South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Intersectionality In Canada's 'Caregiver Program': The Impact Of Race, Class, And Gender On Filipina Women In The 'Global Care Chain', Taylor Simsovic

Culture, Society, and Praxis

This paper explores the experiences of migrant Filipina caregivers in Canada under the Live-in Caregiver's Program (LCP) and the subsequent Caregivers Program (CP), focusing on the intersecting factors of race, class, and gender. Through a literature review, the study investigates the distinct and precarious position occupied by Filipina migrant caregivers, who face marginalization by the Canadian government. The framework of the 'global care chain' proposed by Aggarwal and Das Gupta (2013) and the concept of the 'international transfer of caretaking' presented by Parreñas (2000) are employed to illuminate the devaluation of 'women's work,' particularly that performed by migrant Filipina and …

Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar

Masters Theses

This paper introduces the concept of "extralingual citizenship," which I define as an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrates the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I am interested in the codification of postcolonial disparity into the teaching, social performance, and material assessment of English language users, and the infrastructural disqualification of World Englishes (and their amalgams) in favor of a standardized English. I frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, shifting the focus of English pedagogy/practice from the syntactical/etymological concerns of language …

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

Narratives Of Trauma In South Asian Literature, Ryan Wander

Critical Humanities

Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature uses seven geographically-focused clusters of essays to elucidate the ways in which the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies allows for a delineation of the cultural and historical specificity of South Asian narratives of trauma. These essays simultaneously serve as a means for connecting South Asian literary accounts of individual and collective trauma to broader national and transnational dynamics.

Women Parliamentarians In India Since 1991: Challenges And Opportunities, Vatsala Bhusry

Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs

India gained a new economic orientation in 1991 following the policy of economic liberalization. It offered the opportunities to close the gender gap in various fields including the political field as visualized in the original goal of the Indian constitution. However, there is an acute underrepresentation of women at the national political level and there is a lack of evidence-based research studies to analyze this gap. This study maps the political trajectories of 13 elected women leaders holding offices at the national level since 2019. To better understand the challenges and opportunities at both macro and micro levels they came …

Mending The Broken Bond: Exploring Human-Elephant Conflict In K. V. Dominic’S Poems, Ramya Kalaivani K, Raichel M. Sylus

Between the Species

Mountains are the immovable totem of the landscape which stand out from the surrounding environment as they are the elevated portion of the earth’s crust. In mountain regions, wildlife is one of the essential factors to be considered for developing a holistic environment. As a result of the rapid dwindling of resources for wildlife, the ecological balance is affected. It deteriorates the relationship and instigates conflict between human beings and animals. Mountains are home to various species. Among various animals, elephants are the significant animals seen in the mountain region. K.V. Dominic’s poems depict humans’ cruelty and brutal treatment towards …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers In The Philippines—Subsistence Strategies, Adaptation, And Behaviour In Maritime Environments, Alfred Pawlik, Riczar Fuentes

Sociology & Anthropology Department Faculty Publications

Archaeological research in the Philippines has produced a timeline of currently over 700,000 years of human occupation. However; while an initial presence of early hominins has been securely established through several radiometric dates between 700 ka to 1ma from Luzon Island; there is currently little evidence for the presence of hominins after those episodes until c. 67 to 50 ka for Luzon or any of the other Philippine islands. At approximately 40 ka; anatomically modern humans had arrived in the Philippines. Early sites with fossil and/or artifactual evidence are Tabon Cave in Palawan and Bubog 1 in Occidental Mindoro; the …

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …

A Friend Who Does Me No Good: Aphorism In Matteo Ricci’S On Friendship, Maximilian Chan Weiher

Asian Languages and Cultures Honors Projects

This paper argues that Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) designed his aphoristic compilation, Jiaoyou Lun 交友論–On Friendship (1595)–to serve the Jesuit mission of converting the Chinese to Catholicism and express the conflict he may have felt exploiting friends to forward the Jesuit mission. Utilizing friendships to allow for greater social influence was central to the Jesuit proselytization strategy in China. However, Ricci’s moral education from youth taught him to judge utilitarian friendships as immoral. The extant scholarship regarding Ricci’s On Friendship fails to acknowledge the significance of the aphoristic form to this work. To illuminate the value of aphorism …

Ang Balintuna Ng Pesimismo At Pag-Asa Sa “Ilang Aeta Mula Sa Botolan” Ni Cirilo F. Bautista (The Paradox Of Pessimism And Hope In Cirilo F. Bautista’S “Ilang Aeta Mula Sa Botolan”), Mesándel V. Arguelles

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Sa sanaysay na ito, ginagalugad ang isa sa mga birtud ng panulaan ni Pambansang Alagad ng Sining sa Literatura Cirilo F. Bautista—ang balintuna, sa pangunahin, ang balintuna ng pesimismo at pag-asa kaugnay ng pagpaksa sa mga usapin, suliranin, at penomenong panlipunan ng kanyang panahon hanggang sa kasalukuyan. Pinagninilayan din ang bait at bisa ng kanyang mga tula na nakasalalay sa kabatirang kapwa lubhang mahalaga at di-makasasapat ang wika upang, aniya, ay “ipahayag ang ating isip at damdamin” na nagbunsod sa kanya sa pagbuo ng pormulasyong “sugat ng salita” at “kirot ng kataga”—kapwa ginamit bilang mga susing konsepto ng kanyang dalawang …

The Ecocritical Erotic In Marjorie Evasco's "Elemental", Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This brief article explores the critical entanglements of nature, matter, and the human body in Marjorie Evasco’s poem “Elemental.” Through ecocritical erotic writing, the text establishes the “trans-corporeal” relationships between human desire and the natural environment, the language of the erotic and the craft of poetry, and the writer and the task of ecofeminist writing. Ultimately, this essay suggests that the text and the author engage with the ba’i as an indigenous source of femininity, charting a direction toward native Philippine ecofeminism.

