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The Teleserye Story: Three Periods of the Evolution of the Filipino TV Soap Opera

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Louie Jon A. Sanchez [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 1–16. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.13

Abstract received:  5 March 2021 | Complete article received: 7 June 2021 | Revised article received: 24 August 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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The Teleserye Story: Three Periods of the Evolution of the Filipino TV Soap Opera

Abstract

The essay chronicles the history of the teleserye or the Filipino TV soap opera, one of today’s transnational televisual products making waves in different parts of the globe. It covers three periods—the period of transition from radio to TV (1962 to 1986), the period of competition (1986-2000), and the period of transformation (2000-present). Traversing through 60 years of the form’s enduring presence in Philippine television, it traces the format’s beginnings as it was introduced to the medium in a highly volatile social environment, and assesses its continued flourishing in democratized, contemporary times and consequent entry into the highly competitive global drama market, where it serves both foreign and its very own Filipino diasporic audiences. The essay echoes the abiding thesis of my studies about the cultural history of the teleserye—that the form is indeed the drama of Filipino life.  As domestic, serial form, the teleserye’s intimate relation to the Filipino everyday ultimately makes it reflective of the country’s life and times, its evolution interconnected with the ebb and flow of Philippine history. These are illustrated by representative texts from the said periods, as well as key contexts that unravel the evolution of the form, now gleaned from a global, as well as diasporic context.

Keywords: teleserye, soap opera, telenovela, Asianovela, Koreanovela, Philippine television.

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Women Trespassing Borders: Imaginaries of Cosmopolitanism from Below in Mia Alvar’s In the Country

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Carlos M. Piocos III [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Literature Department, De la Salle University, Manila, Philippines.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.12

Abstract received:  15 March 2021 | Article received: 23 May 2021 | Revised : 29 July 2021 | Accepted: 14 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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Women Trespassing Borders: Imaginaries of Cosmopolitanism from Below in Mia Alvar’s In the Country

Abstract

Mobility has been historically tied to conceptions of cosmopolitanism, bringing forward imaginaries of belonging-in-the-world and going beyond the narrow limits of parochial allegiances into embracing virtues of openness as global citizens shaped by the experience crossing borders and encounter with the Other. Despite dominant ideas about cosmopolitans as elite itinerants of middle-class intellectuals, artists, tourists, expatriates and capitalists, global migration with its entailing forms of mobilities from below—economic migrants, transmigrants, refugees, exiles—has redefined the term to include forms of minor and vernacular cosmopolitanisms that emerge among the migrant underclass. However, just like these forms of mobilities, these types of cosmopolitanism are also bound and shaped by class, gender and ethnicity. This paper explores versions of cosmopolitanism from below in the stories of Mia Alvar in her book, In the Country, that center on female domestic workers from the Philippines. Through the transnational itineraries of these border-crossing women protagonists in contemporary Filipino fiction, the article examines the intersections and contradictions of class, gender and race in cosmopolitan imaginaries of mobilities in Southeast Asia.

Keywords: mobilities studies, cosmopolitanism from below, migrant female domestic workers, Philippine contemporary fiction, Southeast Asian migration.

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Autopoetics, Market Competence, and the Transnational Author

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Maria Gabriela P. Martin [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 1–8. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.11

Abstract received:  31 March 2021 | Article received: 22 Oct 2021 | Accepted: 22 Oct 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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Autopoetics, Market Competence, and the Transnational Author

Abstract

Although materialist analyses have critiqued the institutionalization of postcolonial studies and its emergence in global capitalism, only few have addressed the role of creative writing in standardizing migrant novelistic production to what Mark McGurl has designated as ‘program fiction’ whose trademark is the practice of “involuted self-reference”. In filling this gap, this paper looks into Gina Apostol’s writings and their reception by international audiences as exemplary of the cultural capital of program fiction. While Apostol’s autofictions/ficto-criticism points to the influence of creative writing in her novels — she studied under John Barth in the MFA program in Johns Hopkins University, this context is overlooked when metropolitan readers construe her work as postcolonial literature. I argue that Apostol’s textualist renderings of Philippine history is an act of ventriloquism whose metropolitan success is a symptom of the auratic authority of postcolonial studies in the First world literary marketplace.

