Confessions of a "constipated academic"

I am borrowing the phrase “constipated academic” from historian Ambeth Ocampo. I think the phrase suits me right now. In fact, to add a little more drama, the “thing” in the noun phrase should be “academic wannabe” which would then make me a “constipated academic wannabe.” That perfectly describes me at this point and I am not complaining. No, I actually am complaining pala because academic constipation is a painful experience – very painful.


On Friday, October 24 – United Nations’ Day and my father’s 62nd birthday, Ambeth Ocampo’s third in a series of articles on names appeared in print and online in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He concluded his article with this line: “If one is curious one can find delight in simple things like names. If you are a constipated academic, you squeeze the life from learning by focusing on theoretical frameworks and other boring stuff.” Upon reading those lines, I felt Professor Ambeth was talking directly to me. I felt as if Ateneo’s nationally renowned professor of history was insinuating that PhD students like me are cold, socially detached (human) beings trying so hard to draw or construct contrived theoretical explanations for our pet subjects. And strange as it may seem, I couldn’t agree more.


I just ended the process of writing my research proposal early this afternoon, and right now, I just feel so dreadful about the sleepless nights, headaches, muscle pain, occasional nausea, cough and cold, and social and personal animosity the writing process has caused me. It goes without saying that intellectually masticating heaps of reading materials and mentally digesting dense texts to produce what else (?) but a (self-) convincing “theoretical framework” of what I intend to do to make modest tremors in my field of study are, well, formidable tasks. Of course, there’s the frequent intellectual indigestion – so brain wracking that I had to more frequently than ever seek Divine Guidance at the nearest religious parish or spiritual sanctuary. Thankfully for me, the Great Thinker is also the Great Healer and has provided me the greatest care.


When intellectual digestion becomes successful, the process of squeezing the (mental) manure so to speak (my “byproduct” is supposed to fertilize academic fields for more harvests!) becomes another formidable task. It troubled me for weeks – no, months – and I needed all the energy, all the support, and all the features of the university’s educational infrastructure I could benefit from and rely on: I had to do library work, library work, and more library work with movies on the side, fantastic rumor-mongering among friends, nitpicking of our pet peeves (with disconcerting karmic effects!), a little dose of social networking, long distance calls to my family, and some leisure reading. Of course, there were (and still are) the quite regular visits to the Church of Saint Mary of the Angels at Bukit Batok which boasts of quite eloquent and quite viscerally interesting Franciscan friars. Hmmm…. (it is not what you think it is!)


More often than not, to be able to hit the ground running, I would induce myself to vomit words. I chanced upon the expression “word vomit” through NUS Filipino graduate students steeped in writing end-of-term papers with the minimum of 6000 to 7000 words. My proposal is actually as much a product of word vomit as it is of my modest capacity to synthesize things. I am quite amazed and at the same time apprehensive that I have exceeded by more than a page the 50-page maximum (this aside from the bibliography, appendices and other attachments) set by the department for thesis proposals (It reminds me of the scene in “Antonia’s Line” where a university professor finds Antonia’s grand daughter Therese wanting for submitting a paper beyond the required number of pages. To follow instructions strictly is a sign of discipline, you know.).


The explanation for the number of pages is not really because I have a lot of things to say (well, actually, I have a lot of glittering generalities to prove). It is because I was initially so afraid of the possibility of not reaching the minimum 30 pages of double spaced text that I began to liberally lift from my previous papers in the university, make some modifications of them (meaning creating lengthy paraphrases), and deliberately vomit words as it were.When I began to notice that I had already exceeded the minimum number of pages and was already on the verge of reaching the maximum, I also realized that I still had a lot of arguments to prove and develop. I was then faced with the difficult task of cleaning up the mess and it’s not always easy when your vital points are actually built around the mess!


Naturally, getting over the constipation and being able to justify one’s mess are such a relief; but while that is the case, I still feel the pangs of the excruciating squeeze to beat deadlines (and to create the impression that my postgraduate education so much deserves to be subsidized!).


On the side, there are the proverbial nagging questions: Who will read/appreciate my work? Will people even borrow my dissertation from the library? Will it have an impact in the field? Will it have influence on other people’s lives (such an ambitious question!)? Will my future studies using my semi-original framework attract research funding? In one of my early meetings with my supervisor, I was warned that undertaking doctoral research is a lonely journey. Most of the time, people you like to talk to don’t actually care about your research interests; they have their own research and other interests too. I guess even after the dissertation, the lonely journey continues.


The experience has so far taught me that higher learning is… (I want to use the term “formidable” again but I have used it twice at least so let me check the thesaurus…)…aha, redoubtable (that doesn’t seem to fit and merely personifies the noun but what the heck!). Come to think of it. The conceptual metaphors STUDYING IS EATING (re: intellectual or mental mastication) and LEARNING IS DIGESTION (re: intellectual digestion, academic constipation) have underlain my PhD experience so far. And for a guy (ching!) like me who is not really crazy about eating and not so very much adventurous with food, those conceptualizations can…yes, be formidable (I guess this is becoming part of my idiolect!). If we think about them further, we can derive such entailments or even larger conceptual metaphors as LEARNING IS (PHYSICAL) SURVIVAL or the erudite sounding LEARNING IS LIFE, which makes a lot of sense and which makes the line “Education is a right” more resonant.


And at my age, when all about me is tentative and when the prospect of navigating the great unknown is still exciting, I definitely still don’t want to die. So I don’t want to stop learning.

The ComArts Connection

I write this entry to put into record the little pieces of information I know about a fragment of UPLB history. UPLB marks its centennial in 2009. It’s also the year when the AB Communication Arts program – my “reason for being” during my more-than-a-decade stay in UPLB - reaches her mid-thirties. This blog talks about her.

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The Bachelor of Arts in Communication Arts (ABCA or ComArts) – UPLB’s first liberal arts program – turns 35 in UPLB’s centennial year.

Founded in 1974, the program arguably marked a milestone in the life of UPLB widely known for its trailblazing research and world-class academic pursuits in tropical agriculture, forestry, and allied disciplines.

