Ateneo De Manila University Press Research Articles

20th Century Western Visayan Millenarian Representations: The Case of “Emperor” Flor Intrencherado in the Local Press, 1925-1929

20th Century Western Visayan Millenarian Representations: The Case of “Emperor” Flor Intrencherado in the Local Press, 1925-1929

Future Challenges of Secularization to Asian Christianity and Theology

Future Challenges of Secularization to Asian Christianity and Theology

Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession by Arnisson Andre Ortega

Reviewed by: Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession by Arnisson Andre Ortega Chester Antonino C. Arcilla ARNISSON ANDRE ORTEGA Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018. 361 pages. The Philippines is in a neoliberal urban upheaval, Arnisson Andre Ortega declares in this groundbreaking book, Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession. He compellingly shows the spatial contradictions in the country's national capital region, Metro Manila, which is increasingly being neoliberalized, i.e., designed and developed for elite accumulation whereby land and housing are commodified to provide real estate profits while marginalized populations are displaced. Ortega accomplishes the difficult task of linking contemporary economic and land-use developments with the country's postcolonial history. Since the late 1980s, the real estate industry has been the Philippine economy's backbone, driven by overseas-based Filipinos' (OFs) desire for safe, exclusive suburban spaces and their transnational remittances. Surrounding Metro Manila are massive constructions of gated subdivisions that are often sold to "productive and successful" OFs. Within the metropolis, high-end condominiums, malls, and services in central business districts drive development to attract foreign investments and remittances. These processes of gentrification and socialized housing projects are mired in violence and dispossessions. The state drives out "unproductive [End Page 145] and unsuccessful" Filipinos—peasants, informal settler families (ISF), and indigenous peoples (IP)—from their homes and livelihoods, often violently, to make way for such projects. Because the law requires the relocation of ISFs before demolition, the socialized housing market in low-value peri-urban areas that sell homes to the evicted provides an additional opportunity for real estate accumulation. The relocatees fend for themselves as they struggle to meet amortization payments in resettlement sites, where livelihood and social services are difficult to access. Due to the general failure of the land reform program and the dominance of elite-influenced urban planning, large landholdings—often formerly export-oriented, colonial-era haciendas—are usually the ones converted for gentrification and socialized housing. The author is a geographer teaching at Syracuse University in New York and a former faculty member of the University of the Philippines Population Institute. In the book's introduction, Ortega shares his personal history as a son of peasant migrants to the city and among the first in his family to obtain a university education. As an engaged scholar committed to social justice, he admits his work is necessarily incomplete and explicitly political. His earlier researches on critical geography, migration, and spatial dispossessions have appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Urban Geography, Cities, and Geoforum, among others. In chapter 1 Ortega draws from a comprehensive review of Marxist, postcolonial, and critical urbanism scholarship to analyze urban space in the Global South as containers where global economic, political, and ideological flows are territorially embedded within the postcolonial state. These spatial configurations in turn reconstitute local social relations. Focusing on the period after the 1986 EDSA People Power, which restored liberal democracy and deregulated markets in the Philippines, chapter 2 tackles neoliberal restructuring, land commodification, and the reframing of the Filipino values of sipag (industry) at tiyaga (persistence) toward the ideal of the entrepreneurial, productive Filipino typified by successful OFs. Chapter 3 documents the rise of the real estate industry, identifies the major players, and discusses industry practices that supply OFs their suburban dream homes. In chapter 4 Ortega maps out the neoliberal spatialization in Metro Manila's peri-urban fringe, focusing on the transformation of the Canlubang Sugar Estates in Laguna. He notes how places of consumption have replaced the colonial población (town center) as a critical urban space, reflecting the [End Page 146] shift from agriculture and manufacturing to the service economy. As typified by the case of Canlubang, exclusive subdivisions would cluster around the mall, the archetypal site of consumption in Philippine cities. Chapter 5 studies the idealized "global" and "suburban" (168) lifestyles of returning OFs and traces the expansion of master-planned exclusive communities in the south of Metro Manila. The subsequent chapter descends to the everyday life inside these gated neighborhoods and finds economic anxieties and loneliness...

Karl Gaspar’s Transformative Spirituality: Rediscovering Precolonial Philippine Spirituality and Its Challenges to Contemporary Filipino Pentecostal Spiritualities

Karl Gaspar’s Transformative Spirituality: Rediscovering Precolonial Philippine Spirituality and Its Challenges to Contemporary Filipino Pentecostal Spiritualities

Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality by Lisandro E. Claudio