Lives Away From Home And Precarious Writing As Life: Reading Bienvenido Santos’S Postscript To Saintly Life, Ivan Emil A. Labayne

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Towards the end of his writing career, Bienvenido Santos published two autobiographies, Memory’s Fictions and Postscript to Saintly Life—a departure in a writing life mostly devoted to penning fictional works. This paper focuses on the last autobiography which mainly looks at Santos’s experiences as a pensionado in America. It pays attention to how Santos writes about his Philippine home while in exile, taking part in a program that is part of the American colonial period. The range of Santos’s emotions—with shame and pride on both ends—while abroad is also examined. How these emotions were manifested in the book served …

Marginal Voices, Silenced Annotations: Notes On The Life Of Edith L. Tiempo, Cris Barbra N. Pe

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

The popular version of National Artist for Literature Edith L. Tiempo is that she holds a central position as the literary matriarch of the Philippines. However, little is known about her background as a partly tribal (indigenous) woman. This paper proposes that biography can be a form of intervention to recuperate silenced narratives and marginal lives. Drawing from the ideas of the Geneva School of Consciousness, biography can be seen as a form of reading, where latent images in an author’s works can be made manifest and reveal hidden narratives in the author’s life. Edith’s life and works yield images …

Isagani Cruz And His Fiction: A Footnote To The “Deconstructive Effect Of Feminist Materialism On The Newly-Discovered Cordillera Archives”, Isidoro M. Cruz

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

A cursory reading of Isagani R. Cruz’s literary theory and criticism on one hand, and his fiction on the other, suggests a disparity between Cruz as a scholarly literary critic and Cruz as a fictionist of stories “for adults only”; however, a detail in one of his short stories in his book, Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only, arouses a critical suspicion that his fiction is actually cultural criticism masquerading as irreverent or obscene fiction, so that the critic and the fictionist are one. That detail is found in “Once upon a Time Some Years from Now,” …

Digital Capital And Belonging In Universities: Quantifying Social Inequalities In The Philippines, Wilfred Luis Clamor, Czarina Saloma-Akpedonu

Sociology & Anthropology Department Faculty Publications

This study examines social inequalities in Philippine universities that were exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. A quantitative approach using a national sample of 677 university students was utilized to measure the mediating role of digital capital on social inequalities associated with belonging to academic spaces. For the purpose of determining direct and indirect impacts, structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed. Sociodemographic (i.e., gender, age, type of residence, and family income) and educational (i.e., type of university, year in the university, and excellence criterion) characteristics were the direct predictors that were examined as exogenous variables for both digital capital and belonging. …

Silent Music And Sacred Sounds Of The Hoysaḷas: Visual And Aural Sensory Experiences In Jain And Hindu Temples, Vani Vignesh

Jain Studies

This project examines affective responses to temple spaces and investigates how visual and aural sensory stimulations can amplify people’s experiences in Jain and Hindu temples through ethnographic research and qualitative interviews. It involves the study of the traditional Indian methods of designing and planning temples to understand their place in contemporary South Indian devotion. This project focuses on two twelfth century temples built by the Hoysaḷa dynasty in the South Indian state of Karnāṭaka—the Jain Pārśvanātha basadi (temple) at Haḷēbīḍu and the Hindu Vaiṣṇava Chennakēśava temple at Bēlūru—to show that their location, design, and structure were planned to cater to …

The State Of Transgender And Kinnar Communities In Delhi: Case Studies Connecting Socioeconomic Factors To Health, Ray Craig

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The paper seeks to draw connections between socioeconomic barriers faced by the transgender (trans) community in Delhi, India and the healthcare that the community receives. It primarily discusses transgender people who are not part of the kinnar population, with as much consideration to the experiences of the kinnar community as possible, given limited access to their circles. Five transgender individuals and two cisgender individuals who have worked with trans communities participated in semi-structured qualitative interviews to understand various factors that affect trans people’s daily lives and their healthcare experiences in Delhi. Interviews were transcribed and coded, finding common themes of …

The University Of Wisconsin And The Development Of Librarianship In The Philippines, Bradley Brazzeal

University Libraries Publications and Scholarship

The Spanish-American War of 1898 ushered in an era of American rule over the Philippines that formally ended in 1946. An expansive colonial government developed with Americans filling most professional positions early on. There was a slow transition to Filipinos holding those positions, and this process can be seen in the field of librarianship. By the middle of 1924, library leadership and the teaching of library science was firmly in the hands of Filipinos. The University of Wisconsin and those associated with the institution, both Americans and Filipinos, played leading roles in the development of Philippine librarianship. This article explores …

(Un)Seeing Goa’S Bom Jesus In Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’S This Is Not The Basilica!, R. Benedito Ferrão

Arts & Sciences Articles

This article examines the interrogation of visual history associated with Goan church architectural legacies offered by Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’s installation series, This is Not the Basilica! (2021). The artist’s subject is the 16th-century Basilica of Bom Jesus, which was built in locally domesticated Baroque style during Goa’s Portuguese colonial era and which houses the remains of the Spanish saint, Francis Xavier. Kandolkar’s work makes viewers intimate with the Basilica’s history, I contend, so as to posit the need for conservation efforts that will save the deteriorating church while also revealing its unseen aesthetic past as a symbol of still-unfolding Goan …