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2024

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Ethical Dilemma And Narrative Strategies In David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988 And 2017), Xin Zhang, Shumin He Dec 2024

Ethical Dilemma And Narrative Strategies In David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988 And 2017), Xin Zhang, Shumin He

Kritika Kultura

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988), the first play written by an Asian American playwright to win the Tony Awards, remains his most renowned and controversial play. The play has been criticized for catering to mainstream discourse for reproducing the rather negative “Dragon Lady” stereotype in the name of subverting the “Madame Butterfly” stereotype. However, with the unreliable narration, the play connotes dual narrative dynamics which creates great aesthetic tension and powerful ironic effect. But such a rhetorical device has, to some extent, also led to the alienation between the play’s representing strategies and the implied author’s intention, which results …

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Transhistorical Connectivities Around The Indian Ocean: Western Colonialism And Climate Change In Amtav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru Dec 2024

Transhistorical Connectivities Around The Indian Ocean: Western Colonialism And Climate Change In Amtav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru

Kritika Kultura

This article argues that Amitav Ghosh’s non-fiction book The Nutmeg’s Curse illustrates the ways in which the proto-global entanglement of chaotic colonial forces, which proliferates across space and time, has played an important part in the current climate change. Ghosh imagines the Indian Ocean as a melting pot of rhizomatic energies of imperial aggression and local resistance, but also of new emerging life, with the agency of nature playing a very important part in the latter. I aim to show this in a combined Deleuzian, postcolonial, and ecocritical reading, with elements of chaos theory meant to provide possible interpretations to …

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"Such A Nice Little Place": Rhizomatic Partnership In Nayomi Munaweera's Island Of A Thousand Mirrors, Isabel Alonso-Breto Dec 2024

"Such A Nice Little Place": Rhizomatic Partnership In Nayomi Munaweera's Island Of A Thousand Mirrors, Isabel Alonso-Breto

Kritika Kultura

This article provides a rhizomatic partnership reading of diasporic Sri Lankan author Nayomi Munaweera’s novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors. The novel is analyzed in the light of the bio-cultural partnership-domination lens developed by Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry and underscores the fact that the rhizomatic quality of Indoceanic cultures can be traced even when it appears to be severely in jeopardy. Carrying out an analysis of different forms of domination and partnership models in the narrative thread, this article defends that the novel resolves that it is only outside of Sri Lanka, in diasporic territory, that the devastating …

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Kaleidoscopic Visions Of South Africa: A Study Of State And Station In Imraan Coovadia's Tales Of The Metric System, J. Coplen Rose Dec 2024

Kaleidoscopic Visions Of South Africa: A Study Of State And Station In Imraan Coovadia's Tales Of The Metric System, J. Coplen Rose

Kritika Kultura

This paper discusses the structure of Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System: A Novel. Drawing inspiration from Karina Szczurek’s review of Coovadia’s book, the article explores the kaleidoscopic view of the South African state that emerges across the storylines in the novel. Critically, this paper connects Szczurek’s terminology to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome. The multiple perspectives that intersect over the course of Coovadia’s text foreground the polyvalent bonds connecting characters across space and time. These links form a web between characters which closely resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the rhizome in A Thousand …

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Gurnah's Men: Rethinking Muslim Masculinities In The Indian Ocean World, Felicity Hand Dec 2024

Gurnah's Men: Rethinking Muslim Masculinities In The Indian Ocean World, Felicity Hand

Kritika Kultura

This article explores how Abdulrazak Gurnah illustrates the varieties of Muslim masculinity in the Indian Ocean world through an analysis of two of his youthful characters, Hassan Omar, from his debut novel Memory of Departure and Salim Yahya, from his more recent Gravel Heart. Both young men find themselves pitted against a more traditional male role which stifles them while, at the same time, encourages them to envisage a more fluid understanding of what it means to be a man in a predominantly Muslim society like Zanzibar. The fissures in the relationship that Hassan and Salim have with their fathers …

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Maranao-Muslim Food Culture In Quiapo: Reimagining The Role Of Food And Commensality In Interreligious Understanding In Manila, Marik Iñigo M. Tallara Dec 2024

Maranao-Muslim Food Culture In Quiapo: Reimagining The Role Of Food And Commensality In Interreligious Understanding In Manila, Marik Iñigo M. Tallara

Kritika Kultura

Quiapo is a well-known Catholic pilgrimage site to honor the Black Nazarene. Unknown to many Filipinos, Quiapo, a district of Manila, is also a hub for Muslim culture. While the Muslim population in the Philippines was afflicted by a history of conflict and violence, what is remarkable in Quiapo is how Muslims and Catholics have come together to establish bonds of friendship over food. During the festival of the Black Nazarene, Catholics share food with everyone including Muslims. At the same time, Muslims participate in this festival through sharing space and peddling halal food to the Catholic participants. This ethnohistorical …

