy of Place, Filipino Philosophy, Travel, Philippines

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Bagay: Articulating a New Materialism from the Philippine Tropics

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Christian Jil R. Benitez [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Department of Filipino, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.07

Abstract received:  31 March 2021 | Complete article received: 30 May 2021 | Revised article received: 29 August 2021 | Accepted:30 August 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Bagay: Articulating a New Materialism from the Philippine Tropics

Abstract

Keeping in time with the new materialist turn that aspires to respond to the common disregard to matter in Euro-Western tradition of thought while at the same time insisting the imperative to decolonize such turn, this essay attempts to articulate a Philippine rendition of new materialism, through the notion of bagay, nominated here as a thing whose materiality is intuited to be appropriately determinable concerning a particular moment. This attempt is extended through turning to Bagay poetry, “a concept, a proposition” (Lumbera 2005, 136) from the 1960s toward a Philippine poetics that is most attuned to the concreteness of things, instead of simply overlooking them—a disregarding impulse that is primarily attributed to the “platitudinous and emotional tendencies” (“Bagay Poets” 1965, 24) in Philippine poetry at the time which considers things as mere metaphors, if not symbols for anthropocentric sentimentalizations. Through harnessing then an attentiveness on things encouraged by the Bagay poetics, the materiality of bagay is then sensed in its utmost tropicality, that is, its capacity to turn into whatever.

 Keywords: New materialism, bagay, Philippine poetics, decolonization, tropicality

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Rethinking, Narrating, Consuming Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asia

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Jeremy De Chavez [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.01

Published: February 5, 202

(This editorial is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Rethinking, Narrating, Consuming Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asia

As this special issue would not have been possible without the generosity of certain individuals during these most trying times, this modest introduction must necessarily begin with gratitude. My co-editor, Yue Zhang, and I would like to express our sincerest thanks to the tireless and gracious people behind Rupkatha. It is because of their vision and efforts that Rupkatha has become a truly global journal of interdisciplinary Humanities, a home to many ideas that challenge and extend the borders of what it means to do Humanistic research in order to all the more properly respect its integrity. We hope that this special issue that features works from and about the East and Southeast Asian regions, along with their associated diasporic communities, will contribute to the noble vision of Rupkatha. We extend our gratitude to the numerous scholars who shared their expertise as peer-reviewers and whose generosity ensured the success of this special issue. We are also very grateful to our editorial assistants Mr. John, Fong Chi Chon and Mr. Chris, Miao Chi both of whom often went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure the smooth production of this special issue. Of course, we must also thank all those scholars, both established and up-and-coming, who responded to our call for submissions. The response to this special issue could only be described as overwhelmingly robust, which is indicative of the unquestionable vigor in the field of contemporary East and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies. Indeed, the sheer diversity of the submissions makes it a challenge to collectively introduce the essays without the risk of taking away from their inevitable multiplicity by imposing an artificial thematic unity. Thus, while the concerns of the essays included in this issue cannot be fully contained within their assigned thematic categories, and by no means should be read exclusively within such, I shall nevertheless risk grouping them based on what I conceive to be their principal critical concern—that is to say, rethinking, narrating, consuming.

A substantial number of essays in this special issue have attempted to rethink concepts that have been ossified through convention by bringing them into contact with cultural texts from and about Southeast Asia, revitalizing both concept and cultural text in the process. Carlos Piocos’s “Women Trespassing Borders: Imaginaries of Cosmopolitanism from Below in Mia Alvar’s In the Country” interrogates dominant conceptions of cosmopolitanism by exploring “versions of cosmopolitanism from below” and in the process “examines the intersections and contradictions of class, gender and race in cosmopolitan imaginaries of mobilities in Southeast Asia.” Locating his theoretical intervention within the new materialist and decolonial turns, Christian Jil R. Benitez’s “Bagay: Articulating a new materialism from the Philippine tropics” examines Bagay poetry to “articulate a Philippine rendition of new materialism, through the notion of bagay” and its characteristic tropicality.  Extending his previous work on Chinese Filipino culture, Joseph Ching Velasco’s “From Private Eye to Public “I”:  The Chinese Filipinos in Charlson Ong’s Hard-Boiled Fiction” examines how a generic literary form is strategically disfigured when relocated in the postcolony so that it may speak to post-colonial and diasporic concerns. Hazel T. Biana’s “Traversing Paths/Pasts: Places of Filipino Philosophy” focuses on the concept of place in the work of selected Filipino philosophers to argue that place reveals “the trajectories of their type of philosophizing“ and thus played a significant role in the development of Filipino philosophy. Anton Sutandio’s “Skinned Performance: Female Body Horror in Joko Anwar’s Impetigore” examines the ambivalent status of the female body in cinema to argue that “the portrayal of non-traditional female characters suggests an attempt to challenge the mainstream patriarchal narrative in contemporary Indonesian horror cinema, and at the same time hints at the perpetuating subjectification of woman’s bodies.” Also focused on the representation of the body in cinema is Lynda Susana Widya Fatmawaty et al.’s “The Politics of Gendered Subjects in Indonesian Post-Reform Films.”

