[Review of] Michelle Maria Cruz Skinner. Balikbayan / A Filipino Homecoming

Homecoming is that eternal and unrealizable dream for expatriated Filipinos, from the migrant workers of the 1930s to the skilled and professional immigrants of the last two decades. Sheer economic hardship or cultural estrangement after relocation consign them to limbo and leave-taking. Homecoming becomes an act to be imagined; a dream pursued by Carlos Bulosan in his village stories and 1950s novella, The Power of the People; a hope nursed by the hurt men of Bienvenido Santos\u27s Scent of Apples (1981); an experience textualized by Ninotchka Rosca\u27s account of the 1986 Four-Day Revolt in Endgame: The Fall of Marcos

[Review of] Florentino Valeros and Estrellita Valeros-Gruenberg, Filipino Writers in English: A Biographical and Bibliographical Directory

With the rise of Filipino nationalism in the sixties and the consequent resort to literature written in Filipino and the vernacular, Philippine writing in English ebbed in importance. At that decisive juncture of national crisis, the verdict was made that Philippine literature in English had reached a dead end. Scholars and critics produced searching critiques of aesthetic orthodoxies and turned their attention to other cultural legacies. This reversal of fortunes for the literature in English after four decades of undisputed hegemony in Philippine cultural life partly explains why its history remains unwritten

The Vernacular/Local, the National, and the Global in Filipino Studies

Originally a concept paper for the Institute of Filipino Studies project in Oakland, California, this essay tracks a paradigmatic shift in area studies on the Philippines and ethnic studies of Filipinos/Filipino Americans toward what the writer calls “Filipino Studies.” Exceeding the national culture area assumptions of Philippine Studies and eschewing the assimilationist tendencies of long-standing notions of Filipino ethnicity, Campomanes bases this claim and project for a paradigmatic turn upon three critical planks: the diasporic dispersal of Filipinos in the age of globalization and late-modernity and how it problematizes unitary or organic concepts of Philippine nation, culture, and identity; the reformulation of Filipino nationalism to account for this global distension of the diverse constituencies that now appeal to a Filipino “national” identity and culture; and an historical etymology of the term “Filipino” to illustrate its power, over the term “Philippine,” to mark important junctures in the history of Filipino subject- and cultural formation and how these junctures might be read as instantiations of the vernacularizing act in Filipino formation. The vernacular or vernacularization, as used in this essay, is a term of mediation by which Filipinoness is evolved, contested, and opened up to new possibilities of reformulation; it is also used to underline the centrality of Filipino agency to the making and remaking of the nation to reflect not only diaspora but also its heteroglot/heterogenous composition