Reviewed by: Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality by Lisandro E. Claudio Megan Thomas LISANDRO E. CLAUDIO Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 89 pages. In this welcome addition to scholarship interpreting José Rizal's writings, Lisandro E. Claudio offers an important examination of Rizal's reflections on liberal principles, centering especially on Rizal's attention to individual rights and his admiration for them as keystones of the progress that he sought in the Philippines and for its people as part of a modern world. Claudio is a prolific public intellectual and scholar, known for his Taming People's Power: The EDSA Revolutions and Their Contradictions (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013), the award-winning Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017), and innumerable essays and shorter pieces. Claudio often defends liberal principles and ideas against attacks that he sees as unfair, misinformed, and politically bankrupt; Jose Rizal belongs to the strand of Claudio's work that recuperates liberalism in, for, and beyond the Philippines. As part of the "Global Political Thinkers" series of Palgrave's Pivot project with an international English-reading academic audience, the book aims to introduce Rizal's thought in a concise way to those not yet familiar with Rizal or Philippine politics and history. It does so by advancing an argument that contributes to the historiography of Rizal and resonates in the political present: Claudio argues that Rizal is a fundamentally liberal thinker, that he viewed politics through the "overarching lens" of liberalism (xi) and was "one of colonial/postcolonial liberalism's earliest and most prescient thinkers" (ix). Claudio eschews a narrow definition of liberalism, but it becomes clear that for him, as for his understanding of Rizal, liberalism is primarily understood as the promotion and protection of individual rights and civil liberties. For Claudio, Rizal understood that even liberal colonizers failed to ensure liberal rights in the colony and also thought that liberalism could be "purified" in the colony by the suffering colonial subject (27). At the core of the short book are three chapters on Rizal's writings. These chapters focus on liberal principles or liberalism in evidence, respectively, in Rizal's letters and essays (chapter 2), Noli me tangere (chapter 3), and El filibusterismo (chapter 4). Each of these chapters stands alone, but they cohere in an overall argument that Rizal's political thought centrally [End Page 509] treated the problem of liberalism's failures in a colonial setting as well as its fundamental and undeniable promise. Claudio reads the Noli and the Fili as "twin experiments in two kinds of change, both associated with variants of liberalism," the Noli as an experiment testing "the viability of liberal reformism" in the Philippines and the Fili as "an experiment in Jacobin revolution" (43). Claudio sets the stage for his chapters on the novels by preceding them with a selected reading of Rizal's letters and essays (chapter 2), some of which are better known than others, but which are here mined specifically for reflections on liberal principles. In one particularly helpful passage for the author's purposes, we read Rizal writing in 1889 about the injustices of Spanish governance in the Philippines: "the more vexations are committed the more Filipino liberals will emerge" (28). In Claudio's reading, Rizal held that such "vexations" would "engender a culture of liberalism and embolden liberals to take stances and make sacrifices" (29). For Claudio, Rizal saw liberalism as consisting of appropriately universal political principles of civil liberties—such as the freedom of speech (and the press), freedom of religion, and protection of private property—universal principles in the sense that they ought to be respected by governments everywhere. In turn, Claudio's Rizal saw the import and value of these liberal principles in high relief because they were fundamentally contradicted in the abuses committed by the government and friars in the Philippines. The book argues that for Rizal liberalism's value was especially potent in the context of those abuses: "No European could understand the travails of a liberal in the colony, because for Rizal, Europeans did...

Clothing the Colony: Nineteenth-Century Philippine Sartorial Culture, 1820–1896 by Stephanie Coo

Reviewed by: Clothing the Colony: Nineteenth-Century Philippine Sartorial Culture, 1820–1896 by Stephanie Coo Marya Svetlana T. Camacho STEPHANIE COO Clothing the Colony: Nineteenth-Century Philippine Sartorial Culture, 1820–1896 Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2019. 550 pages. Behind this pioneering work is the author's passion for clothing, which was inspired by the Chinese-Filipino milieu of her childhood; she grew up accustomed to seeing textiles treated as esteemed betrothal gifts for the bride's family. Clothing the Colony: Nineteenth-Century Philippine Sartorial Culture, 1820–1896 is based on Stephanie Coo's doctoral dissertation in cultural history at the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis. Of the existing literature on race, class, and gender in the Spanish colonial Philippines, none has examined these aspects through clothing and fashion as comprehensively as this one. The first two of the six chapters provide the coordinates of colonial society: the class system and its dynamics, the combination of civilization and Catholicism that set colonial cultural standards, and the production and distribution of clothing. In the next chapters gender, class, and culture serve as the primary analytical categories. Inevitably race and occupation also come into play in varying degrees. In the chapter on women's clothing (chapter 3), for example, a variety of groups are distinguishable, such as convent schoolgirls, children, mestizas, and workers. To frame and scrutinize the class structure in the Spanish colonial Philippines, the author turns to sociologists Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen and those who have interpreted them. To validate her findings, Coo draws parallelisms between fashion and clothing practices in the Philippines and in other Asian colonies. Through the lens of dress, the author succeeds in refracting colonial life into its structural components and showing their interaction through time. Teasing out the mutual implications of gender, class, occupation, and race is complex. Understandably, it becomes necessary to repeat information from one chapter to another, although perhaps with more careful editing the author could have reduced the repetition. It seems that due to the sheer amount of information some passages are repeated inadvertently as footnotes and vice versa, and footnotes are duplicated in different parts of the book. Also, while secondary sources serve mostly to provide background information, some subsections could have benefited from works that are [End Page 513] more to the point: for example, those parts dealing with the educational system (145, 242–36). Coo gathers more than a thousand sources, which she classifies into iconographic, material (actual pieces of clothing and textiles), and written. The resulting digital database is prodigious as may be gleaned from the texts and iconographic and sartorial material cited. For a book dealing with material culture and taking into account the limits of textual exposition, the magnanimous number of illustrations augments its vividness. The author systematizes the database not only by year and artist/author but also by the analytical categories used throughout the book: articles of clothing, gender, race, socioeconomic status, and occupation. Based on this body of sources, she observes that those sources dating from the 1820s became sufficiently substantial in number to make that decade a justifiable starting point of a study on clothing history. The terminal year of 1896 represents the historical watershed of the Philippine Revolution and eventual declaration of independence from Spain. From the corpus of sources that grew in number and in variety of genres roughly in the middle of the nineteenth century, coinciding with increasing prosperity, the author distinguishes significant changes in clothing style and practice after 1840. To help readers navigate the mass of sources, she takes pains to introduce the authors and artists whose works she cites. Coo declares a basic point of difference between Clothing the Colony and other works on Philippine clothing: "More than being just about clothes, this book is also about the wearers, clothes workers, and traders" (3). Chapter 2, which discusses clothing material and production, describes the interaction among those three sectors while focusing on the producers. Individuals, classified by their role in these processes, emerge from the anonymous mass of laborers, as the author draws them out of textual and iconographic sources. Although based on typecast portrayals, whether pictorial or literary, the sinamayeras (cloth...

Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th‐Century Philippines. Singapore and Quezon City: National University of Singapore Press and Ateneo de Manila University Press. 248 pages. ISBN 9789814722520. Paperback, SGD 38. LisandroClaudio. 2017.

