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Mojares, Resil.

“Inside Out, Outside In: Teaching World Literature Through


Philippine Literature.” Kritikal Kultura, 24 (2015), pp. 228–239.,
journals.ateneo.edu/index.php/kk/article/download/KK2015.02408/2044.
Mojares in this paper, critiques about the concept of World literature and
Philippine regional literature that was proposed in the new curriculum of the Philippines,
the K-12. He debated the fact that literature of the Philippines is constituent of World
literature in every aspect, which includes the idea of the tradition, culture and its history.
Mojares, strongly disagree the classification of the literature of Cebu, Iloko, Maranao
etc. to be labeled as the ‘regional’ literature and it excludes as to what is our national
literature, angd he clearly emphasizes that the idea of nation and word to the nation and
region are connecter and one cannot understand without the other. Comparison of
literary text internationally or locally must consider its cultural homology, thematic
correspondence and influence to create a proper translation of the text, and it must
include in the curriculum literary must not be limited to a particular time frame and let
everyone explore and appreciate the diversity.

Mojares, Resil B. “Guillermo Tolentino’s Grupo De Filipinos Ilustres and the


Making of a National Pantheon.” Philippine Studies, vol. 58, no. 1 & 2 (2010), pp.
169–184.,
www.philippinestudies.net/files/journals/1/articles/3020/submission/copyedit/3020
-3423-1-CE.pdf.
In this paper, Mojares analyzes the Guillermo Tolentino’s Grupo de Filipino
Ilustres as a portraying heroes and examined how it involves the “pantheonization” thus
the national “Pantheon of Illustrious Filipinos.” The individuals on the photo was said to
be a representation and a symbolism. Mojares, noticed the said background of the
portrait where he said illustrious Filipinos were not gathered in the Malacañang Palace,
in which at that moment were under Americans, so he came to conclude, that it is to
portray how the Filipinos were being exclude to have a power towards the government
at that period. Tolentino’s portrait – with all the males as the model it transpires fairly on
racial, ethnic and occupational term and serves as inclusivity and desired to show
nation’s fractious life. There might be single individual portrait of those heroes, it was
this(Tolentino’s work) that they were together in a single frame and shows the different
personalities that showcase the nation.

Mojares, Resil. “Kolum Kritika: Manuel Blanco's El Indio and the History of
Rumor.” Kritika Kultura , 23 (2014), pp. 277–285.,
journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/kk/article/download/1895/1897.
It has been told that the story of Manuel Blanco’s El Indio was only a speculation,
and considered an alternative history but a novel. According to Mojares, that the story
might just a rumor, but he believes that it doesn’t make it less important to be part of
Philippine history. The story was about the Augustinian friar who works for years to the
treaties of the character as Indio; he was then got leave behind and after his death,
there found a book with blank pages.

- The friar in the story would be identified as the Augustinian botanist Manuel
Blanco (1779-1845) and his book would be described as a thick volume
bound in vellum on the cover of which was inscribed the title, El Indio.

- The story would be told and retold in the years that followed.1 In the way of
rumors, the story of the blank book would be broken down or embellished,
though we may never know what the “original” version was.

- The story of the blank book could have originated as a friar’s malicious tale,
knowing how Spaniards complained, whether in spite or exasperation, that
the indio was a creature of contradictions, an enigma – or, in harsher terms, a
being racially inferior, biologically deficient, and incapable of “civilization.”

- In his lifetime, Blanco was the paragon of the dedicated scholar. Intellectually
curious about many things, he was a voracious reader who was learned in the
sciences and meticulous in his work. Blanco even had the manner and look of
a scholar: reclusive and austere, dark-eyed and slightly built, with a balding
pate and shoulders that stooped because of a spinal deformity.He was the
perfect protagonist. If a scholar so dedicated and tireless could not find
anything to say about the indio to fill even a page, then the indio must indeed
be what others had said about him, a tabula rasa

- There is more to the apocryphal El Indio, however, than its value in the
propaganda war of the nineteenth century. Rumors are not taken too
seriously in Philippine historiography, and historians use them mainly for
illustrative or anecdotal purposes. Yet, there is a great deal that can be
learned from a history of rumor in the Philippines.3 Rumors, after all, are
eminently social. They travel in time, circulate in space, move quickly by word
of mouth (moving easily between the spheres of orality and print) — and thus
define a “community” of experience, sentiment, and frames of reference,
shared as well as contested. Rumors figure a social world. They are a
distinctly urban phenomenon since they require a certain demographic
density and mobility to acquire that scale, speed, and spread that distinguish
rumor from simple gossip. As a mode of communication, they are (unlike, say,
superstition and gossip) part of what constitutes or defines the Habermasian
“public sphere,” though less the sphere of the cultured classes (that
Habermas is concerned with) than its cultural or intellectual underground.