Some essays in this issue are critical inquiries into processes of narrating the nation, which as Homi Bhabha astutely observes, is a process that “does not merely draw attention to its language and rhetoric…but also…attempts to alter the conceptual object itself” (p. 18). Kavitha Ganesan’s “Which tongue? The Imported Colonial Standard or Motherland Vernacular? Exploring “Death” as the Birth of Postcolonial Malaysia in Muthammal Palanisamy’s Funeral Chant” examines two versions of a funeral chant (written in English and Tamil) to elaborate on how death functions as a “metaphor to the birth of the nation” with the aim of demonstrating how a form of narrative in-betweeness that emerges out of the process of translation becomes a way within which a “diasporic Indian’s ‘becoming’ national identity is reconstructed.” Louie Jon A. Sánchez’s “The Teleserye Story: Three Periods of the Evolution of the Filipino TV Soap Opera” posits that the teleserye (Philippine TV soap opera) is a cultural form that is “reflective of the country’s life and times, its evolution interconnected with the ebb and flow of Philippine history.” Niccolo Rocamora Vitug’s “Pop Song Translations by Rolando Tinio as Script and Subversion of the Marcos Regime” examines the arguably ambivalent and complicated politics of a Philippine National Artist by paying attention to his song translations. Jie Zeng and Tian Yang’s “English in the Philippines from the Perspective of Linguistic Imperialism” examines the advantages and disadvantages of the continued dominance of the colonial language in the Philippines. Marikit Tara Alto Uychoco’s “Apostol’s Creed: Unveiling the Political Fictions of Colonialism and Nation in the Diasporic Novel” revisits the tension between postcolonial studies and postmodern theory and attempts to locate global critique in a contemporary metafictional novel.

There are also essays included in this collection that are concerned with how markets impact cultural production, reception, and consumption. Maria Gabriela P. Martin’s “Autopoetics, Market Competence, and the Transnational Author” participate in what has seemingly become its scholarly genre: the critique of postcolonial studies. Her essay examines how “program fiction” standardizes texts marketed as postcolonial, a process that speaks to the “auratic authority of postcolonial studies in the First world literary marketplace.” Io Chun Kong’s “Revisiting theatre of the minoritarian in neoliberalism: The Embodied Memories in Denise Uyehara’s and Dan Kwong’s Auto-performances” examines how minoritarian artists negotiate to work in a neoliberal environment. Kong examines auto-performances not merely as forms of individual aesthetic expression but as a politics of multiculturalism.

We hope that the works included in this special issue become an invaluable and generative resource to scholars working in the field. The final words of gratitude must then be offered to the readers of Rupkatha for their dependably gracious gift of attention. Thank you.  

 References

Bhabha, H. (1990). “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” Nation and Narration. London and NY:

Routledge. 14-30.

Jeremy De Chavez is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China.

 

Book Review: Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration by Carlos M. Piocos III

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Publisher: Routledge. Date of Publication: 2021. Language: English. ISBN: 9780367279165

Reviewed by

[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]

Department of Cultural Studies,  Lingnan University

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.19

Received: 27 April 2021 | Revised: 22 Oct 2021 | Accepted: 22 Oct 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This review is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Book Review: Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration by Carlos M. Piocos III

Carlos Piocos’s ground-breaking book, Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration published earlier this year by Routledge, provides an in-depth analysis of the intimate labour(ed) landscape of Filipina and Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and Singapore, and how their (im)mobilities are not just hastened and aggravated by the neoliberal framework of global labor and the policies of their sending and receiving nation-states, but also in terms of the emotionality that circulates within the global care chains network. Piocos specifically turns our attention to the “felt” politics that emanate from films and fictions of and by Southeast Asian migrant workers and how these cultural productions create an affective economy that, according to him, is not just “sticky” as feminist critic Sarah Ahmed describes, but demonstrates varying viscosities of “thickening and thinning out,” reflecting a “messiness” of feelings that do not necessarily coalesce in these texts (p. 10).

