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Aargh, we missed Resil Mojares’s lecture on Andres Bonifacio yesterday. He’s giving a series of lectures at the Ateneo de Manila as part of the Master Teacher Visiting Program of the School of the Humanities.

Professor Mojares is the author of Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel (1983), The War against the Americans (1999), Waiting for Maria Makiling (2002), Brains of the Nation (2006), and Isabelo’s Archive (2013), among other books on Philippine history, culture, and literature.

Here are the scheduled lectures for 2015, which we intend to attend. Seats are limited. RSVP 426-6001, loc. 5340.

January 12 (Monday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
GUGMANG KABUS: FANTASIES OF CLASS RELATIONS

The lecture demonstrates the value in analyzing “symbolic action” (enactments on a symbolic plane of social desires and fantasies) in large masses of Philippine literary texts, as a way of understanding Filipino popular mentality. It takes as its example an analysis of Cebuano short stories built around the “poor boy-rich girl/poor girl-rich boy” (gugmang kabus) plot formula, and the meanings that can be drawn from this body of texts about the realities of class division in Philippine society.

January 20 (Tuesday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
WAR OF THE SAINTS: THE POLITICS OF THE SANTO NIÑO DEVOTION IN CEBU

This lecture traces the history of Cebu’s Santo Nino devotion (including the sinulog dance), from its introduction in the sixteenth century to the present. Exploring the tensions between church and state, official and popular practices, and the competing communities (and their divine patrons) in Cebu’s weakly aggregated urban zone, the lecture discusses the claims and counterclaims in the shaping of a popular devotion that has become a symbol of the Cebuano community.

January 26 (Monday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
THE STRANGE AND SAD CAREER OF PASCUAL RACUYAL

The lecture revisits the mostly forgotten story of Pascual Racuyal, the quixotic “nobody” who ran for Philippine president in elections from 1935 to 1986, challenging incumbents from Quezon to Marcos. Commonly cited as the iconic “nuisance” candidate, Racuyal (the lecture argues) deserves more respectful remembrance, as the sad clown who appears on stage to show up the idiocy and farce that characterize much of Philippine politics itself.

February 3 (Tuesday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
THE DANGEROUS BEAUTY OF THE HEADHUNTER

What does beauty have to do with headhunting? Drawing from the ethnographic studies of Renato Rosaldo and Michelle Z. Rosaldo on the Ilongots of Northern Luzon–in particular, headhunting and its rituals–the lecture teases out an indigenous conception of beauty that has important implications for aesthetics, politics, and social life in the contemporary

February 9 (Monday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
IS THERE A PHILIPPINE NOIR?

The recent publication of Manila Noir (edited by Jessica Hagedorn) by New York’s Akashic Press, as part of a successful series of noir stories about cities in the world, raises the question: Is there a Philippine noir in fiction? And what is distinctive and local about its stance and style in representing noir’s associated notions of crime, violence, law, morals and urban society?

February 16 (Monday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
THE INVENTION OF A NATIONAL LITERATURE

From his 1880 “El Consejo de los Dioses” to his unfinished “third novel” of 1891-92, Jose Rizal wrestled with the idea of a “national literature,” and sketched the conditions needed for its creation. The lecture shows how the discourse on a national literature has been carried forward, elaborated, contested, and enacted in the decades after Rizal.