Asian Politics & PolicyVolume 11, Issue 4 p. 687-690 Book Review Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines. Singapore and Quezon City: National University of Singapore Press and Ateneo de Manila University Press. 248 pages. ISBN 9789814722520. Paperback, SGD 38. Lisandro Claudio. 2017. Javier Leonardo Vitug Rugeria, Javier Leonardo Vitug Rugeria Department of History, Ateneo de Manila UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Javier Leonardo Vitug Rugeria, Javier Leonardo Vitug Rugeria Department of History, Ateneo de Manila UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 30 October 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/aspp.12488Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume11, Issue4October 2019Pages 687-690 RelatedInformation

The Rise of Filipino Postcolonial Knowledge: Philippine Studies, the Institute of Philippine Culture, and the Ateneo de Manila University Press

A contribution to the yet unwritten histories of Philippine Studies (PS), the Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC), and the Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) Press, this article examines the rise of Filipino postcolonial institutions of knowledge production in the shadow of the Cold War. It argues that PS, IPC, and ADMU Press constituted a coherent and coordinated network that sought to establish a postcolonial culture of knowledge production after 1946. Moreover, their development signaled the rise of decolonizing thought that coincided with the emergence of Cold War area studies. KEYWORDS: POSTCOLONIAL KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION • INTELLECTUAL HISTORY • COLD WAR • DECOLONIZATION • JESUITS

Historical Continuities in and New Works on Philippine Cities

Historical Continuities in and New Works on Philippine Cities Michael D. Pante (bio) wataru kusaka Moral Politics in the Philippines: Inequality, Democracy and the Urban Poor Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2019. 341 pages. gerard lico and lorelei d. c. de viana, eds. Regulating Colonial Spaces (1565–1944): A Collection of Laws, Decrees, Proclamations, Ordinances, Orders and Directives on Architecture and the Built Environment during the Colonial Eras in the Philippines Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2017. 367 pages. ian morley Cities and Nationhood: American Imperialism and Urban Design in the Philippines, 1898–1916 Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2018. 250 pages. andre arnisson ortega Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018. 361 pages. a. k. sandoval-strausz and nancy h. kwak, eds. Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 339 pages. [End Page 131] On 14 February 2019 Pres. Rodrigo Duterte signed Republic Act 11201, establishing the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD) "to streamline housing and land use planning by the government" (Ranada 2019). In the process, the law dissolved two state agencies—the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council and the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board—and merged their functions in a cabinet-level department. On a somewhat related note, the government is also mulling over the creation within ten to fifteen years of a Greater Capital Region (GCR), which would be composed of Metro Manila, Central Luzon, and the CALABARZON provinces, i.e., Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal, and Quezon—a development that may well be realized due to the ongoing railway projects that will eventually connect the said regions together (Roque 2019). Based on these moves, the Duterte administration seems geared toward massive urban restructuring that will affect not just the national capital but also other cities. This trend makes the study of urbanization an imperative. Fortunately, works on Philippine urban history and urban studies are on an upswing, especially in the past decade, equipping us with the necessary conceptual tools to understand the dizzying pace of change both in the Philippines and in Southeast Asia. The historiography of Southeast Asian urbanization traces its roots to the 1950s, when scholars (Ginsburg 1955; McGee 1967) began theorizing the similarities and differences of the so-called Asian city. In recent years, new frontiers in Philippine urban history have opened up, with some scholars looking at previously ignored topics like health and medicine, [End Page 132] food and provisionment, and even household technology (Mactal 2009; Doeppers 2016; Reyes 2012). Furthermore, the scholarly concern toward the built environment, mass housing, vernacular architecture, and the emergence of the informal urban fabric remain prominent, exemplified by the works of Paulo Alcazaren et al. (2011), Greg Bankoff (2012), and Edson Cabalfin (2014) and a 2016 special issue on urban history of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. Adding to this growing body of scholarship are five recently published works that I review in this essay: Ian Morley's Cities and Nationhood: American Imperialism and Urban Design in the Philippines, 1898–1916; Gerard Lico and Lorelei D. C. de Viana's compilation of primary sources, titled Regulating Colonial Spaces (1565–1944): A Collection of Laws, Decrees, Proclamations, Ordinances, Orders and Directives on Architecture and the Built Environment during the Colonial Eras in the Philippines; A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak's edited volume, Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History; Andre Arnisson Ortega's Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession; and Wataru Kusaka's Moral Politics in the Philippines: Inequality, Democracy and the Urban Poor. Cities and Nationhood is the first book of Ian Morley, who is associate professor in the Department of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It is the culmination of his long engagement with the history of planning in the Philippines, Morley having published a number of essays on this topic in various academic journals. The first of its six chapters introduces the terrain of concepts and paradoxes that have defined the Philippine nation and links this map of ideas to the...

Women Who Stay: Seafaring and Subjectification in an Ilocos Town by Roderick G. Galam

