Participant Bios and Paper Abstracts
Panel 1: “Colonial Knowledge Production and the Politics of Memory”
Friday, April 23, 10:00 AM EST – 11:30 AM EST (RSVP here)
Speaker: Raymond Gandara, CSU Fullerton
Raymond Gandara [he/him] is a second-year graduate student in the American Studies MA program at California State University, Fullerton. He graduated from CSU Fullerton in 2018 with a BA in English and American Studies. His research interests include war, empire, & imperialism in popular culture, imperial bureaucracies, Filipino American history, and American national character.
Paper Abstract: “Imperial Roads, “Imperial Pastoral,” and Imperial Memory in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines”
In the aftermath of that “splendid little war” with Spain, the United States had fought a much more prolonged Philippine-American War, rife with torture, disease, and bloody guerilla warfare, to maintain control over the archipelago. Though insurrectos would continue to antagonize the insular government led by the Philippine Commission for the next decade, by 1902 the first nationalist revolution in Asia had been summarily squashed by a rising world power. Yet the lingering insurrectos and ladrones would not be the only challenge for the new colonialists. Throughout their struggle to maintain control and an air of legitimacy in the islands, the U.S. insular government used technology, bureaucracy, and ultimately culture to rewrite the story of their imperial projects in a more flattering light.
This project holds a cultural lens to the development of the caminero labor system in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines. I will argue how camineros and the roads they built invoked what historian Rebecca Tinio McKenna calls the “imperial pastoral,” idyllic representations of Filipino natural life meant to sanitize war and imperialism. I utilize comparative visual and textual analyses of “imperial pastoral” representations in engineering manuals, travel guides, and government publications to make the case that the caminero system helped rewrite the memory of the Philippine-American War and U.S. imperialism.
Speaker: Ian Harvey A. Claros, Ateneo de Manila University
Paper Abstract: “Dumdum, Tigaman, and Andoy: The Concept of Memory in Visayan Language and Culture”
This study charts the vernacular terrain of Visayan languages to unearth its concept of memory through a survey of Spanish dictionaries, folk literature, ethnographic data, and historiography. Diccionario Bisaya-Español by Fr. Juan Felix de la Encarnacion, Diccionario de la Lengua Bisaya, Hiligueina, y Haraya of Fr. Alonso de Mentrida (1841), Vocabolario de la Lenguga Tagala of Fr. Juan de Noceda and Pedro de Sanlucar (1860), and Diccionario Bisaya-Español para las provincias de Samar y Leyte of Fr. Antonio Sanchez de la Rosa (1895) provide counterintuitive tendencies that construct “memory” apart from western thought. While I begin with Visayan lexicons such as dumdum, tigaman, and andoy, I find it equally instructive to locate memory based on a nexus of Philippine languages and its Austronesian counterparts to broaden the moments of complementarity and analogy. By eliciting these discursive formations, I establish a vernacular method of reading Philippine literary texts that deal with remembrance, forgetting, and yearning. Based on these sources, I posit that they constellate an ecology of discourses that complicates the category of “memory” as a particular concept which gestures from an insular standpoint toward a worldview.
Speaker: Sarah Day Dayon, University of Michigan
Sarah Day Dayon is a pinay from suburbs of Chicago, Illinois (Kickapoo/Peoria/Kaskaskia/Potawatomi land) who finds herself negotiating the space between reflecting & reimagining. Sarah Day earned her Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in RI (Narragansett/Wampanoag land) where she double majored in Biology and Ethnic Studies and also completed her Master of Arts in Teaching in Secondary History/Social Studies at Brown. After teaching high school AP U.S. History and Ethnic Studies in Daly City, CA (Ramaytush Ohlone land), she is currently a PhD student in Educational Studies at the University of Michigan (Ojibwe/Odawa/Potawatomi land) with a focus on Teaching and Teacher Education. Her research interests include pinayism, community engaged scholarship, anti-racist and anti-colonial pedagogy, sustaining K- 12 BIPOC educators, and K-12 Ethnic Studies curriculum design.