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The Shape Of Transplantation As Interface: The Craft Of Alienation And Reconciliation In Vietnamerica's Journey Toward Diasporic Identity, Haerin Shin Dec 2024

The Shape Of Transplantation As Interface: The Craft Of Alienation And Reconciliation In Vietnamerica's Journey Toward Diasporic Identity, Haerin Shin

Kritika Kultura

GB Tran’s critically acclaimed graphic memoir Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010), a coming-of-age story of a second-generation Vietnamese American, crafts out the shape and feel of alienation in its search for a communal identity in the wake of the Vietnam War. Lacking emotional and empirical access to his parents’ liminal position as political exiles, the author combines the power of the literary imaginary with palpable percepts that synesthetically interface the affective dimensions of lost or perhaps yet to be realized beloved objects of cultural affiliation. Reading GB Tran’s medium-specific techniques as strategic enactments of intergenerational reconciliation, I reposition the present-progressive …

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Islands In The Stream: A Spatial Perspective On Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Reverse Flow, Faruk Faruk Dec 2024

Islands In The Stream: A Spatial Perspective On Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Reverse Flow, Faruk Faruk

Kritika Kultura

This study examines the role of Indonesian literary works with regard to the imagination as well as constructions of islands and seas, and in relation to the changing perception and attitudes of the Indonesian government respecting these twinned terms. The aforementioned is strikingly obvious in the case of the 2019 Natuna incident in which the Indonesian government verged on jurisdictional conflict with China over its Exclusive Economic Zone off Natuna island. The literary work chosen for discussion is Arus Balik [Reverse Flow] by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. I examine this novel's imagination and construction of islands and seas with reference to …

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Pulo: A Metonym, Christian Jil R. Benitez Dec 2024

Pulo: A Metonym, Christian Jil R. Benitez

Kritika Kultura

As an attempt toward a preliminary understanding of the islandic in its Philippine rendition, this study navigates with and through the Filipino pulo and its associations in various Philippine languages. In its recourse to linguistic and philological paradigms, the study relies above all on some creative invocation of the archipelagic form through the quintessential prose form of the essay. The commonly perceived isolation of islands in kapuluan is intuited here to be simultaneously relational (as kapuluan is also the Filipino assemblage of the pulo). In the process, the pulo is found, through a Tagalog lullaby examined here, to delineate in …

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Masculinities In Literary Works On Indonesia's Post-Conflict Ambon Island, Wening Udasmoro, Arifah Rahmawati Dec 2024

Masculinities In Literary Works On Indonesia's Post-Conflict Ambon Island, Wening Udasmoro, Arifah Rahmawati

Kritika Kultura

Various studies have examined masculinities within a sociological context, emphasizing linkage to violence, power, and militarization. In this sense, researchers have frequently positioned masculinities as the reproductions of male dominance and their perpetuations of conflicts and violence. No study has examined the roles that masculinities and their embedded values have played in building and maintaining peace. This article seeks to fill in the gap by examining how young people on Ambon Island helped create peace by expressing their fluid masculinities through literary works. This article focuses on poems by two Ambonese men—one a prominent peacebuilder and another a former combatant …

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A One-Off Foregrounding In Korean Film: Pornography, Erotica, Technology, Desire, Yu Taeyun Dec 2024

A One-Off Foregrounding In Korean Film: Pornography, Erotica, Technology, Desire, Yu Taeyun

Kritika Kultura

Although sex as a condition of possibility is heavily commodified in the romanticized selling points of advertisements and popular-culture products, the physical experiences most commonly associated with the act—pleasure and pain, commonly known as sadomasochism— remain proscribed in “respectable” modern society. The necessity of confronting both has nevertheless been argued, starting with Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking studies. This accounts for artists and intellectuals inspecting sexuality at its core (“hard” core, so to speak), notwithstanding the risk of social and legal sanctions. Using Jang Sun-woo’s Gojitmal (1999) as key material for analysis, this study will attempt to shed some light on the …

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Jiang Qing And The Visuality Of The Revolutionary Model Opera Films In The Cultural Revolution, Jiang Wei Dec 2024

Jiang Qing And The Visuality Of The Revolutionary Model Opera Films In The Cultural Revolution, Jiang Wei