Reviewed by: Women Who Stay: Seafaring and Subjectification in an Ilocos Town by Roderick G. Galam Veronica B. Sison Roderick G. Galam Women Who Stay: Seafaring and Subjectification in an Ilocos Town Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018. 238 pages. Within the scholarship on Philippine migration, the historical prevalence of migration in the Ilocos region has been studied typically based on the male workers' experience of moving out of their village or province. A shift in the understanding of Ilocano mobility is introduced by Roderick Galam, a native Ilocano who has extensively contributed to the study of Ilocano literature, historical identity, migration culture, and family. These contributions are exemplified in his earlier work, The Promise of the Nation: Gender History and Nationalism in Contemporary Ilokano Literature (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008). In Women Who Stay: Seafaring and Subjectification in an Ilocos Town, Galam offers a compilation of articles based on his doctoral dissertation, which highlights women's experiences and narratives as part of the larger field of migration studies. The book contributes to the discourse on Asian migration at two levels. First, it addresses the bias of migration scholarship toward land-based migrant workers by paying attention to the marginalized narratives of sea-based workers and their families. Second, it examines the blurred categories of nonmigrant women within the larger domain of migration processes. Galam employs sociological and ethnographic approaches in looking at the "gendered subjectification" of Ilocano women who stay behind. He defines "gendered subjectification" as the process through which Ilocano women consciously—or are compelled by their circumstance to—engage in work that significantly defines and redefines their sense of who they are or what they can do (3) given the alternating presence and absence of their seafarer husbands. It also examines women's strategies to "negotiate and navigate" between spaces of power as well as the hierarchies and structures of relations within the family (3) in light of their constrained spatiotemporal context. In chapter 1 Galam frames the "phenomenology of staying behind" based on the individual experiences of selected women from his fieldwork site in a certain town in Ilocos Norte. He limits his study to this anonymous town that he calls San Gabriel, which typifies the history of Ilocano [End Page 265] migration. In San Gabriel, 73 percent of those who have migrated are either working in Hawaii or the US mainland, usually California. Galam's data consist of interviews conducted with sixty women who have stayed in Ilocos. However, what Galam means by "staying" is not clear. Women who stay can be categorized as either former or prospective migrants, indicating that in the majority of the cases presented in the book staying is temporary: either a recent development in the lives of the women interviewed or a transition into eventual migration. Galam does not problematize the territorial aspect of staying, nor does he indicate a spatial scope to limit his study, and neither does he examine the possible shifts in attitude regarding migration. Instead, he pays attention to time, measured not in units but routines, and to women's mobility shaped by the spatiotemporal context of the alternating presence and absence of migrant husbands. Chapter 2 elaborates on the history of the Philippine seafaring industry and the economic developments that have led to the international demand for Filipino seafarers from the 1960s to the present. Here, Galam points out the ugly truth: Filipino seafarers are well trained and yet are paid wages that are lower than that of their counterparts from other countries. He enumerates the judicial and legislative actions the Philippine government has taken to help bring the cost of employment down to protect the industry, yet at the same time making it prone to abuse by both employers and predatory law firms that take advantage of seafarers and their families, especially in cases of injury and death (40). In chapters 3 and 4 Galam connects the previous discussion to the history of Ilocano migration to Hawaii and California and its impact on the contemporary seafaring industry in Ilocos Norte. He demonstrates that Ilocanos' economic aspirations are determined mainly by the prevalence of Ilocano migration to Hawaii, with emigration to that...

Environmental Crisis as The Ultimate Life Issue

Environmental Crisis as The Ultimate Life Issue

Elites and Ilustrados in Philippine Culture by Caroline S. Hau

Reviewed by: Elites and Ilustrados in Philippine Culture by Caroline S. Hau Kristine Michelle L. Santos Caroline S. Hau Elites and Ilustrados in Philippine Culture Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017. 398 pages. The 2016 presidential election brought back the spotlight on an age-old quandary that has inundated the Philippines: the social and political [End Page 122] predominance of the elite in a destitute country. Throughout the election period, politicians roused the Filipinos' imagination of the elite, as some were vilified while others disassociated themselves from this privileged segment of society. As candidates tried to establish themselves as representatives of the masses, the term "elite" became increasingly conflated with the opulence of rich businessmen, the extravagance of socialites, and even the detachment of middle-class intellectuals from impoverished Filipinos, who end up victims of their economic and intellectual dominance. Caroline Hau's Elites and Ilustrados in Philippine Culture addresses this perplexity as she explores the complex relationship of this favored group with Philippine history and society. One might describe Caroline Hau as constituting the very elite that she examines in this book. Her multicultural background as a Chinese Filipino academic based in Kyoto University's Center for Southeast Asian Studies exemplifies the privileged intellectual elite. Like José Rizal, Hau represents the modern ilustrado who is open to foreign ideas to produce works that contribute to national progress. She is best known for Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946–1980 (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000) and more recently The Chinese Question: Ethnicity, Nation, and Region in and beyond the Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014). For more than twenty years, Hau has been navigating privileged intellectual spaces all over the globe in an effort to understand the intricate tapestry that is Philippine society. In Elites and Ilustrados, Hau specifically scrutinizes the threads that both strengthen and weaken the elite's ties to the Philippine nation. Given that Hau dedicates this book to Southeast Asian scholar Benedict Anderson, traces of the latter's work can be seen in how she unpacks the Filipino elite's imagined identity. The book maps out the social imagination of this group through the imprints they have left in our history. In the first chapter, she captures the convoluted imagination of the Filipino elite, which conflates their wealth with their intellectualism, as seen through the nineteenth-century ilustrado who came from well-to-do families and learned liberal ideas overseas. Rather than adhere to this popular notion, Hau unravels the elite's intricate social ties to highlight their fluid identity that extended beyond riches, race, knowledge, and nation. Thus, she interrogates the popular imagination of the Filipino elite throughout the book. [End Page 123] The first four chapters focus on Philippine literature, specifically Rizal's Noli me tangere (1887) and El filibusterismo (1891), Ninotchka Rosca's State of War (1988), Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961), and Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado (2010), where Hau gathers different pieces that create the Filipino elite. Hau offers a fascinating notion of the elite that builds upon the transnational character of the ilustrado, a person substantially transformed abroad upon embracing new values and practices. As she thoroughly analyzes the fictional ilustrados depicted in these works within their historical contexts, she manages to tie their imagined identities to Philippine realities. By establishing the links between them and Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), she highlights the fluidity of ilustrado identity, which struggles to settle its roots in one place. Neither here nor there, the ilustrados are often displaced in national politics and discourse due to their distance and complicated identity politics. Hau adds that the ilustrado's dilemma becomes increasingly complex especially for those who come from multicultural households. Hau's thorough analysis of Chinese Filipinos and Filipinos who live abroad in the later part of the book strengthens her imagination of the transnational Filipino elite. These two chapters are particularly important given contemporary discourses that question the loyalties of these transnational, if not, transracial, Filipinos. While her analysis of the Chinese elite focuses on the racial politics that emerged during the NBN-ZTE corruption scandal in 2007, similar racial arguments have also...

Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines by Lisandro E. Claudio

Reviewed by: Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines by Lisandro E. Claudio Dominic Sy Lisandro E. Claudio Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017. 227 pages. In his first book, Taming People's Power: The EDSA Revolutions and their Contradictions (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013), Lisandro Claudio examines different interpretations of the People Power Revolution to understand how their competing narratives influence contemporary Philippine politics. He concludes by criticizing both mainstream ideologies, which occlude the role of the left, and the communist movement, which often "instrumentalizes" the people. Disillusioned by both, Claudio seeks solutions to Philippine problems elsewhere. In Liberalism and the Postcolony, he proposes one such solution by exploring the political praxis of liberalism in twentieth-century Philippine history. As such, this book has two primary goals. The first is to complexify the understanding of Philippine elite discourse vis-à-vis the liberal practices of four bureaucrats: Camilo Osias, Salvador Araneta, Carlos P. Romulo, and Salvador P. Lopez. (In a highly personal afterword, he includes a fifth liberal, Rita Estrada, the author's grandmother.) Claudio devotes one chapter to each individual to show the existence of an oft-ignored Philippine liberal tradition. Meanwhile, his second goal is to argue for the contemporary value of this tradition—and how it can be a source for future political practice in postcolonial nations. [End Page 103] The book's publication is undoubtedly timely. In recent years, the prestige of liberalism has declined in states that have been its traditional strongholds. Much of the criticism against it, however, is decades old. Liberalism has been called reactionary and duplicitous, privileging minor changes and compromise that ultimately preserve the status quo. Simultaneously, Marxists have shown the centrality of property rights—thus, capitalist accumulation—in the history of liberal policy. Meanwhile, postcolonial critics have argued that liberalism's universalizing concept of liberty has been central to justifying colonialism as benevolent. Consequently, the Philippine left has often sidelined liberal philosophy, routinely castigating it as the ideology of neocolonial elites. However, Claudio argues that there is much to gain from understanding liberalism as a complex phenomenon. Using John Gray's classification from Two Faces of Liberalism (The New Press, 2000), Claudio distinguishes between liberalism as the execution of universal models, a teleological approach that has often been repressive, and liberalism as modus vivendi, or the pragmatic, day-by-day project to maintain peaceful coexistence among different ways of living. This second tradition of liberalism is what Claudio seeks in the works of the four bureaucrats and in formulating his "liberalism for the postcolony." The strength of Claudio's book lies in its first goal. Claudio reveals two main features of Philippine liberalism: the adaptation of American liberal ideas and the commitment to freedom via mediation. These features manifest in the works of all four bureaucrats, although adaptation is more prominent in the first two—in Osias's Deweynian civic nationalism and Araneta's Keynesian economics—and mediation in the next—in Romulo's anticommunist Third Worldism and Lopez's negotiation between student radicals and the Marcos regime. Against homogenizing depictions of the elite, Claudio shows the complex convictions of some of its prominent members. He also contributes to the broadening of Philippine intellectual discourse through his analysis of nontraditional actors such as bureaucrats. In doing so, his project aligns with immanentist epistemologies—including, ironically, the Marxist philosophy of praxis—that seek to deconstruct rigid distinctions between political theory and action. It is in fulfilling the second goal—proving the contemporary relevance of liberalism—that the book shows its weakness. The problem lies in Claudio's vague definition of liberalism, leading to noticeable absences and contradictions. Despite conceding the prevalence of liberalism among [End Page 104] the elite and middle classes, he makes no attempt to analyze how liberal ideas participate in the formation of these classes or their institutions. He focuses on the idea of modus vivendi, eschewing positive definitions of freedom—e.g., a definitive model for attaining freedom—in favor of the negative—i.e., freedom from intolerance and extremism. Unlike John Gray, however, Claudio does not systematically analyze...

Cyclones & Earthquakes: The Jesuits, Prediction, Trade, & Spanish Dominion in Cuba & the Philippines, 1850–1898 by Aitor Anduaga