The author tracts the unevenness of affect within the textual tropes of “belonging and displacement, shame and desire, vulnerability and victimization, and their sacrifices for their home and homeland” (p. 5) that are imbricated in the featured migrant print and visual media; Xyza Cruz Bacani’s photographs in her book, We are Like Air; the short stories of Indonesian migrant worker-writers, Susie Utomo, Erfa Handayani, Maria Bo Niok, Tiwi, Juwanna, Susana Nisa, Arista Devi, Indira Margareta and Etik Juwita; the novels Soledad’s Sister by Jose Dalisay and Sebongkah Tanah Retak (A Lump of Cracked Land) by Rida Fitria; the films Remittance by Patrick Daly and Joel Fendelman, Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo, Still Human by Oliver Chan Siu-Kuen, and from Filipino directors Mes de Guzman and Zig Madamba Dulay, Balikbayan Box and Bagahe, respectively; and migrant documentaries Mengusahakan Cinta (Effort for Love) by Ani Ema Susanti and Sunday Beauty Queen by Baby Ruth Villarama. These are structured into five chapters that illustrate the landscape and politics of migrant “feelings.” While each chapter focuses on a certain affect(s), these chapters “affect” each other by consciously aligning the discussions to connect structurally and emotionally. In this way, migrant feelings emanating from these cultural productions are not discrete emotional categories but are thickening and thinning out beyond the generic constraint and, by extension, permeating within the actual spaces and bodies of domestic migration in both countries. The analysis drawn across generic and formal considerations shows that “border crossing” among migrants does not just happen geographically but extends to the genres of migrant cultural production from which this “rhizomatic” quality merits equal attention. Piocos interfaces his close reading of these texts against the wider discourses impinging Southeast Asian migrant labour and how the affects teased out from these texts influence government “mood” and policy on domestic migration (such as in the featured opinions of Indonesian president Joko Widodo, former Philippine president Ninoy Aquino, and Hong Kong legislator, Regina Ip), reinforce or negate popular representations of migrant labourers, and ultimately show how the interiority of feelings can be harnessed to affect the on-going political movements and struggles of migrant workers in Singapore and Hong Kong. All these shows what Piocos argues as the migrant affective economy where these cultural productions and representations or “viral texts” (p. 156) are reiterated, reproduced, consumed, and/or repudiated by Filipina and Indonesian migrant labourers alongside the precarious narratives and politics of their supposed national heroism as bagong bayani or pahlawan devisa. From alienation and belonging discussed in the first chapter down to grief and/in anger, the book shows not just a spectrum of emotions and feelings, but the journey of migrant political identification that ends in the hopeful note of resistance borne by the on-going transnational migrant labour rights movement shaped and buoyed by an array of migrant affect, proving how “literary and visual texts can take on the political task of affecting a social movement” (Piocos, 2021, p. 167). In this way, Piocos highlights agency in the immobility of migrants by showing how these women subvert their precarious conditions through movement itself.

Overall, the strength of this book is not just how it pioneers the affective turn within migration and migrant studies that are classed, gendered, and racialized in predominant scholarly analyses and activisms, but how Piocos steers this intersection to account for the “thickening of emotionality” as migrant remittances accrue in nation-states whose coffers are bellied by their suffering. Begging the question, how do we turn suffering into empowerment? And while it sounds unfortunate that migrants need to be subordinated to come into the agency, this paradoxical, albeit violent, relationship is precisely what makes emotions, feelings, and subjectivities complex and therefore cannot be decoupled from the migrant subject formation. Non-representational theories such as affect and how Piocos highlights how cultural productions are “aesthetic mediations and political interventions” (p. 6) show how upward social mobility and/or migrant political struggle require fluid motions of emotional negotiations found in the interstices of being accepted in the home/host country against knowing one’s “place,” being allowed certain intimacies while wholeheartedly accepting exclusion, and accepting sacrifice as a necessary catalyst for radical change, all illustrated by the fictions and films featured in this book. Ultimately, this shows how emotionality and the viscosity from which it moves migrants are not just ambivalent, dichotomized, or even dialectically opposing but are contronymic, which is to say how these presumably subordinated, negative feelings of alienation, sexual othering, and sacrificial motherhood are understood to be the necessary affective drives to claim or arrive at positive migrant agency.