The institution of UPLB’s first liberal arts program, however, was carried out not without the proverbial birth pangs. One professor from the Department of Humanities, in fact, alluding to a song from the Broadway musical Miss Saigon, described ABCA as having been “conceived in hell and born in strife.” Such was how tremendous the challenge to those who wanted to institute a liberal arts program in a campus envisioned by many of its constituents to be a regional (that is, Southeast Asian or even Asia-Pacific) leader in science and technology.

It helped a lot though that the program was the brainchild of UPLB’s foremost proponent of liberal education:  Dr. Edelwina C. Legaspi, now UP Professor Emeritus of the Humanities. Almost thirty five years after the institution of the AB Communication Arts program, Dr. Legaspi’s name remains indelibly attached to it.

After graduating magna cum laude from UP Diliman’s AB English program, Dr. Legaspi was recruited by UP College of Agriculture Dean Leopoldo Uichanco to teach at Los Baños in the early 1950’s. Not long after she joined UPCA to teach English language and literature to agriculture majors, she went on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue her master’s degree in English at the prestigious Radcliffe College (now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University). After earning her master’s in 1954, she chose to return to Los Baños instead of joining Diliman’s faculty at the College of Liberal Arts where her credentials would have been most appreciated. Soon, she chaired the UPCA Department of English (later renamed Department of Humanities), got married, raised four sons, and in the early 1960’s, went together with her family to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York to pursue a PhD in Rhetoric and Public Address under a Ford Foundation Fellowship.

(In the 1960’s, Cornell University was considered the mecca of rhetorical scholarship in the United States. Dr. Legaspi is perhaps the only PhD holder in rhetoric and public address in the UP System and even in the country today. UP Diliman’s Department of Speech Communication and Theater Arts has acknowledged this by requesting, on several occasions, her service as graduate adviser or supervisor to students who chose to do their graduate research in rhetorical theory and criticism.)

Dr. Legaspi returned to UP at Los Baños after earning her doctorate from Cornell in 1966. She reassumed her position as chair of the Department of Humanities, and in March 1973 – more than three months after UPLB became UP’s first autonomous university – she was appointed by UP President Salvador P. Lopez as founding dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities (renamed College of Arts and Sciences a few years later). Her appointment meant a reaffirmation of the UP President’s commitment to liberal education. An eminent man of letters himself, President Lopez told Dr. Legaspi that his decision was based on the fact that among the potential contenders for deanship, she was the only candidate who, despite having resolutely served UPCA, was not “agriculturalized” and who had remained faithful to her training and education in the liberal arts (personal communication with Dean Legaspi).

As dean of the new college – what would later be one of UP System’s largest colleges in terms of enrollment, she worked for the institution of new curricular programs and offerings including a liberal arts curriculum – the AB Communication Arts curricular program, instituted in 1974.

The ABCA’s or ComArts’s institution marked UPLB’s transformation into a comprehensive autonomous (constituent) university that offers degree programs not only in the natural and social sciences and the professions but also in the cultural sciences or the arts and humanities. It may also be construed as a strategic move to put the expertise of the faculty of the Department of Humanities to better use.

Before the institution of the ABCA program, the department had been known only as a “service unit” offering general education (GE) subjects (in literature, humanities, and the like) and service courses (e.g., ENG 10, intensive English modules for foreign students). While the department had been competently serving this distinct function, the absence of a degree program it could call its own did not maximize the expertise that the humanities faculty had had. Faculty members of the department held degrees in a variety of areas in the arts and letters such as English language, literature, language teaching or pedagogy, art studies, foreign languages, and speech and drama. The constraint of teaching the same set of service courses year in year out could debilitate the faculty members’ potential to advance their knowledge and maintain their expertise in their fields. Proponents of the ComArts program knew this very well and admirably took advantage of the department’s composite of expertise.

It should be noted that the teaching of specialized courses in the humanities has not only benefited students of communication arts. Undoubtedly, it has had a significant impact on the teaching of general education courses in the arts and humanities, which every UPLB student needs to take. A department with an academic program that bears specialized courses does something that a mere service department would find difficult to sustain. It ensures that a regular UPLB student taking GE courses gets to be taught by discipline experts who continue to have the passion to learn and pursue advancement in their areas of specialization while at the same time capable of taking a broader or a generalist perspective. (NB: This I must warn the reader, though, is only the ideal scenario.)

The core of the ComArts program is language and literature from which disciplinal areas such as speech communication/speech arts, theater arts, and (creative) writing have developed and continue to be nourished. Consistent with the academic interest of most of its faculty, the program primarily focuses on the aesthetics of linguistic communication or the language arts which have both expressive and communicative functions (This should explain the term “communication arts” and should clear up notions that it is undefined and that it overlaps with what we generally know as communication programs that offer courses in broadcasting and journalism.). Since language is inextricably connected to other semiotic resources (such as audio-visual forms of expression and communication) and not to be taken separately from its historical, social, political, and cultural contexts, other areas and allied disciplines come into the picture.

Designed with a necessary measure of fluidity and flexibility, the ComArts program allows students to take courses in fields like business management, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, history, human ecology, development communication, and (community) education – courses that will complement and enrich their understanding of communication arts in any of the program’s three areas of concentration: speech communication, writing, and theater arts.  At best, the program enables them to chart their unique directions in the areas that would best nurture their human potential.

In the publication titled “The Humanities at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños and Their Place under the Agricultural Sun” (College, Laguna, 1984), the UPLB Commission on the Humanities, formed by then UPLB Chancellor Emil Q. Javier and chaired by no less than Dean Edelwina Legaspi, offered the following as reasons for ABCA’s existence:

“The ComArts program ‘aims to develop the human being first; his choice of vocation will depend upon his adaptability to the opportunities open to him. He is not meant to be trained technically but to be developed as a versatile graduate.  He is encouraged and assisted in seeking ‘opportunities to think creatively, clearly, deeply and widely about a variety of human problems; … ways of expressing [himself] clearly, logically, and with grace language.’ He is expected to ‘develop a keen sense of values… [and to continue developing his] potential as [a] human being.’

“[The] AB ComArts curriculum is more general than specialized, more liberal than professional.  In keeping with its nature, it directs its efforts to the development of critical thinking and reflective intelligence, in the acquisition of the ‘why’ than in ‘how to’ skills."

