(NOV.7)— The July to December 2017 issue of “Humanities Diliman” (HD Vol.14 No. 2) has a new editor-in-chief (EIC) and is now available online.

At the helm of the journal’s latest issue is Prof. Patrick F. Campos, Assistant Professor at the UP Film Institute and UP College of Mass Communication Office of Research and Publication’s current director. He succeeded the late Dr. Reuben Ramas Cañete, former Asian Center professor who served as the journal’s EIC in 2015.

Campos said HD Vol.14 No. 2, which features five articles and two reviews, was the last issue that Cañete began to edit before he passed away on Feb. 17.

The articles are: “Usbong na Pagtatáya: Tangka sa Pagpapalawig sa Katuturan ng Sosyolohiya sa Pilipinas (Usbong sa Pagtatáya: Assessing the Affordance of Sociology in the Philippines)” by Dennis S. Erasga; “Mula mga ‘International Exposition’ tungong ‘Manila Carnival’ Pagtatanghal ng Filipino sa mga Eksposisyong Industriyal at Komersiyal (From ‘International Expositions to ‘Manila Carnival’ Presenting the Filipino as ‘Tribal People’ and ‘Beauty Queen’ In Industrial and Commercial Expositions” by Raul C. Navarro; “A Rhetorical Analysis of Isabelo F. de los Reyes’s El Tinguian” by Iö M. Jularbal; “Larawan ng Cama-cama Bilang Filipino: Ang Imahen ng Nacion ni Adelina Gurrea (Portrait of the Cama-cama as Filipino: Adelina Gurrea’s Image of Nacion)” by Arbeen R. Acuña and “Contesting a National Cinema in Becoming: The Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival (2005-2014)” by Emerald O. Flaviano.

According to Campos, the articles in the current issue represent “two trajectories of narrating the nation.”

He said in reading the articles “we can imagine the two narrative vectors of national temporality as being, in crucial moments, intersected and overlapped by forces that do not belong to the nation.”

“These forces come in the form of colonial influence, foreign ideas and ‘global’ values. And these forces, as far as the contributing authors in this issue are concerned, are to be resisted, appropriated, reversed, or problematized,” Campos added.

Erasga’s paper, assesses the function and relevance of sociology in understanding the Philippine social realities. He investigates “the ambivalence that characterized the disciplinal identity of sociology—an identity simultaneously forged by the literary and scientific traditions during the Industrial Revolution period.”

Campos said Erasga “renarrates the Eurocentric history of sociology in order to show why I cannot be simply be uprooted from its original context and replanted in Philippine soil. He then offers suggestions, centered on the concept of pakikipagkapuwa, in ideologically repurposing and locally appropriating the discipline for it to be able to give appropriate accounts of Philippine society.”

Navarro’s paper re-reads the colonial discourses of international trade fairs from the 1870s to the 1930s held in Spain, France and the United States, “that attempt at speaking for the natives, images that were constituted to showcase the Filipino, and colonizer and colonized accounts that were testament to the said experience.”

Campos said, Navarro “shows how the same discourses influenced the local version of such fairs, in the form of the Manila Carnival of 1908” and argues that “the fairs were meant to create impressions and images of an exotic native that would suit colonial purposes.”

Jularbal’s article gives a rhetorical analysis of Isabelo F. de los Reyes’s “El Tinguian” (1888) which was considered as “the most complete study of the Tinguian at that time.” The author also tackles De los Reyes’s views and representations of the Cordilleran ethnolinguistic group of the Tinguian.

The editor notes that Jularbal “detects an orientalist nativism in the writing of De Los Reyes” and “argues that De Los Reyes’s study sets the Tinguian as an exoticized other of the national self, in the style of European travel writings, in order to gain legitimacy as an academic text.”

In Acuña’s paper, the author gives a creative and critical reading of the Adelina Gurrea’s “La Leyenda del Cama-cama,” a framed story in “Cuentos de Juana” (1943) focusing on the story’s main characters and explores the idea of “nacion” expressed in Gurrea’s cama-cama, a half-human and half-heron dwarf.

The editor notes that Acuña “productively conceptualizes the cama-cama both as a figure produced during the precolonial period and a ghost that continues to haunt the neocolonial present, embodying both the anxiety and aggression involved in forging a national identity in the crucible of colonial conflict.”

In Flaviano’s paper, the author discusses the issue and problematizes the conflicted discourses on the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival from its birth in 2005 to 2014.

Campos said Flaviano, “describes the way Cinemalaya’s arrival revitalized cinema in the Philippines and have summoned a national public to be the ideal spectator of Filipino films. At the same time, however, she demonstrates how the transnational nature of cinema processes and the international recognition that legitimizes new Filipino films complicate the national cinema framing of Cinemalaya.”

The two book reviews featured in the journal are:  Joel David’s “Seeds in the Garden of Letters: A Review of The End of National Cinema” by Patrick F. Campos and Oscar Tantoco Serquiña Jr.’s “Critical of the ‘Critical’: A Review of Kritikal na Espasyo ng Kulturang Popular” edited by Rolando B. Tolentino and Gary C. Devilles.

Humanities Diliman is UP Diliman’s (UPD) official internationally-refereed journal in the Arts and Humanities.

The members of the editorial board are:  associate editors Dr. Leah Enkiwe-Abayao (UP Baguio), Dr. Ramon G. Guillermo (UPD), Dr. Carolyn S. Hau (Kyoto University), Dr. Scott Contreras-Koterbay (East Tennessee State University), Dr. Ruth Jordana L. Pison (UPD), Dr. Helen Yu Rivera (UPD), Dr. Matthew M. Santamaria (UPD) and Dr. Rolando B. Tolentino (UPD); managing editor Dr. Gonzalo A. Campoamor II, editorial assistant Epifania M. Domingo, layout artist Dercylis G. Mararac, and copy editors Arvin A. Mangohig and Eilene Antoinette G. Narvaez.

For the list of the members of the international advisory board, click here.

To inquire about the journal’s printed version, contact the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Development (OVCRD) at (02) 981-8500 local 4048 or (02) 436-8720.