Reviewed by: Cyclones & Earthquakes: The Jesuits, Prediction, Trade, & Spanish Dominion in Cuba & the Philippines, 1850–1898 by Aitor Anduaga Kerby C. Alvarez Aitor Anduaga Cyclones & Earthquakes: The Jesuits, Prediction, Trade, & Spanish Dominion in Cuba & the Philippines, 1850–1898 Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017. 375 pages. Possessing a command of both social and physical science research, Aitor Anduaga writes about the history of meteorology and seismology, institutional scientific networks, and scientific ideologies and discourses in the second half of the nineteenth century, an important period in Spanish contemporary history. Evident in his works, namely, Geofísica, Economía y Sociedad en la España Contemporánea (CSIC Press, 2009), Meteorología, Ideología y Sociedad en la España Contemporánea (CSIC and AEMET, 2012), and Geophysics, Realism and Industry: How Commercial Interests Shaped Geophysical Conceptions, 1900–1960 (Oxford University Press, 2016), are the correlations between scientific development and the greater social and economic milieus. Anduaga demonstrates that science and society do not exist in a vacuum. His latest opus, Cyclones & Earthquakes: The Jesuits, Prediction, Trade, & Spanish Dominion in Cuba & the Philippines, 1850–1898, is a historical assessment of the institutional and bureaucratic transformations in two of the remaining Spanish colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century and of how these scientific makeovers helped institutionalize meteorology and seismology as indispensable bodies of knowledge in advancing colonial [End Page 95] economy and education. In this historical context, Anduaga ventures into a multifaceted, albeit geographically specific, field of the history of science and technology—the development of institutional meteorology and seismology in the Philippines and Cuba. The author guides readers through the complicated nineteenth-century Spanish bureaucracy and details how scientific institutions flourished in the intricate ministerial structure that connected the Madrid government to its colonies. The book's arguments revolve around four aspects: (1) the institutionalization of science, mainly, meteorology and seismology, and the role of Jesuit scientists and Spanish state engineers in scientific advancement in the colonies; (2) knowledge production through experiments, observations, and scientific publications; (3) the engagement of the economic elite in scientific development; and (4) an evaluation of Spanish peninsular and overseas bureaucracy through the lenses of scientific governance and network building by state and nonstate actors. In the late–nineteenth-century Philippines and Cuba most of the scientific accounts and studies about typhoons and earthquakes were made by Jesuits and Spanish colonial state engineers, including military (inginieros militares), civil (inginieros coloniales), and mining (inginieros de minas) engineers. They played active roles in developing the colonial economy, even though Madrid was often hesitant to invest in new and risky scientific projects. The Jesuits and state engineers established their presence as "scientific architects" in the colonies. At the vanguard of the emergence and maturation of modern scientific ideas in the colonies were Philippine and Cuban observatories that generated innovative ideas and instrumentation. These observatories—the Observatorio Meteorológico de Manila (OM), the Observatorio Fisico-Meteorológico de Havana (OFMH), and the Observatorio del Colegio de Belén (OCB) in Cuba—equipped the colonies with the basics of environmental science, particularly meteorology and seismology. These observatories' scientists and engineers mastered the craft of measuring patterns of weather influences and terrestrial movements. Jesuits were behind these institutions during their formative years: Federico Faura and José Algué (OM), Benito Viñes (OCB), and Andrés Poey (OFMH). In the case of state engineers, not only did they help develop seismology as a discipline but they also institutionalized it through the inclusion of scientific knowledge in policies pertaining to building regulations. In the [End Page 96] Philippines, state engineers like Rafael Cerrero Sáenz, José Centeno García, and Manuel Cortés led the production of scientific knowledge. In Cuba, colonial military engineers and officials such as José Gutiérrez de la Concha, Francisco Serrano, Domingo Dulce, and Francisco Lersundi played active roles in the promotion of institutional meteorology and seismology. Anduaga narrates the development of these sciences in the Spanish colonies from the point of view of the state and how state agencies and actors were the protagonists in this nineteenth-century imperial project. On the one hand, the book "highlights the ambiguous role of the state...

Weaving Cultures: The Invention of Colonial Art and Culture in the Philippines, 1565–1850 by René B. Javellana

Reviewed by: Weaving Cultures: The Invention of Colonial Art and Culture in the Philippines, 1565–1850 by René B. Javellana Marya Svetlana T. Camacho René B. Javellana Weaving Cultures: The Invention of Colonial Art and Culture in the Philippines, 1565–1850 Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017. 369 pages. The dedication page of Weaving Cultures: The Invention of Colonial Art and Culture in the Philippines, 1565–1850 adumbrates its content, as the author cites the varied provenance and affiliation of family members and friends, "Filipinos all." They represent the flesh and blood of Philippine colonial history, engendering mestizaje (denoting miscegenation and cultural hybridity). René B. Javellana addresses the central question of Philippine cultural identity, tracing its development to a mesh of encounters that, with Spanish colonialism, thickened as well as expanded to the Americas and Europe, veritably constituting an early stage of globalization. Broadly, this monograph resonates with the core ideas of Nick Joaquin's "process of Philippine becoming." But Javellana's inquiry mainly partakes of the insights from pioneering works on Latin American culture and art about the inescapable fact of mestizo culture. Those conversant with Javellana's work will agree with his remark that this monograph is "in a way a culmination of [his] many years of research in Philippine colonial art and culture" (xxi). It ties together the different strands of his scholarship: colonial art and architecture in the Philippines and Asia, cultural dissemination and heritage conservation, and art and communication theory. Undoubtedly cross-pollination has taken place among these areas of his oeuvre, given his long engagement with the arts as professor and former director of the Fine Arts Program at the Ateneo de Manila University, archivist of the Jesuit province in the Philippines, and chair of the Board of Trustees of Jesuit Communications. The book explores the various aspects of cultural exchange and change resulting from the encounter that was colonialism. It begins with the network of exchange of information and knowledge established in the sixteenth century, in which the development of technology played a pivotal role. The next seven chapters discuss the colonial impact on the natural and built environments, on images and language, on clothing and performative traditions, and the native perception of these aspects of everyday life. By examining concrete objects, images, and practices as interrelated, mutually [End Page 126] shaping, and reinforcing parts of a whole, Javellana draws a vibrant picture of colonial life. The monograph concludes with an attempt to reconstruct the indigenous worldview based on the colonial world thus portrayed, from which questions arise to drive further research. He applies a communications model from the field of information design, articulated by the likes of E. Tufte and N. Shedroff, to the encounter of cultures that resulted in the "invention" of colonial art and culture. Invention is to be understood as "creation and production" and in "the more archaic sense of finding as implied in its Latin root invenire, to find, to discover" (1). In the realm of communication, the emphasis lies in the two ends, sender and receiver, both of which can be interchangeably colonizer and colonized. Although the underlying idea of transculturation (and not just a one-directional acculturation) is not new in postcolonial studies, Weaving Cultures presents a rich tapestry of artefacts and practices that have undergone the process of colonial encounter. In the theory used, the extent to which communication—and therefore also miscommunication—occurs is articulated in the conversion of received data to information, and therefrom to the more orderly form of knowledge and even wisdom. Crucial to the initial part of the process is how data become meaningful to the receiver or consumer, which happens when the latter can relate to what is being transmitted; thus, a context of understanding should exist where the communicator "knows something about the world of the consumer in order to create a context of shared meanings" (9). The consumer then adapts, interprets and reframes, and modifies and integrates practices and objects introduced according to his or her own world of meaning. Oftentimes new meanings come about, which lie at the heart of cultural change. For example, the native belief in the inherent sacredness of nature was...

The Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early Presidency ed. by Nicole Curato

Reviewed by: The Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early Presidency ed. by Nicole Curato Arjan P. Aguirre nicole curato, ed. The Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early Presidency Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017. 348 pages. Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s meteoric rise to the presidency in 2016 has undeniably left many scholars on Philippine politics dumbfounded. Duterte’s campaign departed from traditional campaign methods that had proven effective in getting popular, wealthy, and dynastic personalities elected. His presidential campaign was exceptionally focused in using social media as a tool in influencing people’s perceptions and opinions. It attained the rare feat not only of successfully mobilizing voters in a highly fragmented area such as the island of Mindanao but also in garnering support from people of different backgrounds, religions, economic statuses, ideologies, and so on. His assumption of power was filled with so much controversy and anxiety. The first months of his administration saw the institutionalization of some of the most divisive policies—the drug war, Ferdinand Marcos’s burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery)—the Philippines has ever seen in recent decades. His presidency has been heavily criticized for normalizing political improprieties (e.g., public cussing, indecent jokes), appropriating populist tendencies (e.g., antagonizing “yellow” forces, fostering public paranoia), and undermining political institutions (e.g., persecuting the opposition, vilifying media institutions, tolerating the proliferation of fake news), among many things. From these ongoing discussions, A Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early Presidency gives an overview of how contemporary interlocutors think about the emerging insights, realizations, articulations, and narratives regarding Duterte and his presidency. Drawing from the perspectives of academics, activists, and journalists, this reader offers one of the most comprehensive examinations and critical interrogations of the Duterte presidency: the man and the myth as well as the institutions and dynamics surrounding his administration and the outcomes thus far. This compilation of essays tackles how and why Duterte’s phenomenal rise to national prominence disrupts and perpetuates elite democracy in the Philippines (4). The editor, Nicole Curato, is a sociologist and a recipient of the Australia Research Council’s Discovery Early Career [End Page 542] Research Fellowship at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. As Curato explains, The Duterte Reader can be arranged according to the following themes: (1) electoral insurgency and the inevitable rise of Duterte, (2) the liberal ideas and illiberal fantasies of his regime, and (3) crass politics and spectacle-driven publics that emerged in his presidency (4–5). This thematization aims to capture the elusive understanding about the person behind Duterte, the institutions and structures that work around him and his supporters in the government, the myths that reinforce the articulation of his visions for the country, the messy and unstable dynamics that complicate the political situation in his regime, and the enigmatic outcomes of his rule that further divide the public. Expounding on the first theme, electoral insurgency and the inevitable rise of Duterte, are the essays of Carmel Abao, Jesse Altez, Cleve Arguelles, Kloyde Caday, Ronald Holmes, Anna Pertierra, and Julio Teehankee. They discuss how and why Duterte’s rise to power disrupts Philippine electoral politics and perpetuates elitist politics. The book offers insights about the following factors that influenced Duterte’s come-from-behind victory in 2016 and the widespread popularity that he currently enjoys: activating populist tendencies (305–10); sustaining deep connection with the general public (58); continuing efforts to undermine the dominant EDSA People Power narrative (265); promoting the emergence of a post-EDSA narrative (50–53); promising inclusive politics for the diverse peoples of Mindanao (111); and appropriating melodrama in politics (222). These essays present the earliest and most wide-ranging analyses to date of the Duterte campaign, with its multifaceted operation and the gargantuan political support during the incipient stage of his presidency. Abao’s essay, for example, articulates the populist tendencies of the Duterte regime by focusing on the antagonistic pairing of populism with pluralism. Duterte’s populism is attributed to his ability to exploit the growing cynicism and disillusionment of the...

Empire’s Trail of Bodies: A Review Essay

Empire’s Trail of BodiesA Review Essay Dinah T. Roma (bio) nerissa balce Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017. 223 pages. victor roman mendoza Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913 Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2015. 286 pages. e. san juan jr. Racism and the Filipino Diaspora: Essays in Cultural Politics Naga City: Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2017. 79 pages. [End Page 517] “History has moving, inexhaustible frontiers,” writes historian and cultural critic Resil Mojares (1981, 178). His remark refers to an earlier body of works on Philippine historiography that witnessed the rise of new methodologies in the study of local and national history. Yet Mojares’s words may aptly echo an urgency among contemporary Filipino American scholars whose efforts at demythicizing the US empire have led to groundbreaking works. Three recently published books—Nerissa Balce’s Body Parts of Empire, Victor Roman Mendoza’s Metroimperial Intimacies, and Epifanio San Juan Jr.’s Racism and the Filipino Diaspora—locate history’s “inexhaustible frontiers” in the archives that have largely been the source of so-called official historical narratives. For these authors, to read the US colonial archives anew is to illumine the violence of empire if Philippine history were to retrieve bodies that had been ravaged and whose stories had been silenced on account of imperial modernity. The works are the outcome of the authors’ long engagement in the academe and advocacy to disclose the US empire’s machinations as it ceaselessly impacts on the Filipino global diaspora. Nerissa Balce is an associate professor of Asian and American studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; Victor Roman Mendoza holds an appointment as associate professor of women’s studies and English at the University of Michigan; while Epifanio San Juan Jr. is a multi-awarded academic and staunch public intellectual on Philippine–American relations and the Filipino diaspora, who carved his career teaching at key American universities. The three books rupture the munificent veneer of the US empire. They expose the “cracks in the façade” (Fast and Francisco 1974, 350) through methodologies that are cognizant of the self-serving knowledge produced by colonial functionaries and orthodox historians. The books’ arsenal of interdisciplinary critical tools is wide-ranging—postcolonialism, literary studies, cultural studies, area studies, historical materialism, feminism, ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies. The concomitant use of these critical tools highlights how complex the undertaking is to categorically unmask the American colonial legacy for what it really was—brute force and rhetoric. To do so is vital in putting into perspective the invasion of the Philippines not as a discrete historical occurrence in the name of a noble mission but one in the same expansionist spirit as the conquest of the Native [End Page 518] Americans, Africans, and Mexicans (San Juan 2017, 5). The three books thus foreground the genocidal nature of these imperial subjugations to assert that the Philippine conquest is a major period in US imperial history and one that is unique in the Asia-Pacific, whose aftermath is still evident in the phenomenon of Filipino migration and diaspora to the US. Body Parts of Empire, which won the 2018 Best Book award in Cultural Studies from the Filipino Section of the Association for Asian American Studies, unravels the “complicity of culture in historical violence” (Balce 2017, 15). It consists of five chapters that stand for an inventory of the colonial cultural products teeming with literary and cultural tropes through which the Filipino native body has been vilified. Each chapter analyzes the particular rhetoric that produced the tropes of abjection of body parts which Balce (ibid., 17) catalogues in the following pairings: face (colonial photographs), skin (newspapers), bile (women travel writings), and blood and bones (race romances and ethnographic images). Metroimperial Intimacies, Mendoza’s landmark work, shares Balce’s stance of delving into culture but this time “to look for the queer in the colonial” (Claudio 2016). Mendoza reexamines the colonial archives to dissect the menace of same-sex intimacies between the Filipino male native...