The Commission also acknowledged that the Department of Humanities, which offers the program, subscribes to the sentiments of the Alumni Foundation of the University of Chicago when it said:

“The purpose of general liberal education is not a job, but any job; not a profession, but any profession; not a station in life, but any station in life. Like the marriage vow, ‘in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse’ general liberal education recognizes that no one knows what life may bring.  Whatever may happen to you in later life, you will be better if you know how to think, to think clearly, and to think for yourself."

Almost twenty five years after the publication of the Commission’s report and almost a decade since the dawn of the 21st century, the core values and fundamental principles behind the AB Communication Arts program have remained steadfast. I believe it is time, and needless to say, worthwhile, to revisit them and reflect on their relevance in our changing times. Such exercise is necessary whether in reaffirming or transforming a program that undeniably made an indelible mark in UPLB history.

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I do not subscribe to the inclusion of a laundry list of names and personalities in historical or feature writing. But to give the reader an idea or peek into the interesting mixture of personalities that have “graced” and fashioned themselves from the AB Communication Arts program in its 35-year old story as well as the Department of Humanities in its 100-year old existence (Note: It started out as the “English department” in the UP College of Agriculture in 1909.), I am writing some of their names below.

I mention here a few ABCA alumni who have ventured into a variety of fields: Alexander Cortez (theater/ stage director), Juliet Labog-Javellana (print journalism/ Philippine Daily Inquirer news writer), Benito M. Vergara, Jr. (history/ author and professor of Asian Studies at the University of California Davis), April Robillos (communication studies/ study abroad advisor at Purdue University), Rene Somera (anthropology/ former Chairperson of the De La Salle University’s Department of Behavioral Sciences), Rodrigo "Jiggy" Manicad (broadcast journalism and television arts/ news and public affairs reporter), Mario Dumawal (entertainment news/ television reporter), Hosanna Espanto (technical communication/ associate editor of The Philippine Agricultural Scientist), Claudette May Datuin (art studies/ professor of art theory and criticism at UP Diliman’s Department of Art Studies), Maria Luisa Culiat-Sadorra (English language teaching/ former Chairperson of De La Salle University’s Department of English and Applied Linguistics), Sheryl Raros (literary arts/ poet), Layeta Bucoy (dramatic literature/ playwright), Father Ruel Lero, SVD (the religious clergy/ priest and spiritual counselor).  Other alumni have gone into such fields as law, business, public relations and advertising, college teaching, primary and secondary education, community organizing, and even the armed struggle of the Philippine Left!  Interestingly, two ABCA alumni have served as chairpersons of the UPLB Department of Humanities – Noel K. Torreta (2001-2007) and Jerry R. Yapo (2007 to date).

Here are some of the names that have graced the faculty of the Department of Humanities: Edelwina C. Legaspi (rhetorician and UP Professor Emeritus of the Humanities), Paul Blanco Zafaralla (art critic and recipient of the 2007 UP Alumni Association Professional Award for Art Criticism), Pacifico D. Espanto (Iluko poet and the first Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences), Paz Eulalia Saplala (former CAS Associate Dean and former UP Open University Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs), Teresita Guillen (writer-painter and former Dean of UP Mindanao’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences), Josefina A. Agravante (Professor of Speech Communication at UP Diliman's Deparment of Speech Communication and Theater Arts and former Dean of the UP College of Arts and Letters), Pedro "Edru" Abraham (ethnomusicologist/performance artist and Professor of Humanities at the UP College of Arts and Letters), Ces Quesada (stage, television and film actress), Cris Millado (playwright and stage director), Remedios Z. Miciano (former Vice Dean of De La Salle University’s College of Education), Ruperta R. Asuncion (Iluko poet and 2008 UP Alumni Association Distinguished Alumna for Culture and the Arts).

Tribute to Dean Corazon B. Lamug

I learned about the sudden death of Dr. Lamug yesterday morning from friends back home. I received two text messages and an email while in the middle of reading an article on Sarah Palin and the reality of the political mind. The news was, to say the least, shocking. For a moment I could not concentrate on my reading. For hours, I could not get myself into rewriting a fragment of my research proposal. How could anyone so energetic and brimming with life pass on so suddenly? I knew through my friend, Wengki, who was Dr. Lamug’s advisee and who lived with her for a semester, how health conscious and fit the former dean of the UPLB College of Arts and Sciences was.


Dr. Lamug, UPLB professor of sociology and president of the Philippine Sociological Society, died while swimming off the shores of Coron, Palawan. I am informed that she was on a weekend educational trip with a colleague and students of her graduate class. That she died so suddenly is distressing, but the fact that she died while in action was – as one of her former students would say – characteristic of her.


Dr. Lamug was such an important figure during my early years of teaching in the University of the Philippines at Los Banos. She was a social scientist par excellence, a formidable administrator, and a good person. In solidarity with her students and colleagues in UPLB, I wish to pay tribute to her in this blog.


Dr. Lamug was two-term dean of the UPLB College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) – arguably the ideopolis of UP Los Banos and whose founding in 1972 was instrumental to UPLB’s transformation from a highly specialized agriculture and forestry campus to a comprehensive autonomous/constituent university of the UP System. During these terms (2000-2003 and 2003-2006), I served as instructor then assistant professor in the Department of Humanities – one of the nine units of CAS. Having been under her leadership, I knew Dr. Lamug as a formidable administrator. Like any right-thinking leader, she demanded competence and professionalism from her faculty.


I remember sitting in an ad hoc committee where I together with our department head had to present a proposal for the refurbishing of the speech laboratory. There she pointed out the proposal’s limitations and weaknesses and reminded us to do better in our “homework” during our next meeting.


I also recall that during one of the college-level meetings on the revitalization of the General Education Program, she had some of the sharpest and most cutting comments on the humanities course proposals. I had to defend the proposal for SPCM 1 (Speech Communication) and though it had the mark of approval from discipline experts, it still was subjected to what I perceived then as a scathing scrutiny from the dean. Later, I realized that that very stressful meticulousness was a preparation for more caustic comments in the university level deliberations.