Paper Abstract: “Black and Filipino Intellectual Thought and Anti-Colonial Education: A Comparative Analysis of Carter G. Woodson and Renato Constantino’s ‘Miseducations'”
In 1933, Carter G. Woodson, also known as the Father of Black History and creator of the first Negro History Week (which has now evolved into Black History Month), wrote the The Mis-Education of the Negro. His widely popular monograph denounced U.S. schooling for failing to uplift the unique contributions of Black individuals and communities and instead exploited and painted African Americans as inferior. In his 1966 essay, “Miseducation of the Filipino”, published 33 years after Woodson’s Miseducation, Renato Constantino critiqued the historical impact of U.S. colonial education in the Philippines. Woodson, inspired by his time as one of the Thomasite educators deployed to the Philippines in 1903, and Constantino, whose essay title harkens back to Woodson’s seminal work, are both uniquely situated within and push back against the dominant narrative of U.S. schooling. In comparing the historical contexts and content of Woodson’s and Constantino’s works, my analysis seeks to illuminate the hegemonic nature of U.S. education, through the specific structures of enslavement, capitalism and colonialism. At the same time, I hope to address how communities of color, particularly Black and Filipino peoples, have sought to challenge oppressive institutions of power in education by reimagining and reclaiming knowledge production and public schooling for themselves. Ultimately, this paper aims to contribute to the rich historiography of the miseducation of people of color specifically and anti-racist and anti-colonial education more broadly.
Moderator: Emilie S. Tumale, NYU
Emilie S. Tumale is a PhD Candidate in Sociology of Education at NYU Steinhardt and a community educator based in New York City. Hailing from the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County, she has been eager to learn more about the Asian American community in the New York Metropolitan area. With her involvement in various Filipino American organizations in NYC, Emilie’s dissertation research entails further understanding how Filipino American college students conceptualize their ethnic identity in relation to their geographic contexts.
Panel 2: “Decolonization and Trans/Oceanic Approaches”
Friday, April 23, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST (RSVP here)
Speaker: Kale B. Fajardo, University of Minnesota
Kale B. Fajardo is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities and Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Paper Abstract: Native Seamen, Bangkas (Boats), Seafaring, and Turtles: Decolonizing The First Circumnavigation and Surviving the Current Climate Emergency
My paper examines some of the Native/decolonial and Filipinx and Pacific Islander imaginaries of the Magellan-Elcano-De-Malacca circumnavigations in the following texts: Jungle Dream, a novel by Jessica Haggedorn (Fil-Am, “The Turn, the Poem, and the Canoe” an essay by Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro); and “Balikbayan #1,” a film by Kidlat Tahimik (Filipino). I argue that Native navigation and seafaring skills and knowledge were central to the First Circumnavigation (as well as to the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade). I conclude the paper by discussing the ecological implications of the circumnavigation in the context of the current global climate emergency. This paper is an excerpt from Chapter 1 from my second book project, Another Archipelago: Queering/Transing Filipinx Geographies, Mobilities, and Visual Cultures.
Speaker: Brenda Rodriguez Alegre, University of Hong Kong
Brenda Rodriguez Alegre, earned her PhD in Psychology. Her research is about transgender women. She is currently among the Board of Directors of STRAP (The Society of Transsexual Women Advocates of the Philippines). Brenda is a Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong where she teaches TransAsia and Sexuality and Gender at The Gender Studies Program, with upcoming publications on transgender people’s experiences.
Paper Abstract: “From Asog to Bakla to Transpinay: Weaving a Complex History of Transness and Decolonizing the Future.”
As we look into the last five hundred years of our history in the Philippines, it is profoundly challenging to trace the history of transness and queerness. However, it cannot be denied that in our pre-colonial times, our society was more matriarchal as well as inclusive and celebratory of otherness. The baylans or asogs as usually referred to in the Visayan are reflective of our transgendered past. They were shamans and leaders, revered and feared. But the colonial years seemingly decimated them, erased, silenced. Then later the bakla became the narrative of post-colonial queerness. The queer was powerful in the iconography of Roderick Paulate and Regine Velasquez, yet absent in spaces of human rights and politics. Then in the age of intersectional feminism, transpinays claimed visibility in various spaces, which sometimes celebrate her but mostly harmed her. This essay attempts to weave a complex history of transness and explore our narratives within Philippine society where identity politics is amnesiac of our glorious queer past, selfish of our repressed present and unaffected of our uncertain future. As a transpinay, I position myself among these narratives and speak from the power of the truth as well as weave a tapestry of transcendent transgender experiences that bravely begins to decolonize their future.
Moderator: Joseph Allen Ruanto-Ramirez, Claremont Graduate University
Keynote Panel: “Reflections on 500 Years of Navigation and (Anti)Conquest”
Friday, April 23, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM EST (RSVP here) (Public Livestream Available via NYU KJCC)
Speaker: John D. Blanco, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, UC San Diego
John D. (Jody) Blanco teaches modern Philippine, Latin American, and Asian-American literatures, with a focus on the literatures and cultures of early modern globalization under the Spanish Empire (Philippine, Latin American, and Asian), at the University of California, San Diego. His current research and book manuscript engage in a comparative study of missionary and indigenous collaboration and conflict in the spiritual Conquest of the Philippines between the 16th-18th centuries. He is the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the 19th Century Philippines (UC Press, 2019) and the translator of Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities of Latin America: Culture and Politics in the 19th Century (Duke UP, 2001).