Keywords: Autopoetics, Market Competence, Transnational Authorauratic, Apostol, Philippine history.

Revisiting theatre of the minoritarian in neoliberalism: The Embodied Memories in Denise Uyehara’s and Dan Kwong’s Auto-performances

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Io Chun KONG [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

General Education Department, City University of Macau, Macau.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.10

Abstract received:  27 Feb 2021 | Article received: 30 May 2021 | Revised: 12 Aug 2021 | Accepted: 15 Aug 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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Revisiting theatre of the minoritarian in neoliberalism: The Embodied Memories in Denise Uyehara’s and Dan Kwong’s Auto-performances

Abstract

In a neoliberal multicultural landscape, minoritarian artists tend to, deploying various forms of self-media or virtual platforms, create their artistic spaces for their identitarian performances. While self-media has been more and more entrepreneurially dominant, the aura of theatrical performance of the self seems to be now obsolete. Moreover, in view of neoliberalism as an increasing hegemony that has insidiously marginalized theaters of minoritarian performances (such as the New WORLD theater) in the past decade in the U.S., “minoritarian subjects” (to borrow José Esteban Muñoz’s term) are experiencing a predicament in which they are becoming more and more visually contingent owing to the neoliberal representational violence. With an urge of reviving such distant aura, this paper revisits the solo performances of Denise Uyehara and Dan Kwong staged in the Highway Performance Space, a generative site of what Meiling Cheng calls the “heterolocus”. By exploring auto-performance as a minoritarian genre, the paper examines what Diana Taylor calls the “embodied memories” in the works of Uyehara and Kwong, and further argues that these performances should not be simply understood as an individual aesthetic and political expression, but also be rendered as a powerful epistemological repertoire to perform cultural politics for the communal Asian American theater.

Keywords: Neoliberalism, Asian American Theatre, Autoperformance, Embodied Memory, Heterolocus.

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Which tongue? The Imported Colonial Standard or Motherland Vernacular? Exploring “Death” as the Birth of Postcolonial Malaysia in Muthammal Palanisamy’s Funeral Chant

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[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Kavitha Ganesan [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]  

Centre for the Promotion of Knowledge and Language Learning, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Sabah, Malaysia.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–18. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.09

Abstract received:  18 March 2021 | Article received: 1 June 2021 | Revised : 6 Sept 2021 | Accepted: 8 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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Which tongue? The Imported Colonial Standard or Motherland Vernacular? Exploring “Death” as the Birth of Postcolonial Malaysia in Muthammal Palanisamy’s Funeral Chant

Abstract

This article examines “death” in a funeral chant set in the plantation estates of Malaysia, and written in English and Tamil, as a metaphor for the birth of the nation. It explores how the death of communal linguistic elements, both in orality and symbolic references, lead to the deconstruction of motherland identity markers which are then replaced by the reconstruction of diasporic identities that are observable through the use of standardized English. For this purpose, the Malaysian Indian life-writer, Muthammal Palanisamy’s English version of an oppari (Tamil for funeral chant), which was published in Malaysia (2002) will be read in relation to the Tamil version published in India (2007) through transliterated and translated texts of the chant. In so doing, the paper highlights the inherent gap between the two versions that can be usefully deployed to address whether English is an enabling tool through which ethnic Indians can express their identities in a postcolonial nation like Malaysia or is it perpetually contaminated by colonial history and values. On the other hand, the paper also draws attention to the question of whether the displacement of the vernacular language, i.e., Tamil, witnesses the inevitable cultural death of a diasporic community or does it display a form of inclusivity within the polyglot linguistic environment of the adopted land, Malaysia.

Keywords: Malaysian Literature in English; migrant/diasporic Indian; national identity; funeral chant; plantation estates

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