Of course, I could not forget how she, as a member of the UPLB technical panel for the humanities and social sciences, “lambasted” the research proposal I submitted for possible university funding. That was a year after she gave me a warm hug for getting a university teaching award (This reminds me that one is really only as good as his last performance). She minced no words, described my proposal as “sketchy” (a word that would haunt me in the weeks that followed), and reminded me of the exacting research standards that UPLB is known for. The revised proposal was later approved by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research but when the university administration changed guards it was cut from the list of proposals for funding.


The proposed research might never have seen the light of day in UPLB but it was to transform into something else. Parts of the “botched” revised research proposal were crucial to my application for study overseas. I reworked my proposal and submitted it as part of my application for admission to a PhD program at NUS. And while I was waiting for the results of my application, Dean Lamug so kindly recommended that I apply for the Ford Foundation Scholarship Grant. The grant allowed successful applicants to study in universities of their choice and I was one of two people from the Department whom Dean Lamug identified as potential applicants.  But before I completed my application for a Ford scholarship grant, I received an email from NUS informing me of my admission to the university under a research scholarship.


I decided to accept the NUS offer and informed Dr. Lamug of my decision. She was very encouraging and did not question my decision to resign from the university. Her advice was most heartening and forward-looking: “Immerse yourself in NUS's research and publication culture.” She knew then that should I decide to return to the university or to pursue a career in the academia, a considerable research and publication experience would be most indispensable.


I knew her mostly from our moments of professional interaction. They were significant moments as their consequences were crucial to my development as a young academic. When I think about this, I recognize that beneath what I perceived as Dean Lamug’s tough and stern façade was actually a caring and nurturing person.

Studentship, scholarship, and some musings on surviving in Singapore’s academic jungle

(The following is the full text of a short speech I delivered during the Barrio Fiesta/Meet the Scholars of the University of the Philippines Alumni Association Singapore on Sunday, 31 August 2008. Before I did an oral reading of my typewritten speech - something I would normally discourage in my public speaking classes back home - I clarified that I did not think I was the best person to give advice to new Filipino students on what to do and what not to do when in Singapore. I just couldn't say no when one lazy Friday afternoon while gallivanting at Vivo City with friends I got a phone call from the UPAAS Vice President Minnie Lau requesting me if I could give a very short speech on student life in Singapore. The rest was history. Charing!)

I came to Singapore with the following assumptions in mind:

 

1. That higher studies in a highly rated institution of higher learning (a “global knowledge enterprise”) would enrich and expand what little I k now in my academic areas of interest;
2. That it shall keep me abreast with the developments in these areas;
3. That it shall help me establish contacts/ connections with superstars/ major personalities in the field; and
4. That it would increase my potential for publishing in refereed journals, now a major requirement for tenure and especially promotions in the University of the Philippines.

 

So far, NUS has not disappointed me although I am miles and miles away from being prolific in terms of publication in top tier, international refereed journals.

The library is fantastic – and I mean not just the physical but also the virtual one. It’s actually a haven for researchers in the social sciences and the humanities.

 

It shouldn’t, however, surprise anyone that Singapore as an educational hub in Southeast Asia offers more than meeting the expectations I mentioned earlier.

 

In my one-and-a-half-years in this city-state, I have been immersed in a student culture that is highly competitive and very conscious of achievement. I’m sure most of you have heard of the term “kiasuism” or the Singaporean’s fear to lose. Let me refresh your memories with a classic case: When a local student thinks you are a potential A student, he is going to make sure he is an A plus.  

Kiasuism can be so overwhelming that even if you are already inundated with nine chapters of required readings for the week, you’ll feel that you have to read more and beyond the requirement as your classmates would surely drop foreign sounding names and esoteric issues from their “outside” readings. 

But no worries. My Filipino friends and I have discovered that we are as kiasu as the locals. In fact, we can be so competitive our enthusiasm can get easily dampened by a B+. I was actually told by a Filipino friend who earned his PhD from NUS that most of my predecessors in the English Department got straight A’s for their coursework and that they expect no less from me. So the pressure doesn’t really come from THEM (the locals); it comes from US (the small community of Filipino students in Singapore). So on behalf of the Filipino student community, I am pressuring the new students to get straight A’s. We expect no less. (Of course, do not commit suicide if you fail. Yes, sulk in despair and when you are done, move on.)

 

Getting an A and A+ isn’t easy. It does require the proverbial blood, sweat, and tears, not to mention a lot of hair fall (even if you are using a shampoo with Pro-V treatment).

 

I think I am getting a dose of my own medicine.  Back in Los Baños, I kept telling my students, when they complain about the difficulties of their academic requirements, this:  “You are meant to suffer. Life is not an entertainment; it is a struggle.”  I guess, what goes around comes around. Let me tell you that I suffer a lot and that studying is a struggle. It definitely heightens the stress level.

 

But then again, that is what studentship is all about. There is aesthetics in sufferance as flowers bloom from the rubble or (this one is corny) a phoenix rises from the ashes.

 

So I am not going to tell new students some schmaltzy words of advice. Instead my advice, without meaning to sound more popish than the pope, is: Burn your midnight oil, suffer, kick some ass, go get you’re A’s and A pluses.

 

And it’s always good to remember: We are as good as our last performance.

Photos courtesy of Ms. Angeline "Angie" Wong - dear friend, honorary Filipino, and photographer par excellence

SONA, Rhetoric, and the Invention of Truth

The report on the Pulse Asia survey on people’s perception of the SONA (“Public skeptical over Arroyo speech in Congress”, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 24 July 2008) brings to mind proverbial notions of rhetoric as “mere” embellishment or concealment of “truth”, as “deception”. The SONA, being a rhetorical act, has often been treated by those who oppose or are critical of the administration as a superfluous verbal activity that is far removed from reality. (Manuel Martinez, in his book A Political History of Our Times: Presidential Policies from Aquino to Ramos to Estrada (MFM Enterprises, 1999), comments that “all SONAs, regardless of which President was mouthing them, by their very nature, have suffered in many parts from banality, turgidity, superfluity and insipidity.”)

While it is important to examine and understand whether the rhetoric of the SONA corresponds with the material reality experienced by Filipinos in their everyday struggle, it is also worthy to look into how rhetoric actually constitutes reality.

