Villa Revisited: Footnote to Youth and the Early Stories of Jose Garcia Villa

Villa Revisited: Footnote to Youth and the Early Stories of Jose Garcia Vill

Resil Mojares. Interrogations in Philippine Cultural History. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017. 191 pages.

Excerpt: In the school year 2014–15, Resil Mojares delivered a series of lectures at the Ateneo de Manila University as part of the master visiting teacher series sponsored by the School of Humanities of the university. Six of those lectures and two new papers make up Interrogations in Philippine Cultural History. The papers are just as the title of the book promises; they interrogate topics in various areas that constitute, to use a dated term, “Filipiniana” chapters in local and national history, specimens of Philippine literature, and approaches to Philippine studies, among other things. Primarily intended for a student audience, many of the papers are exploratory rather than conclusive, intended to provoke further studies or to illustrate a methodology

Nick Joaquin in Retrospect

Excerpt: A man with two birthdays was Nick Joaquin. All sources agree that he was born Nicomedes Joaquin in 1917 in Paco, Manila, and one even gives the time of birth (“around 6:00 am”). But was it on May 4, as his passport indicates, or on September 15, the feast day of St. Nicomedes, that he “emerged from his mother’s womb . . . [and] made a big howling noise to announce his arrival”? Nick himself played coy, because “he hated having people come around to celebrate his birthday.

The Making of Jose Garcia Villa\u27s Footnote to Youth

This article recounts the story behind the publication of Villa’s stories and his book Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (1933) in the United States. First, the conditions of the American literary marketplace are briefly described. Second, documents pertaining to the realization in print of Villa’s stories and his book are analyzed as sites of negotiations between colonial subject (Villa) and the colonial master (his American editors and publishers). Finally, an account of how Villa was made to circulate in the Philippines after the publication of his stories and his book in the United States is given. From these discussions the article hopes to show that Villa’s self-fashioning by publication was both subject to and critical of the colonial condition, alternately reinforcing it and challenging it

Raissa Rivera Falgui. Woman in a Frame. Quezon City: Adarna House, Inc., 2014. 180 pages.

Excerpt: If one of the goals of young adult writing is to educate and entertain readers, then Woman in a Frame is a success. In the figure of Marcela Simbulan, Raissa Rivera Falgui creates the Philippine equivalent of “Shakespeare’s sister,” and imagines what a native Filipino woman in the nineteenth century would have had to go through if she wanted to be an artist