However, while there remains so much more to say about what this book can potentially “affect” in terms of migrant scholarship, it has ironically shown a minor shortcoming in what it has chosen to privilege. The cultural productions of fiction and film featured by Piocos in this book leave out the dynamism of the everydayness of lived “emotionality.” And there are clear opportunities from which this book could have benefitted from the equally “thick” description from ethnographic data such as the author mentioning his engagement with his network of Filipina and Indonesian domestics in his “Sunday group” from his stay in Hong Kong from 2012-2016 (p. 156) that informed much of his own “feelings” and textual analyses. It would have been equally fascinating if the researcher’s own ethnographic notes from this immersion or certain interviews conducted by him with these migrants as both subject and creator of these featured texts would have been included in the shaping of affect. While this book’s success can also be attributed to its material density where Piocos has analyzed 19 “texts” in total, the potential to further the affective through ethnographic detail remains. Arguably, emotions are made to be “trackable” within the curated frames and borders of these films and fictions, revealing how emotions can sometimes be predicated on or affected by the prevailing standard, rules, and/or conventions of a given genre, and this leaves the readers wanting to know more how they can observe and/or apprehend migrant emotions as actual lived experiences, vocabularies, and gestures in the field.

Perhaps the book’s possibilities can be an opportunity for scholars of varying levels of academic career to use this book not just as an illuminating introduction to Southeast Asian migration, affect theory, and emergent migrant fiction and film but as a field guide in ethnographic studies as well. As I write this review, I am also immersed in my own ethnographic work among Filipina migrant workers in Hong Kong and I can see how this book opens the possibility of tracking and apprehending these felt politics as gestures, discourses, and emotions that unfold and circulate in the field. This book also engages with critical ethnographic concerns such as adapting a certain sensitivity in decoupling our interlocutors from their perceived subordinate status and disengaging ourselves from the paternalistic intentions of well-meaning research for and about Southeast Asian migrants, and where the book’s resounding recognition of hope in migrant political movements can help ethnographic researches document a more nuanced migrant agency.

Reference

Piocos, C. M. (2021). Affect, narratives and politics of Southeast Asian migration. Routledge.

Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias is an Igorot Kankana-ey scholar from Baguio City, Philippines. He holds a BA and MA in Language and Literature from the University of the Philippines, and he is currently a PhD candidate of the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong where he is a recipient of the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme and the Belt and Road Scholarship awards. Before commencing his fellowship, he taught courses on literature and arts at De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines.

English in the Philippines from the Perspective of Linguistic Imperialism

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”users” wrap=”i”] Jie Zeng1 [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”I”]  & Tian Yang2 

1School of Foreign Languages, Chendu Normal University, China.
2Department of International Exchange and Cooperation, Nanyang Normal University, China.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.18

Abstract received:  27 Feb 2021 | Article received: 28 May 2021 | Revised: 14 Aug 2021 | Accepted: 11 Dec 2021 | First Published: 5 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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English in the Philippines from the Perspective of Linguistic Imperialism

Abstract

This essay analyses English linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992, 46) in the Philippines and identifies the features of linguistic neo-imperialism in the current era. The study rethinks and investigates how English linguistic imperialism plays a dual role in promoting and destroying the Filipino linguistic ecology. The present situation of English imperialism analyzed in this essay shows that the new stage of English linguistic imperialism embodies language hegemony mainly driven by political influence and business interests. At present, English linguistic neo-imperialism is not confined within post-colonial territories but maintains and expands both the language’s positive and negative influences as the world’s lingua franca. The authors also discuss the Filipino ownership of English and whether linguistic imperialism is entirely applicable to the Philippine context. Evidence shows that the continuing use of English, to a great extent, is Filipinos’ choice, not only for the benefit of the United States.

Keywords: English linguistic imperialism, neo-imperialism, the Philippines.