Arguably, the SONA has been used to justify and legitimize (controversial) government policies pursued not only during the years before the annual delivery of the congressional speech but also in the years that come after. Before the passage of the contested Human Securities Act of 2007, for instance, the president, through her SONAs, had been flagging various articulations that tend to legitimize and rally public support for the passing of the law. She had, of course, made explicit calls for Congress to pass an anti-terrorism law in her SONAs from 2002 to 2004. But curiously her articulations also include the employment of more sophisticated rhetorical devices such as the metaphor of “war on terror” as a curative to the “nation’s ills”. Thus, we heard her speak of the “global war on terror” as “a historical watershed” and of ensuring that criminals “of the common kind and the kind that kills in the name of political advocacies” “feel the full brunt of the arsenal of democracy.”  Later, we realized through the Alston Report that the war on terror frame had been used to target not just these lumped “criminals” or “enemies of the state”, but even members of legal organizations, journalists, and human rights advocates that the military considered as “fronts” of the armed rebels.

Whether we listen to it delivered from the presidential podium via television, radio or the Internet, or read its full text published in major dailies or on the web, or completely ignore it, the SONA – including the metaphors and frames it privileges – will find its way in other contexts and domains as it has been strategically designed to carry sound-bites ready to be embedded or alluded to in journalistic texts, news broadcasts, classroom discussions, political commentaries, and even in everyday small talks or conversations. More importantly, the speech carries passages apportioned to be recontextualized or reformulated into more “authoritative, non-negotiable materialities” like the Human Securities Act and other statutes.

A considerable number of people may not be aware of the SONA (the report on the recent Pulse Asia survey indicates that 40% of the respondents are not aware of the past editions of the congressional speech), and a considerable number of those who are aware of it may find it “untruthful”, but these “facts” do not erase nor reduce the truth that the SONAs like all policy speeches are implicated in our socio-political reality. 

Politics, according to rhetoric scholar Bruce Gronbeck, can be understood as “a symbolic action” and this demands “that we analyze systematically the discourses of political ideology and valuation, of political visions and the places citizens occupy in such visions; of the means by which self-interests are converted into communal interests – into public policies.” It may  therefore, be helpful for us to regard the SONA – including the spectacle that comes with it – with our critical minds.  And it may do us good if we listen to it carefully, study it, write about it, and perhaps, investigate, challenge or negotiate the representations it offers us before they get reformulated by our legislators into authoritative texts and become non-negotiable.

 

Vietnam and the "Universe": Is the Empire Striking Back?

When I think of the documented atrocities the US foreign policy had inflicted on countries in Indochina, I couldn’t help but find the staging of the US-based Miss Universe Pageant in Vietnam suspect and open to several questions. By staging one of the enduring symbols of American popular culture in a land the US imperialist foreign policy had wreaked so much havoc on in the 1960’s and 1970’s but failed to defeat, is America trying to symbolically redeem itself? What does the staging of an American-owned/sponsored beauty contest mean to the freedom-fighting Vietnamese people?

 

If reports that the Vietnamese people are not generally warm to the staging of the international beauty pageant are true, one shouldn’t be surprised at all. It may have been more than four decades since the US-Vietnam war, but gruesome images of the impact of America’s post-World War II imperialist agenda in the Far East still linger. I wonder if the staging of this spectacle is strategically designed to erase the iconic image of a running Vietnamese girl naked and napalmed (Will the image of the very pretty Miss Vietnam Nguyen Thuy Lam eventually replace that of Kim Phuc, the “Vietnam Napalm Girl” photographed by Pulitzer award winner Nick Ut?)

 

When the Philippines first staged Miss Universe in 1974 – several years before I was born and became a beauty pageant fan – there reportedly was so much festivity in the air (at least in Metro Manila). Not only was this due to the internationally well-known/infamous Filipino passion for pageants. The reigning queen, Margarita Moran, was a compatriot making it possible for the former US colony in Southeast Asia to have two Miss Universe title holders in a brief span of five years. And in spite of the renaissance of nationalistic fervor in the 1970’s, Filipinos generally loved/adored anything American. There must have been protests against the staging of the pageant – and I’m wild guessing that one of the staunch protesters was beauty queen-turned-activist Nelia Sancho, Queen of the Pacific 1971, first-runner up to Gloria Diaz in the 1969 Binibining Pilipinas, and I must hasten to add, a University of the Philippines alumna – but they must have been overshadowed by the cacophony of support from Filipino pageant fans and, yes, Marcos supporters. We were not just warm to the idea of hosting Miss Universe back in 1974. We embraced the idea, celebrated the staging, and the rest, as they say, was history.

 
Vietnam’s experience with international beauty pageants is rather more recent. It is only since the early part of this decade that it has been sending representatives to major international beauty pageants. It is quite natural then for the Vietnamese people not to welcome the event with very open arms.

 

But I wonder if there are protests and formidable display of resistance from the locals. I don’t know about the pageant fans documenting the situation in Vietnam, but I believe this is one significant aspect of beauty pageants that shouldn’t be swept under the rug. There is so much to learn from these acts of resistance where tension thrives. To me, they constitute the liminal space that would remind us that beyond the spectacle lie critical issues that we have to confront and address if we do not want to be complicit to the inhumanity that is involved in anything that displays pleasure/entertainment amid atrocities inflicted by the very same people/institutions/transnational corporations that sponsor/support/control these fun factories or enterprises.  And I am not just merely talking about hypersexualized women parading in front of the awestruck public (I think I have made it clear earlier that these are active choices some of the candidates make – and they do not necessarily rely on the male chauvinist panopticon that some feminists claim beauty contestants have in their minds.) I am talking about beauty pageants – yes, Miss Universe, Miss World, Miss International, Miss Earth – being political.

 

Staging an international beauty pageant in a developing country is a political act. More so, if that developing country had been formerly the target of a colonial power’s napalm bombs and other weapons of mass destruction – a (neo)colonial power that is curiously home to the pageant under question.

