June 2019

(Re)Solving the South(ern) Puzzle: Katitikan as Alternative Discourse

Thomas Leonard Shaw June 26, 2019

The impetus for the Katitikan project- a literary journal embedded firmly in the intersections of national, regional, and postcolonial discourses- lies in an often misarticulated necessity for the interrogation of various notions of ?South? and its socio-political implications vis-?-vis literary production within the Philippine Archipelago. Crucial to this investigation is the critical turn in moving away from understanding the ?South? merely in terms of geographic, identity politics, but instead understanding its theoretical potentialities through a poetic and representational practice that straddles the interconnection of various regions in the Philippines while simultaneously problematizing and deconstructing the notion of a ?regional? literature.

Perhaps much of the difficulty, of which this theoretical proposition must first negotiate with, results from earlier discourses on the theoretical and creative production inscribed within the inchoate spaces that emerge from national-regional boundaries, which has prematurely signified ?regional? writing as a marginal subject haunted by the Metro Manila spectre, articulated through problematic national-regional binaries. Nevertheless, attempts to carve out a regional space has only further elided discursive, intersectional possibilities by which writers, located throughout the Philippines, may negotiate with their own socio-historically situated subjectivities. The notion of a Southern literature is precisely located in what has been a tumultuous discourse that has had to content with unstable, naturalized contentions from both the center and margin attempting to contain it within specific modalities of enunciation which, while offering opportunities for writers in these spaces, can only be considered a limited articulation at best, a restricted silence at worst.