- ”While rumors are fed by an appetite for novelty and amusement, it is


important to stress that they can also be read as a claim to political
knowledge. Rumors assume a particular importance in societies and times
when there is a rising interest in public issues and people are eager to keep
up with current events, but there is difficulty in procuring first-hand
information, there is a lack of transparency in the powers that impinge on
people’s lives, and there is a general state of uncertainty about what is true or
false. In such a situation, inventing and spreading rumors become a form of
“public opinion,” a way of asserting one’s right to hold and declare an opinion
on what is happening.

- The story of El Indio is part of this nineteenth century climate of subversion. It


is overtly political, one that carries essential information about the identity of
the victim (the indios) and the enemy (the Spaniard, particularly the friar), in a
story that, whether true or false, was familiar, credible and sufficient in itself to
incite reaction.

- I am attracted however not only to the problem of rumor and its role in history
but the elements of the story itself. The tale of the blank book strikes me as so
archetypal that I would not be surprised if somebody tells me later on that in
fact this story has its versions in Latin America, Africa, and places where
Western knowledge came face to face with local realities that could not be
deciphered.

- What new meanings can be teased out of the story of the blank book if we
take it seriously, and assume it to be factual? (Call this the textual analysis of
an empty page.)That Blanco, the friar-naturalist, is cast as the character in the
story is extremely felicitous. If a scholar of such analytical abilities as Blanco
could not find anything to say about the indio, was that not a proof that the
indio was indeed a vacancy, an emptiness? Or is the blank page a woeful
confession that after two centuries and more, there was indeed so much
about the land and its people the Spaniards did not know?Consider the
choice of a naturalist and taxonomist as author of an anthropological treatise
on the character of the indio.

-
Resil Mojares. Brains of the Nation: Pedro Paterno, T. H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo
de los Reyes and the Production of Modern Knowledge. Quezon City: Ateneo de
Manila University Press, 2008, 565p.

- FILIPINOS are notorious for having short memories. This may explain why
history is used in schools for nation building because many young Filipinos
cannot see the past beyond their lifetime. This may also explain why history,
both either as a discipline or an academic subject in schools becomes
contested territory.

- To understand the past one must gobeyond the dates, names, and events
that fill textbooks and look at the way history is written; this is why an
archeology of the sources for Philippine history is important

- Because of the concept of “nationalist theory” Rizalʼs edition of Morga is


seldom read today because Rizal did not write a history, he annotated one,
but his notes, though obsolete, reveal the first Philippine history from a
Filipino viewpoint.

- Unlike Rizal, however, the few times Paterno, Pardo, and de los Reyes are
taken out of the dustbin, they are exposed to ridicule for the political,
ideological, or religious positions they took in their time. Not till now have their
works been given competent and impartial study.

- The neglect of their works is due to three things: First, their published works
and manuscripts are rare, quite hard to find due to the destruction of the
National Library, the National Museum, the University of the Philippines
Library, and many private Filipiniana collections during the Second World War
and the Battle for Manila in 1945. Second, their works are largely in Spanish,
a language alien to a successor generation educated in English. Spanish
used to be a bridge that connected Filipinos from different times and places
but today it separates a young generation from its past. Third, these men
have been oversimplified and painted as eccentrics with unpopular politics
and, in the case of de los Reyes, an odd mix of politics and religion.

- The lives of these three men make for an interesting read, and there are
many primary sources to show how they took to each other. For example,
Rizal commented on de los Reyes and his Ilocano point of view. Pardo called
Paterno a fake and a plagiarist in annotated entries for his 1903 bibliography
of Philippine books, Biblioteca Filipina. It is significant that two of the three
subjects in the book served at the helm of the National Library of the
Philippines, from that founded by Paterno in 1887 to the cultural agency
headed by Pardo from 1923 to his death in 1925.

Mojares, Resil. “The Emergence of Asian Intellectuals.” ASIAN STUDIES: Journal


of Critical Perspectives on Asia, 49:2 (2013),
www.asj.upd.edu.ph/mediabox/archive/ASJ-49-2-2013/Mojares.pdf.

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