 

It is perhaps easy to see the pageant in Vietnam as America’s way of striking back, of exercising cultural imperialism in a country whose spirit it never defeated through more-than-a-decade-long exercise of military might and hard power. It is, however, another thing, curious as it may seem, to view Vietnam’s seeming “complicity” as its unique manner of telling the world’s lone superpower that the indomitable Vietnamese spirit is again ready to take another challenge posed by the once formidable foe. Only this time, it shall not face the challenge with its mortars and world-famous guerilla tactics; it shall do so with this thing curiously called “beauty”. And yes, on a stage where (un)fortunately, napalmed bodies won’t be running amok to remind the world what America really stood for in the war. Only nice-looking, beautiful bodies clad in pastel-colored bikinis.

(Note: This is partly inspired by the documentary "Hearts and Minds" available at http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=168)

Images used:

Vietnam Napalm by Associated Press Photographer Nick Ut, 8 June 1972. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4517597.stm

Nguyen Thuy Lam, Miss Universe Vietnam 2008, competing in Beach Beauty. Available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/medoubleq/2543185549/

Miss Universe 1974 with Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos. Available at http://www.missosology.org/philippines/ ... mited.html

Margie Moran in Miss Universe 1974. Available at http://www.missosology.org/philippines/ ... llery.html

Nelia Sancho as Queen of the Pacific 1971 and now as advocate of women's and children's rights. Available at http://www.balita.com/xshell.php?id=%0A%091608

Miss Landmine.Available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scraaaaatch/2048150644/

Fascist America by Ryan Brown. Available at http://www.fascistamerica.net/fa-05.html

Misses Australia, Germany and Philippines. Available at http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u ... 2ae3fbf2be

Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach (Part 2)

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Paulo Freire

I finished reading Freire’s ‘Teachers as Cultural Workers’ this afternoon, and obviously, there is so much more to be said about it. The book has ten more letters including letters 3 to 10, the author’s Last Words, and an afterword from Shirley Steinberg, a Freire disciple and Kincheloe’s better half.

I shall only highlight a few points that I was able to jot down or remember while reading the book in several places today (I spent several minutes reading this marvelous work in the MRT going to Orchard Road, then a few minutes on Bus 143 going to the university, about two to three hours in one corner of the stacks section of the Central Library, then several more minutes on my way home via Bus 189. I realize then that when one is enraptured by the printed word, he becomes totally unmindful of a lot of stimuli that normally impinge on the senses while in the public transport system. These stimuli include very attractive local boys in the National Service uniform, the famed multiracial scent wafting in the air-conditioned buses and MRT, the humming sound of the engines of these public transportation vehicles, and aunties to whom I would normally offer my seat when I feel like performing the role of the most chivalrous gay on the planet.)

Now, the points. One that really caught my attention is the term ‘patient impatience.’ I guess it may be regarded as another permutation of the dialectics of theory and practice and a strong reminder for teachers to veer away from the extreme tendencies of anti-intellectualism that invalidates theory, and intellectual elitism that regards theory as an end in itself (In one of his interviews, Henry Giroux, a Freire disciple in North America, admonished the tendency of English departments to do this. I couldn't agree more.). Freire suggests that teachers should strike the balance between getting impatient in a system that denies them of their dignity and exercising patience (reflexivity) so as not to be rash and judgmental and unscientific.

Then there is the author’s call to allow the imagination to flourish. Coupled with a systematic and disciplined study of concrete experience, imagination should help students and teachers – co-learners – rework, re-invent, and perhaps, re-contextualize others’ readings of the word/world so that they become relevant to their lives.

Freire is explicit in saying that ‘teaching is political.’ In his eighth letter, he asserts that ‘education is a political practice’ (129) and immediately restates this with emphasis, ‘[an] educator is a politician.’ To accomplish this, he recommends that educators ‘know what happens in the world of children with whom they work. They need to know the universe of their dreams, the language with which they skillfully defend themselves from the aggressiveness of their world, what they know independently of the school, and how they know it’ (130).

What is good about Freire’s ‘Teachers/Letters’ is that it does not assume that the readers will take everything that it brings to their attention as relevant or applicable or even agreeable to what they actually do. They are given the choice to accept or reject, transport and transgress from its ideas, and that in itself is empowering. After all, Freire has made it clear from the very beginning (his ‘First Words’) that the things that he shares are borne out of the experiences of the oppressed from the time Brazil was ‘invented’. They cannot be transported wholesale in, say, the Philippine classrooms or in any educational site beyond the Brazilian context for that matter.

The relationship of the ‘concrete context’ and the ‘theoretical context’ is definitely a recurring theme in his letters. On this, he elaborates: ‘[It] is impossible to teach content without knowing how students think in the context of their daily lives, without knowing what they know independently of school so that we can, on the one hand, help them to know better what they already know and, on the other, teach them what they don’t know yet’ (140).

The original Portuguese title of the book is ‘Professora Sim, Tia Nao’ or ‘teacher yes, aunt no’ (thanks to Peter McLaren’s preface for this information). I’ll leave it to the future readers to discover why.

Photo taken from this site: http://www.apafec.org.br

Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Paulo Freire

(Part 1)

So far, I’ve only read the first and second letters in Paulo Freire’s ‘Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach’ (2005, expanded edition) and I am already amazed by the wealth of insights that can be derived from the book.

I read Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ (1984 translation) back home, and what compelled me to read this classic text was the constant mentioning of his work in my interactions with colleagues and friends in NetWorks and Ugnayan ng Pahinungod, especially those deeply involved in literacy work in the country’s rural areas and indigenous communities. My desire to understand the value of the work was also partly influenced by one of my references in rhetoric which outlines the concepts, definitions and major theorists in the field from antiquity to the latter part of the 20th century. Freire’s name was one of the entries. Apparently, his discussions on the relationship of language, thought, and reality as well as his thesis on the dialectics of reading the word and reading the world (which appears as one of the chapters in the book that I’m currently reading) have earned him a significant place in rhetorical studies in the last century (So much for appropriation and ‘pillaging’ of theorists from allied disciplines – a tendency that rhetorical studies have been unapologetically pursuing.).

So my interest was not so much on how the book (‘Pedagogy’) would influence my philosophy and method of teaching in the university but how I could meander through the discourses of my colleagues who kept on citing ‘praxis’, ‘action-reflection-action’, ‘conscienticization’, ‘banking method’ versus the liberatory ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, etc. during our interactions. I was also interested in using his ideas and ‘tools’ for the content of the course SPCM 105 (Philippine Public Address). While I had been fortunate enough to have read his work before I began to teach the course, I regret to say that I failed to incorporate his work in my syllabus. I was just too overwhelmed to revisit my notes on analytical frameworks and critical approaches that have mostly emanated from Greco-Roman and European-American traditions.