Paper Abstract: “A God is Weeping: Reinterpreting the Conquest”
Reading stories of the “spiritual conquest” of the Philippines during the seventeenth century in the chronicles of the religious Orders against the grain reveals the struggle of natives to understand the anomalous situation of having had their patterns of economy and society fundamentally altered by the Spanish presence, but without a corresponding law or order that would allow them to envision their future under Spanish rule. While stories of gods and monsters in the Philippines are routinely unmasked by missionaries as figures of the devil, a close reading of these episodes suggests the collective struggle of natives to either reinvent their notions of law, religion, and custom under friar surveillance; or appropriate Christian beliefs and conceptions as a way of filling in the gaps of the limits of Spanish reach. Centennials invite us to not only relinquish our obsession with constructing / deconstructing / reconstructing grand narratives, but also to become indifferent to their persistence in favor of allowing the past to speak to our today, in other ways.
Speaker: Oona Paredes, Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, UCLA
Oona Paredes is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. An anthropologist and ethnohistorian by training, her work focuses on the Indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, with a special focus on Mindanao. Her monography, A Mountain of Difference: The Lumad in Early Colonial Mindanao (Cornell SEAP, 2013) portrays the pericolonial encounter between Iberian Catholic missionaries and the ancestors of today’s diverse Lumad peoples in the southern Philippines.
Paper Description:” Death on the Beach: ‘Decolonizing’ Mactan’s Pericolonial Moment”
In imagining, discussing, and portraying the European Magellan’s arrival in the Philippines, Filipinos tend to focus on dramatizing the moment of his demise at the hands of the native Lapu-Lapu. This aligns with what Julius Bautista points out is a “culture of death” in the Philippines that tends to fixate on the final violent moment of someone’s life, such as Jose Rizal, Ninoy Aquino, Jesus Christ. In this talk I’ll be comparing Magellan’s moment with another comparable voyager-colonizer death at the hands of natives — that of Captain Cook in 1779 at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island of Hawaii. In popular historiography, both deaths signal a definite turn to coloniality, but I argue against reinforcing the seemingly inevitable trajectory of these and other moments by situating them as pericolonial moments across both space and time.
Speaker: Vicente Rafael, Professor of History, University of Washington
Vicente L. Rafael (Ph.D., Cornell) is the author of several works on the historical and cultural politics of the colonial and post-colonial Philippines, including Contracting Colonialism Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule(1992); White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (2000); The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (2005); Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation(2016). He has also edited Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays in Filipino Cultures (1995); Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam (1999); and Nick Joaquin’s collection of short stories, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic (2017); and with Mary Louis Pratt, a Special Issue of American Quarterly on The Politics of Language, Translation and Multi-lingualism in American Studies (forthcoming). Currently, he is completing a book on the politics and aesthetics of the Duterte regime, “The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte” to be published by Duke University Press in January, 2022.
Paper Abstract: “ Duterte’s Phallus: On the Aesthetics of Authoritarian Vulgarity”
What are some of the sources of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s symbolic authority? Duterte is widely known for his irreverence and bawdy humor that constitute important elements of his governing style. His stories reveal a reliance on invective and an obsession with obscenity. He also makes frequent references to genitalia–his as well those of his critics to the delight of his listeners. He revels in what Achille Mbembe calls an aesthetic of vulgarity that has the effect of establishing a relationship of “conviviality” between himself and his audience. What results is an “intimate tyranny,” much of it centered on the tales of his phallus as it encounters the world. This talk is an attempt to explicate the terms of this intimate tyranny. By closely reading some of his well-known jokes and stories, we see how his humor works by way of a dialectic of vulnerability and vengeance that shores up his popularity even as it consolidates his authority.
Panel 3: “Cultural Production and Colonial Legacies”
Saturday, April 24, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST (RSVP here)
Speaker: Isidora Miranda, Vanderbilt University
Isidora Miranda is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Vanderbilt University. She is currently at work on a book manuscript on the Tagalog zarzuela, cultural nationalism, and constructions of racial and gendered identities during the U.S. colonial period in the Philippines.
