Schedule
Nov. 28, 2024 | 4:15–5:45 PM
Room
Rm 4, Jade-Onyx
Moderator
Ramon G. Guillermo
University of the Philippines Diliman
G4.1
Ang Bantug nga si Ulang Otô: Colonial Narratives and Counter-narratives ‘from Below’ in Early 20th Century Maasin, Iloilo
Kyle Philip M. Ravena
University of the Philippines Visayas
The period between the end of Spanish colonial control and the beginnings of American rule saw continuing confrontation and resistance among what official colonial sources refer to as ladrones, tulisanes, pulahanes, etc. Among those identified persons of interest is Otô Valentin, a notorious “bandit” that roamed the mountains of Central Iloilo. Limited information is known about him, and both colonial and local officials have simply branded him as a “fugitive” and an “outlaw”, a buyung, who needed to be and was pacified by the colonial state. Even existing post-colonial studies follow the same line—a “Robin Hood”, albeit connecting him to the larger nationalist framework, described as part of the anti-colonial “quasi-religious cults” and an extension of the Philippine Revolution. However, stories from the community provide nuances to these narratives. This study follows the premise of postcolonial scholarship, especially Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? in the context of early 20th century Iloilo, challenging traditional knowledge production on these “fugitives” in our colonial history. Through critical use of oral history and revisiting documentary evidence, this study presents an active voice “from below” that challenged existing power structures. These are voices from Otô and from the community that saw him as a respected and trusted leader, a huwaran (ideal example) living in righteousness, who sought to protect his people and safeguard its peace.
G4.2
Peasant Uprisings and Communist Network in the Philippines during 1930s
Takamichi Serizawa
Yamaguchi Prefectural University
This presentation aims at understanding the revolutionary network formation between the Filipino communists and peasants during the 1930s put under the US colonial rule. As anywhere in Southeast Asia, the Great Depression during the 1930s had severely hit peasant communities in the Philippines, and peasant uprisings were flourishing in many places to overcome this depression as well as US colonialism. During around 1930, with official recognition from Moscow, Communist parties were founded throughout Southeast Asia including the Philippines. Based on the Comintern archives in Moscow (the Russian State Archives of Social and Political History, or known as RGASPI), this presentation introduces the correspondences between the executive committee of Comintern and the Communist Party in the Philippines how the former instructed the latter to ally with the peasant groups, particularly based in Luzon, in order to bring the communist revolution to fruition.
G4.3
Historiographies of Anti-Marginality: Rethinking Imperial Peripheries, Frontiers, and Borderlands in Northern Luzon
Jeraiah D. Gray
University of the Philippines Baguio
Following Aguilar’s (2018) work on geographic peripheries, this essay revisits the recent spike in historical literature on the outcomes of Philippine colonial state-building along its physical limits of control. The emerging corpus of work unpacks the nature of imperial peripheries in the Philippines under Spain and the United States. Notable examples by Acabado (2022), Mawson (2023), Blanco (2023), and Woods (2023) investigate cases in Northern Luzon, more specifically in the Cordilleran uplands and adjacent areas. As sites of ambiguous colonial influence, these spaces serve as rich sources of analysis because their histories often challenge notions of hegemonic and centralized imperial practice. To anchor the essay within Philippine historiography, the first section explores how the conceptual categories of the “center” and “periphery,” as well as its other iterations, have been employed and rethought across different regions. Students working on indigenous histories of the Philippines will know that this represents the continuity of the long-running project to rewrite history from the state’s physical margins—especially from the vantage point of ethno-histories. The newer strand of scholarship is different in the sense that it leans more heavily on the ways peripheral localities reveal complex assertions of indigenous and colonial agency within the larger workings of empire. After these discursive contexts, the following sections tackle work on Northern Luzon under the Spanish and American colonial periods. Under both regimes, state-initiated centralization via urbanization led to surprisingly different outcomes through the mediation, or resistance, of local actors.
G4.4
Where “lives were as cheap as chickens:” Dark Histories of Collaboration During the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, 1941–1945
Greg Bankoff
Ateneo de Manila University
There are dark histories in every nation’s past, stories that for one reason or another are best left out of the official narrative. World War II is full of such “uncomfortable” histories. The political context in Southeast Asia, however, was more complicated than in Europe as collaboration involved “defecting” from one occupying external power to another. In the Philippines, there has been surprisingly little interest in and limited scholarship on the many individuals accused of treason. The limited research conducted on collaboration has focused predominantly on members of the national elite. Scant attention has been given to what life was like in the barrios, the everyday violence and the atrocious brutality where “lives were as cheap as chickens”—as one report describes it. Fortunately, it is still possible to recover some of this lost history within the records of the Historical Data Papers, the village histories mandated by President Elpidio Quirino in 1951. Within these thousands of pages are recorded the dark histories of wartime collaboration at the local level, the struggles and betrayals to survive, and where the wrong decision might mean death or, at the very least, the loss of one’s home and community. This “new” rural history breaks with a more sanitized Manila-centric account of the Occupation and depicts the reality of war as it was experienced by most Filipinos.