My interest in reading Freire now is not so much anchored on the need to work my way through the language game of my friends and colleagues or to cover up my insecurity in teaching rhetoric and public address. While I grapple with several ideas, concepts, theories that I need to apprehend well for my comprehensive exams in the middle of this year, I wouldn’t deny that I have been blessed with a little luxury of time to read what I like to read. After all, I am currently not tied to teaching, marking papers, reading both well- and haphazardly written student essays, not to mention regular staff meetings and phenomenal departmental ‘intramurals’ – activities which had taken most of my time for eight years before coming to Singapore to study.

On Friday afternoon, the last day of classes in the university, I headed towards Vivo City, the largest mall in town which houses a favorite bookstore called ‘Page One’. There I was drawn to checking out titles in the humanities and possible additions to my mini-library. I purchased two books, one of which is Freire’s lesser known work. The other book is Michel Foucault’s ‘Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourses of Language’ (thesis related but something I have to grapple with much later. This is only my second Foucault book, the first one being ‘Madness and Civilization’, the author’s dissertation. Quite embarrassingly, I’ve only read a few pages of that ‘critically acclaimed’ work. It is probably now accumulating dust in my bookshelf in Bay, Laguna. I sincerely hope to save it from my superficial display of erudition (a thing I am most guilty of) when I get back home this year.)

Now back to Freire's ‘Teachers’. What is it about Freire’s ‘Teachers’ that is so compelling? In his first two letters (preceded by a foreword by Donaldo Macedo and Ana Maria Araujo Freire, a preface titled ‘Pedagogy for Life’ by Peter McLaren, an introduction by Joe Kincheloe, and Freire’s ‘First Words’), he talks about reading the word/reading the world (the dialectical relationship of theory and practice, of experiencing and critical analysis of experience, of texts and contexts) and grappling with ‘the fear of what is difficult.’

Several points are inspiring from where I stand. One is the need to discipline oneself to reflect on his readings quite regularly. Freire suggests that one who professes to teach reading/writing the word/world should be able to write quite regularly and to critically examine what he has written, that is, to scribble down his reflections ‘at least thrice a week’ and to examine them after some time.

Another interesting point has to do with performing one’s capacity for radical love. Here are lines from the book whose significance is underscored in the preface by Peter MacLaren (in Freire 2005:xxx-xxxi):

'We must dare in the full sense of the word, to speak of love without the fear of being called ridiculous, mawkish, or unscientific, if not antiscientific. We must dare in order to say scientifically, and not as mere blah-blah-blah, that we study, we learn, we teach, we know with our entire body. We do all of these things with feeling, with emotion, with wishes, with fear, with doubts, with passion, and also with critical reasoning. However, we never study, learn, teach, or know with the last only. We must dare so as never to dichotomize cognition and emotion. We must dare so that we can continue to teach for a long time under conditions that we know well: low salaries, lack of respect, and the ever-present risk of becoming prey to cynicism. We must dare to learn how to dare in order to say no to the bureaucratization of the mind to which we are exposed everyday. We must dare so that we can continue to do so even when it is so much more materially advantageous to stop daring' (Freire 2005:5-6, emphasis added).

The ‘radical love’ thesis is further explained in the fourth letter (which I have not read as of this writing) but which MacLaren liberally quotes in the preface (xxx-xxxi)

'[To] to the humility which teachers perform and relate to their students another quality needs to be added: lovingness, without which their work would lose its meaning. And here I mean lovingness not only toward the students but also toward the very process of teaching. I must confess, not meaning to cavil, that I do not believe educators can survive the negativities of their trade without some sort of ‘armed love,’ as the poet Tiaglo de Melo would say. Without it they could not survive all the injustice or the government contempt, which is expressed in the shameful wages and the arbitrary treatment of teachers, not coddling mothers, who take a stand, who participate in protest activities through their union, who are punished, and who yet remain devoted to their work with students.
It is indeed necessary, however, that this love be ‘armed love,’ the fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce. It is this form of love that is indispensable to the progressive educator and that we must all learn' (Freire 2005:74-75).

Having read only a few pages of Freire’s work, I can already glean that there is so much passion, so much soul in his writing about teaching. There is, however, a caveat to merely adopting this ‘armed love’ thesis without much reflection. I think this is the point most often abused by people who profess to ‘fight for what is right’ when in fact they only fight for their personal interests. I have been witness to this abuse and arrogant display of dissent in the name of ‘academic freedom’ and ‘collegiality.’ I choose not to spell out the details. Because of this tendency, there is so much reason to heed Freire’s call for social praxis in teaching – to engage in the dialectics of action and reflection so as to avoid both intellectual elitism and uninformed/uncritical ‘reading of the world.’ That engagement, at the very least, requires the humility to accept that our assumptions about ourselves and about the world are tentative, to listen to what others (usually from the opposite end of where we stand) have to say, and to constantly engage in the negotiation of meanings.

Beauty pageants: subversions, reaffirmations

This is somewhat a rejoinder to the post I made on March 11. The issues that I am going to raise are actually a bit marginal to the main issues I foisted earlier.

Thanks to Aileen for taking special notice of the idea that beauty pageants can actually become a site to challenge linguistic dominance. Now, I’m beginning to seriously consider the idea that the pageants do more than that. Pageants can actually be seen as a contested site, a site of struggle between social actors including the so-called elite and the marginalized (This may sound contrived – and please pardon me on this – but this is helping me rehearse my mind for the paper I am writing for my graduate module – not related to pageants, though.).

