Critical Essay in English

Check out these critical essays in English written by 21st-century Filipino authors.

  • What Comes Next

    Almost a year has passed now since we started living this life in pandemic limbo. “Unprecedented” is a word that has been thrown around, just as metaphors comparing the virus to a war waged by an invisible enemy have become ubiquitous. Through language, we are conditioned to think of militarism as positive and necessary in…

  • The Social Semiotics of Our Sensibility: A Filipino Workshop Method Adapted by the 1st Cebu Writers

    Freshly cooked rice partnered with scrambled eggs and utan Bisaya was the first meal I had upon arriving at Ocean View, Oslob. I took a quick nap from my long and tiring travel. My plane landed in Cebu at midnight.  I arrived at the 7 Eleven rendezvous place around 5 A.M. Then I took the…

  • Looking at Space and Place: The Navigation of Meaning Making

    During the 1st Cebu Writers Workshop held in Oslob from the days of Feb 7 to 9, there arose during the sessions a constant need to talk about place-making. Here Place-making was dominantly figured through two other relevant concepts – that of space and that of meaning making. Fellows and panelists alike talked about their…

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

    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…

  • Excavating the Trauma: Notes on the Teng Mangansakan’s Forbidden Memory

    If the emotional is too on-top of the speaking voice, surrendering to a guiding thought an idea, a proposition, a question can pass as urgent. In watching the premiere of Gutierrez ‘Teng’ Mangansakan’s Forbidden Memory last 2017, I had to quell a kind of rage gearing to erupt in the wake of a reopened rupture…