Kritika Kultura

The Cultural Revolution (1966–76), which occurred 17 years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, saw the production of the filmic Revolutionary Model Operas or RMOs, comprised of eight films within this period. The RMOs, which were actually operas filmed in 35mm, precluded all other film genres during the period. Political factors, issues, and developments in the Cultural Revolution, especially in the early 1960s, contributed to and inflected these films: they became the predominant popular cultural form through which the Cultural Revolution, as a set of discursive regimes, was articulated. Mao Zedong believed that the Chinese Communist Party …

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Gendering Genre In Korean Films With Filipino Women Characters, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes Dec 2024

Gendering Genre In Korean Films With Filipino Women Characters, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes

Kritika Kultura

The paper deals with the category of the Korean yosong yonghwa (yosong = women; yonghwa = film) and the place of the Filipino women characters in them. Especially in film genres where women play major protagonists from melodrama to vampire films, indelibly etched in their narratives is the all-too-familiar set of conventional roles and activities assigned to women, portraying a female identity constructed socio-culturally by a patriarchal society. As such, yosong yonghwa is associated with fictional images as well as actual experiences especially common in societies with a history of Confucian influence: from the suffering, hardworking, domesticated, and naïve wife …

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Activism Renewed And Beyond: Korean Feminist Documentary Practices In The Twenty-First Century, Kim Jihoon Dec 2024

Activism Renewed And Beyond: Korean Feminist Documentary Practices In The Twenty-First Century, Kim Jihoon

Kritika Kultura

This article offers a critical mapping of Korean feminist documentary practices in the twenty- first century, with emphasis on films made since the mid-2010s. The study is grounded in a distinction between the documentaries before and after this period in terms of the feminist politics and the social actors that these films address and engage. In so doing, it argues for three implications of twenty-first century Korean feminist documentary cinema as follows: first, rather than remaining with little remarkable change, the activist tradition of Korean independent documentary has been renewed and revamped in its continual intersections with the shifting social …

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From Hostesses To Working Girls: Sex Workers In Late 1970s Philippine Cinema, Joel David Dec 2024

From Hostesses To Working Girls: Sex Workers In Late 1970s Philippine Cinema, Joel David

Kritika Kultura

The depiction of morally wayward women characters as protagonists in Philippine cinema emerged in parallel with the trend in presenting gangsters and so-called bad boys in the late 1950s. Drawing influence from the spread of the French New Wave and its transformation of American cinema into the New Hollywood, the Filipino counterparts (of both genders) required comeuppances that were either tragic or reformist. One other tendency was to provide confederates for these characters, to the point where duos or, more often, groups would dominate the narrative. This paper will look at the possible reasons for the narrative strategies used by …

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A Forum On Genders And Sexualities In Asian Cinema, Joel David Dec 2024

A Forum On Genders And Sexualities In Asian Cinema, Joel David

Kritika Kultura

Although neither the first nor the last instance in attempting to provide a snapshot of current concerns in the issue of genders and sexualities in Asian film, there will always be a need to determine the status of female, queer, and non-binary subjects in the region. In a medium as universally “readable” (though not always as readily accessible) as film, the project acquires extra significance during a period when film practice and scholarship are becoming more feasible for a greater number of individuals.

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The Girls That Get It, Get It: On Critical Dance Memes, Jared Jonathan Luna Dec 2024

The Girls That Get It, Get It: On Critical Dance Memes, Jared Jonathan Luna

Kritika Kultura

A gap within the current artistic ecology in the Philippines is the lack of platforms that engage with critical discourses in dance. Run Thru Magazine, which used to publish articles on dance criticism was discontinued a few years ago. While the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Encylopedia of Philippine Art has a wide range of writings on dance in the Philippines, its essays fail to confront current discourses in dance practice and dance making. The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the arts has brought in waves of reflections and realizations towards the present and future of ‘production and …

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Dance After Lockdown: Living With Paradox, Simon Ellis, Rowan Mclelland, Rosemary Kostic Cisneros Dec 2024

Dance After Lockdown: Living With Paradox, Simon Ellis, Rowan Mclelland, Rosemary Kostic Cisneros

Kritika Kultura

This writing explores the experiences of people in the UK’s contemporary dance sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.1 It draws on qualitative data from a small research project—Dance after Lockdown—to examine how that sector understands their work, and how the language and ideology of the creative industries have shaped the lives and experiences of contemporary dance artists and institutions in the UK. The paper offers a range of diverse voices as one of the goals of the research was to examine the breadth of experiences, which we hope makes a case for the need to have a dance sector that is …

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Feeling Dis/Connected: Interweaving Protest In The Online And Onsite Public Sphere, Susanne Foellmer Dec 2024