My point is that pageants cannot just be seen from a monolithic standpoint or be viewed simplistically as anti-women (usually by critics of post-feminism) or  pro-female empowerment (by delusional owners of beauty pageant enterprises and a lot of post-feminists of course). Somebody has raised in one of the forums that the Philippine’s crazy passion for beauty pageants is a ‘subversion of the semi-feudal society’ – which may be the case – but the analysis needs to be ‘complexified’ (I’m afraid Lorie and Angie will raise their eyebrows for this word!) as there are a lot of nuances involved in the pageant arena. The case of Janina San Miguel winning a crown may be a case in point (notice the hedging as I cannot be categorical at this point).  She comes from a simple family (she says in a TV interview that her father is a jeepney (or is it taxi?) driver), perhaps a marginal group who may have little access to public platforms where members can articulate their own views about themselves and their relation to their immediate and remote contexts. The beauty pageant, though produced, owned, and controlled by the social elite (e.g., Madam Stella Marquez de Araneta and company, corporate sponsors, Ambassadors and popular public personalities as judges) and though driven by elitist interests (the dole out mentality euphemized as charity is just screamingly obvious), becomes a venue where young women from ‘ordinary’ backgrounds can create small but ‘revolutionary’ steps to redefine their identities and articulate/express (in a variety of ways – mangled English, native tongue, grace under pressure, self-affirmation in the face of mockery) their often muted/silenced viewpoints or perspectives.  

There is no denying though that the pageant is largely controlled by elitist/dominant discourses – hyper-sexualized women strutting on stage, formulaic questions and answers that reaffirm social hierarchies, dominant beliefs and values – but the women who participate in this arena can not be simply regarded as unthinking subjects that are duped to reproduce dominant perspectives. In fact, the answers of candidates 8 and 18 to their respective questions (one on the most difficult problem she has faced and the other on her concept of a perfect family) were answers that challenged the prevailing idealized notions of family in the Philippine context. Both girls come from ‘broken families’ and have been very honest about how they see or appreciate such condition in a different way.  They have somehow broken a type of essentialism and this makes them less pageant patty.

Janina San Miguel’s victory, because of her inelegant English (I find her answer “My family is the most important persons (sic) in my life" acceptable. At best, it is indirect and enthymematic if seen through the lens of classical rhetoric. In other words, she allows her audience to infer from her utterance which is a mark of a genius! Hahaha. Of course, this is contrived, because I have become a fan and staunch supporter of Janina), has disturbed quite a number of people, especially members of the so-called intellectual elite who perpetuate the language ideology that English is a superior language or that knowledge of English makes one intellectually superior. Her victory was seen not just as a fly in the ointment but as a subversion of idealized notions of ‘beauty and brains’, of the perfect female representative of the Filipino race. Janina somehow represents the subject position of the marginalized – young, ordinary, vulnerable.  How can she possibly snatch a crown previously worn by English-speaking mestizas or morenas (think of Ruffa Guttierez, Karla Bautista, Mafae Yunon) trained from the elite schools of the country or overseas? She is the subversion of the idealized Miss Philippines-World candidate and that is utterly unacceptable to some members of the intellectual elite (not that a lot of them care about beauty pageants.).

This is not to downplay the idea that asymmetrical power relations exist in beauty pageants – the elites like Donald Trump, Julia Morley, and Madam Stella own, produce, dictate the ideas that ought to circulate in their respective (business) enterprises. This does not however mean that the candidates, their trainers, the noisy and vibrant communities of pageant fans driven by communal/consensual dreaming, and the audience at large do not have the power to redefine (in the words of Homi Bhabha, ‘insinuate, interrupt, interrogate, and antagonize’) the dominant discourse/s of the elite. They have the power, and although they may be constrained to use it, they pose a welcome threat that makes the play messy, dynamic, and definitely exciting!

Photo credits: Boyet Blas for mabuhaybeauties.com

Binibining Janina and her majesty's 'Living English'

So-called ‘English communication skills experts’ in the Philippines are having a field day mocking the newly crowned Binibining Pilipinas-World, Janina San Miguel.  I must admit that I too cringed at the thought of her representing the Philippines in the world's oldest and biggest beauty pageant to be held in October this year. The video clip of her Q and A during the pageant is of course the current object of mockery and derision among (pwede bang amongst para beauty pageant patty?) Filipinos back home and in diaspora.

While struggling to write my analysis and discussion for my independent research project, I thought of scribbling down my two cents worth on this matter (which is embarrassingly of great importance to people who regard pageants as part of their communal dreaming!):

Well, Janina San Miguel’s utterance is what some applied linguists would call ‘living English’. I’d say it is an example of English in use by ‘subalterns’ or ‘postcolonial subjects’.  At best, it is a modest form of resistance against the colonial tongue (I kind of loved it when she maintained her poise and exuded that annoying smugness – or should I call it chutzpah? – after her last clause, ‘…but I said dot (with emphasis) my pamily is the most important persons (very alliterative!) in my (with matching prolonged diphthong [ai]) life’). Janina has disturbingly ‘recontextualized’ English – has ‘colonized’ it so to speak – to the consternation of those who adhere to the unstable notion that there is only one way of speaking English, and that is, by using the Standard World English (which is a very contentious construct anyway.).

I would have loved, though, to see a more radical form of resistance in Binibining Pilipinas Beauty Pageant which seems to put a lot of premium on English speaking skills (On the contrary, international beauty pageants do not necessarily require English proficiency. The last two Miss Universe winners – from Puerto Rico and Japan – had atrocious English skills when they won. Puerto Rico’s English was horrible in her interview clip in the Miss U website but she won, anyway. She spoke Spanish on the pageant night.).I would have been very impressed if the 17-year old Janina spoke in Taglish or used code meshing the way Binibining Pilipinas World Marilen Espino did in the national pageant in 1992. That would have been very ‘revolutionary’ of Janina. And that would have been, to my mind, permissible since she is not in the context of an English classroom with an English teacher warped in shaky paradigms of second language teaching. Hahahaha!

I guess Janina just didn’t have the presence of mind or didn’t have the character to rock the ‘establishment’ during the pageant. Seriously, Janina should just have been given the first-runner up honors because that means she can still compete in the future and be better prepared for the Q and A. Or she should have just been given a Binibining Pilipinas International title since Miss International just requires delegates to present prepared speeches during the pageant. But then, the decision has been made and whether ‘English-loving’ Filipinos like it or not, she is going to represent the Philippines in Miss World in Ukraine (barring unforeseen circumstances, of course). She is one lucky bi…girl!

Go Janina! Go for Miss World! You have my support (as if it mattered.)! Hahaha!