Publication
Abstract:The war on drugs in the Philippines, despite President Dutertes rhetoric of saving the country, has killed alarming numbers of people. This article analyzes a dystopian text titled Ganagan (Fertilizer) by Roy Aragon which is about the Duterte administrations war on drugs. Deploying close reading and semiotics, it shows that the story portrays the punitive and vindictive nature of the war on drugs as a totalitarian project which resulted in dehumanization and collapse of human values. It further argues that the text suggests a possible future in which Dutertes utopian pursuit of the best of all possible worlds, which has done away with dangerous drugs, is driven less by the search for happiness than by a determined faith in justice. Lastly, the analysis focuses on the vegetable garden which Castas, the main character, has cultivated. Launching off from Edward Sojas trialectics of spatiality and Thirdspace and conventions of dystopian fiction, the article shows that the garden is an ambivalent position, negotiation, and critique of the war on drugs. Hence, the garden, as a lived space, though imposing a desired order, could also be a site of disentanglements and resistance.
Keywords:dystopian fiction; lived space; war on drugs
Abstract:Literary studies, with the influence of critical theory inspired by Marxism and the Frankfurt School, have sidestepped concerns on aesthetics and poetics. Using Elleke Boehmer’s postcolonial poetics, this study aims to explore juxtaposition and asynchronicity in Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart. It discusses how juxtaposition and asynchronicity as postcolonial poetics interrogate the postcolonial politics in the novel and explains the novel’s contribution to enriching Filipinos’ counter-memory and in enabling resistance. The poetics of second-person narrator point of view, flashbacks, free indirect discourse, and elliptical narrative are ways through which the text has explored migrants’ efforts of forging and linking social relations in the interstitial spaces between homeland and host land. At the same time, the novel goes beyond essentialist contours of migrant experience such as heteronormative nationalism and nostalgia for lost origins. The paper demonstrates not only a critical reckoning with power structures but also renewed attempts and continued struggle, which lead to radical hope.
Abstract:This study took a humanities approach to climate change education, focusing on climate fiction texts in the literature classroom, namely: Barakat Akinsiku’s “The God of the Sea,” Sigrid Marianne Gayangos’s “Galansiyang,” and Jules Hogan’s “Those They Left Behind” from Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Volume III (2021). This encompassed the Quarter 3, Week 7 literature competency in the DepEd Grade 10 curriculum context. In-depth discussion of the cli-fi texts was made possible through the crafting of a lesson exemplar, writing of discussion questions through an ecocritical lens, and using Collaborative Digital Text Annotation (CDTA) as an evaluative reading tool which engendered student responses to the text and interactions within the CDTA activity. Thematic analysis was used in interpreting the digital text annotations which revealed four different themes: drawing out story elements, connecting the text to the real world, performing evaluative reading, and expressing random reactions under which the students' responses to the cli-fi texts were classified. The researchers recommend using online applications such as Google Docs as digital annotation tools during collaborative classroom reading. Also, literature classroom facilitators should create a concrete reward system to encourage students' enthusiasm during the CDTA activities and to achieve the collaborative aspect of the CDTA. Lastly, other reading strategies for evaluating cli-fi texts must be explored.
Keywords:climate change education, interdisciplinary literature instruction, technology-based learning, ecocriticism
Abstract:Christoph Brumann and David Berliner, in their book World Heritage on the Ground: Ethnographic Perspectives (2016), ask what World Heritage (WH) does on the ground far away from the meeting halls of the WH Committee. This article explores the ways in which WH moves and breathes on the ground of Calle Crisologo, Vigan City in northern Philippines. Utilizing participant observation and key informant interviews and building on Edward Soja’s notion of Thirdspace, it aims to unpack differences of meanings with regard to the ways WH gets negotiated by locals. The themes of remembrances, counter-memory, impacts and meanings of WH, rootedness and counter practices, and postcoloniality problematize and enrich WH’s relationship with local histories, memories, societies, identities, and economies. Shown through the variegated accounts are the ways in which people’s engagement with the street turns it into a fecund and volatile, real and imagined lifeworld of experiences. Findings and lessons relate well to heritage’s meaning, value, and significance – such as, for instance, the ways that local people’s voices can be better valued for more sustainable and inclusive heritage, culture, and memory of Vigan City and elsewhere.
Keywords:World Heritage; thirdspace; Calle Crisologo; Vigan City; urban space
On-going
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Presentation
- Translanguaging Practices and Language Identities of Prospective English Teachers (2024)
- Scaling the Ili: Folklore as Archive in Prescillano Bermudez’s Dagiti Pundador (2024)
Citations
- Juxtaposition and Asynchronicity as Postcolonial Poetics in Elaine Castillo’s America is Not the Heart (2023) https://www.scilit.com/sources/484110
- Ethical Literacy Criticism and Ariel Sotelo Tabag’s Panangsapul iti Puraw a Kabalio (2024) https://crea.ujaen.es/handle/10953.1/23402
IP Registration
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