Paper Abstract: “Race, Religion, and the Politics of Representation in the Tagalog Zarzuela Minda Mora (1904)”
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Tagalog zarzuela became a multivalent form of popular entertainment that mirrored socio-political realities as well as created new fantasies of a national and post-colonial future. The playwright Severino Reyes, in particular, favored the genre’s realism to critique social vices and the blind religiosity he perceived as legacies of Spanish colonization. With the goal of cultural uplift, Reyes collaborated with Filipino composers to showcase local performers as cosmopolitan artists in their fluency in Western art music. While Reyes saw the musical stage as means to counteract the negative portrayals of Filipinos in Spanish and US colonial rhetoric, a number of his works also featured representational practices that constructed racial and cultural difference within the local population. This paper focuses on Reyes’s Minda Mora (1904), which remains one of the earliest examples of artistic works in the Tagalog language that advocated for the Islamic population in Mindanao through its protagonist Minda. Minda Mora and its immediate reception, however, reveal the fraught politics of national identity formation in inter-colonial Philippines. The zarzuela took up discourses on race and civility from the US, which in turn animated debates about the existing colorism in the archipelago. But unlike exoticist works produced in the imperial metropoles, Minda Mora complicates the binary constructions of the “East” and the “West” as it powerfully critiques the racist motivations of white European colonial expansion while remaining ambivalent to US presence in the Philippines.
Speaker: Jose Santos P. Ardivilla, UP Diliman College of Fine Arts
Jose Santos P. Ardivilla is a political cartoonist, printmaker and also an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication at the University of the Philippines Diliman College of Fine Arts. He is a PhD in Fine Arts student currently as Fulbright scholar at the Texas Tech University.
Paper Abstract: “Tropical Baroque and the Two Christophers”
2021 marks 500 years of contact between the Philippines and European explorers. The legacy of the contact can be gleamed from the two paintings of St. Christophers in a town of Paete, which is several miles away from the capital Manila. These two paintings were said to have been made from 1840s-1860s during the Spanish colonial Times in the Philippines. What is interesting to note is that one version tried to literally cover up the other. The newer portrait of St. Christopher is that of a European figure whereas the older one is that of St. Christopher as depicted through a body that is argued to be Native and/or Muslim. These two paintings taken together can offer a glimpse on the social political network of utterances and counter-utterances that are still thriving to this day regarding colonial legacies. I argue that these paintings are symbolic translations (from the Catholic ritual of translating holy relics to the people), but in two different directions. It bears mentioning that these paintings are inside the church dedicated to Santiago Compostela, Spain’s Patron Saint. Santiago Compostela has another name: Santiago Matamoros, Mataindios which is St. James the Muslim Slayer, the Indian slayer. To be in a church dedicated to a saint of violent colonial subjugation adds another layer to colonial legacy. One encompassing legacy is that these paintings are ideas born from the Tropical Baroque in which it is a weaving of opulence of Spanish aesthetic set in the backdrop of violence and subjugation.
Speakers: Danim Majerano and Marely P. Fos, Kapitolyo High School, Philippines
Paper Abstract: “Statue of the Sentinel of Freedom from Mactan: A Visual Politics”
Lapu-Lapu is recognized as a hero nowadays. He is now part of Rizal Park, the national park in Manila, in the National Capital of the Philippines. Rizal Park is a national project the under American colonial-imperial regime. In this park, the statue of Lapu-Lapu was unveiled on February 5, 2004 despite opposition from the National Historical Institute, after then former President Gloria Macapal Arroyo approved the installation of the Statue of the Sentinel of Freedom or the Lapu-Lapu Monument. Through the use of newspaper reports, analysis of his monument and laying out one’s own point of view is the purpose of this paper. This project ventures on the utilization of the national government of the image in the context of its identity production. The study aims to analyze and discuss the said report of Lapu-Lapu as an artistic image and its appropriation by the art institution vis. a vis., the national government. His main contribution in Philippine history is deeply grounded in today’s politics and the ideological relations between art and governance. From the national to local politics in the Philippines, I can see that the very image of the Lapu-Lapu of Mactan is a powerful and effective ideological tool of the government in propagating and pleasing the Visayan people to vote again the former President and her allies for the national positions.
Moderator: Erica Feild, NYU
Erica Feild is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Her research examines representations of Muslims and converts from Islam in historical and literary texts produced in Spain, Mexico, and the Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. More specifically she is interested in how language ideologies intersect with colonial constructions of religious and racial difference and the politics of race making.
Panel 4: “Deconstructing Filipinx American Identities”
Saturday, April 24, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST (RSVP here)
Speaker: Karin Louise Hermes, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Karin Louise Hermes is a Filipina-German expat from Manila, currently based in Germany. She is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has an MA in Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a BA in Ethnology & Sociology from the University of Heidelberg.