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Pop Song Translations by Rolando Tinio as Script and Subversion of the Marcos Regime

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Niccolo Rocamora Vitug [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Faculty at the University of Santo Tomas and PhD Scholar at the College of Music, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, Philippines.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–21. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.17

Abstract received:  10 Feb 2021 | Complete article received: 13 June 2021 | Revised article received: 14 Aug 2021 | Accepted: 6 Sept 2021 | First Published: 5 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Pop Song Translations by Rolando Tinio as Script and Subversion of the Marcos Regime

Abstract

Philippine National Artist for Theater and Literature Rolando Tinio was well-known for his translations. Though attention is rightfully given to the theatrical works he translated into Filipino, he is also known to have translated songs. One of the enduring sets of song translations that he made are recorded in the album “Celeste,” rendered by the singer and actress Celeste Legaspi. This album was released in 1976, not long after the establishment of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). Then First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos had an interest in the arts, looking at it as something to uphold because it served a function in the vision of the Marcos regime. What I seek to problematize is how the song translations followed a script—in line with the ideas of music theorist Nicholas Cook—based on the said vision. Such a script, according to Michel Foucault, might be the locus of both obedience and subversion. The identification of this script will be done by a reading of a representative pop song translation by Tinio, in the context of other materials that elucidate the script of the time—from the former first couple and one who held a key position in their regime. The reading will be supported by a reading of Tinio’s last translation work, that of Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, which was turned into a musical entitled Ang Larawan.

Keywords: music as script, translation, pop songs, Rolando Tinio, Teatro Pilipino, Marcos regime.

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From Private Eye to Public “I”: The Chinese Filipinos in Charlson Ong’s Hard-Boiled Fiction

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Joseph Ching Velasco [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Department of Political Science and Development Studies, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines. 

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.16

Abstract received:  31 March 2021 | Article received: 1 August 2021 | Revised: 1 Sept 2021 | Accepted: 4 Sept 2021 | First Published: 5 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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From Private Eye to Public “I”: The Chinese Filipinos in Charlson Ong’s Hard-Boiled Fiction

Abstract

Charlson Ong’s Blue Angel, White Shadow (2010) is a hard-boiled fiction that revolves around the issues of crime, corruption, and death in a postcolonial Southeast Asian state. Predominantly dark, gloomy, and mysterious, the mood of the narrative establishes a strongly morose reading experience. The narrative world portrayed in the novel is simultaneously sorrowful and somber. Binondo, the historical ethnic Chinese epicenter of the Philippines, is depicted with excessive chaos and moral disarray. I argue that the novel has attempted to reshape the usual form of hard-boiled fiction by systematically interrupting the narrative’s serious and cynical tone. More specifically, humor was deployed by the author as a mechanism to intervene in the novel’s subscription to the norms of hard-boiled fiction. The novel puts into perspective different facets of Chinese Filipino identity mediated through the Philippine postcolonial landscape. Ultimately, I initiate a discussion on the intersection of Chinese Filipino literature, identities, diaspora, and genre theory. I maintain that Chinese Filipino literature, like the subject of the present inquiry, is borne out of the diasporic experience through collective histories and memories.

Keywords: Postcolonialism, Charlson Ong, Hard-Boiled Fiction, Chinese Filipino, Binondo, Manila.

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Skinned Performance: Female Body Horror in Joko Anwar’s Impetigore

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Anton Sutandio [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.14

Abstract received:  13 March 2021 | Article received: 30 April 2021 | Revised: 20 July 2021 | Accepted: 9 Sept 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022

(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Skinned Performance: Female Body Horror in Joko Anwar’s Impetigore

Abstract

This article discusses the 2019 Indonesian horror film, Impetigore (Perempuan Tanah Jahanam) directed by Joko Anwar. In 2021, Impetigore became the first Indonesian horror film to represent the country at the Academy Awards. This article focuses on the film’s mystification of the female body, which points towards gender relations. This research utilizes the concept of body horror, particularly relating to the skin, gender relations, and wayang mysticism. The findings show that the film metaphorically underlines the ongoing disconcerting perspective of contemporary Indonesian society on women’s embodied agency. The film’s portrayal of non-traditional female characters suggests an attempt to challenge the mainstream patriarchal narrative in contemporary Indonesian horror cinema, and at the same time hints at the perpetuating subjectification of woman’s bodies as a threatening yet desirable agency.

 Keywords: body horror, mystification, female body, Impetigore, Indonesian horror film

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