Review: México y Filipinas: culturas y memorias sobre el Pacífico by Thomas Calvo y Paulina Machuca, eds.

Book Review| November 01 2017 Review: México y Filipinas: culturas y memorias sobre el Pacífico by Thomas Calvo y Paulina Machuca, eds. Thomas Calvo y Paulina Machuca, eds. México y Filipinas: culturas y memorias sobre el Pacífico, Zamora, Michoacán (México): El Colegio de Michoacán & Quezon City, Manila (Philippines): Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2016. 411 pp. John D. Blanco John D. Blanco University of California, San Diego John D. Blanco teaches the literatures and cultures of early modern globalization under the Spanish Empire (Philippine, Latin American, and Asian) and modern Philippine and Asian-American literatures at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century Philippines (UC Press 2009; University of the Philippines Press 2010). His current book manuscript engages in a comparative study of missionary and indigenous collaboration and conflict in the reinterpretation of the Conquest in the Philippines between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. His articles have appeared in the Radical History Review, Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (Kyoto), and Amerasia journal, as well as various book anthologies. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies. At UCSD he is the Associate Dean for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the Division of Arts and Humanities (DAH). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos (2017) 33 (3): 449–451. https://doi.org/10.1525/msem.2017.33.3.449 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John D. Blanco; Review: México y Filipinas: culturas y memorias sobre el Pacífico by Thomas Calvo y Paulina Machuca, eds.. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 1 November 2017; 33 (3): 449–451. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/msem.2017.33.3.449 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentMexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Yoshiko Nagano. State and Finance in the Philippines, 1898-1941: The Mismanagement of an American Colony. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015, 272pp.

Yoshiko Nagano. State and Finance in the Philippines, 1898-1941: The Mismanagement of an American Colony. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015, 272pp.

Lisandro E. Claudio. Taming People's Power: The EDSA Revolutions and Their Contradictions. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013, 240p.

Taming People's Power: The EDSA Revolutions and Their ContradictionsLISANDRO E. CLAUDIOQuezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013, 240p.People is the foundationalist myth of the ruling Aquino which began with the presidency of Corazon (Cory) C. Aquino who replaced the fallen dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1986 and which continues under the presidency of her son, Benigno (Noynoy) S. Aquino, III, which will end in mid-2016. The Aquinos and their yellow crowd elite supporters claim legitimacy based on a divinely sanctioned popular uprising against an evil dictator re-establishing a righteous democracy. People power also gained international prominence as one of the first televised revolutions, with the plucky Cory Aquino defeating the wily dictator Marcos, leading to a heroic transition to democracy. That this piece of political folklore has lost appeal for most Filipinos who remain poor and are now often disillusioned with this once new political order is evidenced by the dwindling crowds at the annual celebration of power. The themselves seem to have abandoned the idea of people power.No recent book captures the ambiguous legacy of better than the work of the young Ateneo historian Lisandro E. Claudio. What Claudio has done in this book is quite extraordinary. He systematically distinguishes two formations, the official, yellow narrative and the anti-people National Democratic discourse of the communist left (later in the study it becomes evident that he analyzes a third discursive alternative as well: the subaltern perspective of laborers on the Aquino-Cojuangco owned Hacienda Luisita). Claudio then examines how these discourses are literally monumentalized and the message this political architecture is trying to convey. These material commemorations of the anti-Marcos struggle culminating in the mass uprising against Marcos that he examines are, on the one hand, the quasi-official of the Shrine of Mary Queen of Peace, popularly known as the Our Lady EDSA shrine and the Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Monument of Heroes) of the left.Beyond this Claudio then undertakes an ambitious and revealing case study of how people power is viewed in Hacienda Luisita, the great plantation of the landlord-politician Aquino- Cojuangco dynasty. But he also shows how the role of the communist left is viewed ambivalently by the sugar plantation workers, many of whom were caught up in violence initiated by the strike breaking landlords but also instrumentalized by the left.The book is well written in a sophisticated, but intelligible post-modern style, with key theoretical insights effectively used to clarify Claudio's discursive approach to recent Philippine history. The result is a study full of more insights about recent Philippine politics than any other I have read in past decade. Claudio constructs a theoretical framework for the book drawn from memory studies to reconstruct the people narrative. He invokes Foucault's regime of truth, a provisional . . . product of the capillary movement of knowledge-power-but may nevertheless coalesce into identifiable discursive formations (pp. 5-6). Not a mere top-down ideology like the authoritarian developmentalist one of the Marcos era, the mainstream discourse was created by the Church hierarchy, middle class activists, big business, and traditional politicians. But Claudio is not content with just analyzing the official story which deemphasizes the role played by ordinary Filipinos who overthrew Marcos in favor of the Godgiven- miracle explanation of EDSA (the major Manila street after which people power is often known in the Philippines). …