Feeling Dis/Connected: Interweaving Protest In The Online And Onsite Public Sphere, Susanne Foellmer

Kritika Kultura

Usually, people gathering locally are (still) constituting the critical embodied element in advocating for social issues. However, the recent pandemic necessitated different pathways to making one’s voice heard. In this article, I investigate protesting impacted by the restrictions of public movement in which choreographic means are used as a tool to find new ways of political mobilization: through combining the online and the onsite public sphere. Referring to Bennett’s and Segerberg’s idea of “connective action,” I explore the example of the annual “Sternfahrt” protest of the German ADFC, an NGO lobbying for cycling in Berlin. Due to health and safety …

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Weights And Pressures: Precarity And Democracy's Legislative Subjects, Victor Merriman, Sarah Black-Frizell Dec 2024

Weights And Pressures: Precarity And Democracy's Legislative Subjects, Victor Merriman, Sarah Black-Frizell

Kritika Kultura

This short essay introduces the Our Dance Democracy (ODD) project (2018–present) and the contributions to this Forum Kritika, “Dancing Democracy in a Fractured World.” The latter includes articles, provocations, and creative responses in visual and poetic forms. Dance is an art form positioned between artists and audiences, on one hand, and institutional structures— including funding regimes and performance venues—on the other. As state and civil society infrastructure experiences pressure arising from neoliberal political economy and the exacerbating effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic, dance-makers experience increasingly burdensome conditions as artists, citizens, and human beings. Choreography itself emerges as a zone …

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The Ecological Terrain Of Class War In The Cadre Poetry Of Mayamor / Maya Daniel / Roger Felix Salditos, Jose Monfred C. Sy Dec 2024

The Ecological Terrain Of Class War In The Cadre Poetry Of Mayamor / Maya Daniel / Roger Felix Salditos, Jose Monfred C. Sy

Kritika Kultura

In his cultural criticism, Edel Garcellano protests that literature is a politically partisan act in a “terrain of class war.” Cadre writings from “liberated” or “red” zones, Garcellano writes, demonstrate a clear partisanship with the peasants, workers, and other participants of the liberation struggle waged by the National Democratic movement in the Philippines. His commentary on the ideologization of writers invites us to investigate works produced in the context of the protracted people’s war to better understand the so-called “liberated consciousness” of cadre writers. Mobilizing Garcellano’s interpretive model of partisan symmetry between author and text, this paper critiques poems written …

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On Salvation, Bare Life, And Affective Politics In Raffy Lerma's Pieta, Vincent Pacheco Dec 2024

On Salvation, Bare Life, And Affective Politics In Raffy Lerma's Pieta, Vincent Pacheco

Kritika Kultura

Recent scholarship on Raffy Lerma’s Pietà is generally optimistic about the potential of the photograph to unravel state power and challenge normative perceptions of liberal democracy vis-à-vis populism. Contrary to these readings, I follow Vicente Rafael in speculating on “the limits of photographic intervention in the drug war” by suggesting that the Pietà, an image that is supposedly emblematic of liberal resistance, unwittingly reiterates Rodrigo Duterte’s necropolitical order. This gesture is an attempt to fulfill Jacques Rancière’s desire for a radical politics where we can freely question the very critiques that aim to expose and unravel Duterte’s aesthetic regime. My …

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The Place Of Literary Criticism In The Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Praxis Of The Philippine National Democratic Movement, Lance Espejo Dec 2024

The Place Of Literary Criticism In The Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Praxis Of The Philippine National Democratic Movement, Lance Espejo

Kritika Kultura

For Marx, “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force” (“A Contribution To The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”). Marx also says, “theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” It is this materialization of critical thought as theory which this paper expounds on. Marx says that this materialization happens in man himself, hence theory—or thought—is embodied. This paper, first, strives to expose the underlying class struggle which helps shape the discourse, which in this case, is literary criticism. Second, it …

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Reclaiming The Indigenous Body: Discourse, Social Media, And The Aesthetic Of Igorot Activism, Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias Dec 2024

Reclaiming The Indigenous Body: Discourse, Social Media, And The Aesthetic Of Igorot Activism, Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias

Kritika Kultura

This essay analyzes online activist media addressing the red-tagging and trumped-up criminal charges against members of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance in the wake of the Anti-Terror Law in 2020. Engaging with critical scholarship on the archiving, colonial discourse, and representation of the Igorot body, I argue that these online activist media published on the organization’s official Facebook account deploy strategic essentialism by subverting the colonially othered and criminalized marker of the savage-terrorist. The Igorot body is rendered as a quasi-heroic figure of the Igorot warrior who invokes and appropriates traditional bodily customs on warfare and gender relations to embody a …