Paper Abstract: “Deconstructing Diasporic Nationalisms to “the Philippines” for Anarchipelagic Futures”
This paper attempts to deconstruct national and regional identities in the Philippine diaspora towards Indigenous resurgence and decolonial solidarities with Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) in Hawai‘i. The aims of this deconstruction are two-fold: Questioning the salience and construction of “Filipinx” identities in the “local” Asian settler diaspora in Hawai‘i, in particular regarding the migrations of rural peasants from the newly independent Philippines in the early 20th century, and tapping this nebulous allegiance to the nation-state for abolitionist solidarities with Indigenous Hawaiian resurgence and Philippine Anarchipelagic organizing in the 21st century. I examine the move from regional identities in the Ilocos and Visayan provinces to the panethnic “local” and “Filipinx” in Hawai‘i based on labor organizing and land eviction coalitions, to relate these “local” Asian or rather working-class interests for common cause towards Indigenous Hawaiian resurgence. Specifically, shared fishing practices between Filipinx and Hawaiians and bayanihan (mutual aid) in Anarchist organizing groups are put side-by-side to emphasize intercommunal relationalities and forms of cooperation from the 1920s to the 1970s to the 2020s, through an archipelagic and Oceanic perspective as reminiscent of the 1520s. Despite not wanting to explicitly label the anti-imperialist and non-statist forms of Indigenous resistance and Filipinx settler solidarities in Hawai‘i as “anarchist,” I employ a discourse analysis of contemporary Philippine Anarchist texts in the diaspora and in the Philippines or the “Anarchipelago” to the conditions at hand, in dialogue with Hawaiian Anarchists.
Speakers: Marc Johnston Guerrero and Lisa Combs, Ohio State University
Marc Johnston Guerrero, Ph.D., serves as assistant chair for enrollment management in the department of educational studies at The Ohio State University. He is also an associate professor in the higher education and student affairs program and affiliated faculty with the Asian American studies program at OSU. He completed a PhD in education (with an emphasis in higher education and organizational change) from UCLA. His research interests focus on diversity and social justice issues in higher education and student affairs, with specific attention to Asian American & Pacific Islander students and multiracial/mixed race dynamics.
Lisa Combs, MS (she/her/hers), recently transitioned from her role as program coordinator in the Student Diversity and Multicultural Affairs Office at Loyola University Chicago to become a doctoral student at The Ohio State University in the higher education and student affairs program. Her research interests include identity interconnections, multiraciality in higher education, and Filipinx identity development. She received her BA from The Ohio State University and her MS from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Paper Abstract: “At Home or On Tour? Mixed Filipina/o American Reflections on Culture and Identity”
According to 2010 U.S. Census data, approximately one in four Filipino Americans identified with another race or Asian ethnic group, one of the highest proportions for any Asian group. Yet, the enduring legacy of Spanish and American colonization of the Philippines have ramifications for how mixed or mestizo Filipino Americans are affirmed as part of the community. Root (1997) named a dynamic where Filipino Americans may reject those who are mixed with white because of a desire for self-protection, which “results in rejecting all that is perceived as part of the colonizer; mixed-heritage Filipinos are the physical embodiment of the Filipino’s contact with the colonizer” (82). These dynamics place mixed-heritage Filipinos in a liminality position between being Filipino and American. This presentation is based on a duoethnography that engages dilemmas of authenticity for two mixed heritage Filipina/o Americans on various points in ongoing journeys toward decolonization. We center our analysis around recent travels to the “motherland” of the Philippines, posing two guiding questions: a) What does it mean for us to claim Filipino-ness within the context of the Philippines when we are solely visiting? And (b) How is the dissonance of being in a different national context helpful for better understanding our relationships to our Filipina mothers? We collectively reflect on our experiences and share the realization that there is no escaping our proximity to whiteness/colonization despite connections to family, while still questioning the rigidity of the systems associated with racism and colonization that cause us to question our identity.
Moderator: Michael Menor Salgarolo, NYU
Michael Menor Salgarolo is a PhD candidate in the NYU History Department and a 2020-2021 Doctoral Fellow at the NYU Center for the Humanities. His dissertation is a history of Filipino communities in southern Louisiana from the mid-nineteenth century to the early-twentieth century, focusing on questions of race, migration, and empire. He is the co-founder of the Filipinx Powerpoint Party, which is both an informal salon featuring Filipinx academics and an academic mentoring network.
Photo Credit: “Cebu | Magellan’s Cross” by travel oriented is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0