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Rainbow Guerrillas: Gay And Lesbian Narratives Inside The Revolutionary Movement In Mindanao, Jervy C. Briones Dec 2024

Rainbow Guerrillas: Gay And Lesbian Narratives Inside The Revolutionary Movement In Mindanao, Jervy C. Briones

Kritika Kultura

The LGBT community in the Philippines is tolerated but not accepted, as different forms of discrimination against this sector still exist. The founding of several LGBT organizations in the 1990s marked the emergence of an organized LGBT movement in the country. The same decade also witnessed the recognition of same-sex relationships and marriage by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), which was an important development for the advancement of LGBT rights within the revolutionary movement. In this paper, I argue that the significant number of LGBT members within the movement necessitated the creation of revolutionary policies that reject gender …

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Models Of Revolutionary Action: The Kasama In Ang Bayan During The Anti-Dictatorship Struggle (1982-1985), Karlo Mikhail I. Mongaya Dec 2024

Models Of Revolutionary Action: The Kasama In Ang Bayan During The Anti-Dictatorship Struggle (1982-1985), Karlo Mikhail I. Mongaya

Kritika Kultura

This article discusses the concept of the kasama, or comrade, as articulated in Ang Bayan, the central organ of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), in the years 1982 to 1985. Critically reading Ang Bayan articles and related archival material, I look into the concrete articulation of comradeship in the Philippine experience during the height of the anti-dictatorship struggle against the Marcos dictatorship. I underscore the way kasama becomes fully intelligible as a collective subjectivity among those engaged in revolutionary struggle in juxtaposition to the figures of the masses, allies, and enemies of the people. I contemplate how this …

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Toward A Critique-Al Filipino Studies: Class, Nation, Writer, Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao Dec 2024

Toward A Critique-Al Filipino Studies: Class, Nation, Writer, Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao

Kritika Kultura

The continued appeal of postcolonial theory for Philippine studies/Filipino studies scholars in the twenty-first century begs the following questions: Is the Philippines postcolonial? Does the “post” in postcolonial signify the end of colonialism? What’s at stake in the application of postcolonial theory to the Filipino experience? This paper highlights three Filipino Marxist scholars—Delia D. Aguilar, Edel E. Garcellano, and E. San Juan, Jr.—for their theoretical interventions toward developing an alternative to postcoloniality, which is a strand of a larger body of post-theories in the academy (post-ality). Their alternative constitutes the emergence of a critique-al approach in Filipino studies—an approach that …

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Forum Kritika In Honor Of Edel E. Garcellano, Mary Grace R. Concepcion, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes Dec 2024

Forum Kritika In Honor Of Edel E. Garcellano, Mary Grace R. Concepcion, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes

Kritika Kultura

Edel E. Garcellano, in First Person, Plural (1987), uses the generic terms “essay” and “reportage” to refer to a particular mode and method of critical writing and thinking which is usually reserved for the term Critique. In his book, Critique underpins the breadth and depth of his socially committed critical reading strategies: ideological deconstruction, textual subversion, thematic reflection, filmic incursion, and praxiological knowledge toward purposive intervention. An award-winning writer, critic, and activist, Garcellano, who died in April 2020, taught at the University of the Philippines and the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He had been a major influence among his …

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How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text And Post-Darwinian Animal Fable In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi, Xinyi Cao Dec 2024

How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text And Post-Darwinian Animal Fable In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi, Xinyi Cao

Kritika Kultura

Animal fable, a genre that anthropomorphizes animals to convey moral lessons, demonstrates the possibility that animals can be tools to teach us to be ethical human beings. In this article1 I adopt ethical literary criticism, especially its conception of human-animal relations and the term brain text to investigate the role and place of animal fable in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi to explore how the post-Darwinian animal might be exploited by fabulists to tackle human reality. In the novel, brain texts of Pi as the storyteller reveal his intention to use stories as ethical interpretations of his experience which …

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Brain Text And Traumatic Postmemory In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Ercong Gao, Junwu Tian Dec 2024

Brain Text And Traumatic Postmemory In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Ercong Gao, Junwu Tian

Kritika Kultura

By adopting Nie Zhenzhao’s conception of brain text, this paper explicates the generation of traumatic postmemories as represented in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, a third-generation descendant of Holocaust witnesses. The authors argue that the traumatic effects of great catastrophic events, such as the Holocaust during the Second World War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, can be transformed into brain texts of horror and trauma of the survivors, which, with time passing by, become the traumatic postmemories of the survivors’ descendants who have not experienced these events. As far as this novel is concerned, …

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