Chinese Uhuru

Mao’s most famous statement about postcolonial struggle came in response to the Congo Crisis of the 1960s, yet China’s understanding of and involvement in that conflict has been largely ignored. Based on briefly declassified archival sources and long-forgotten cultural works, this essay examines the significance of China’s engagement in the heart of Africa. A close reading of the spoken-word drama War Drums on the Equator (1965) reveals the importance of mobilizing “subjugated knowledge” in asymmetrical conflict.

Shame, silence and resistance: How my narratives of academia and kidney disease entwine

As an academic with a chronic illness, it has taken me a while to understand shame’s impact on my academic identity and choices. In this article, through a process of narrative recuperation, I consider the challenges and contradictions of living as an academic with chronic kidney disease, an incurable and often debilitating illness that, for the most part, is invisible to others. By means of evocative autoethnography, I trace the trajectory of silencing shame I experienced around my condition in academia and I show how and why this changed over a number of years. My aim in doing this is to uncover subjugated knowledge of what it takes to live as a chronically ill academic and to be an advocate for other academics living with chronic illness. I theorise my study using Garland-Thomson, Shildrick and Leder, all of whom have worked with the othering effect of shame on the nonconforming body. These theorists have described ways of resisting shame and, partly thanks to them, I was able to find ways of fighting back and recovering. My intention in sharing these illness narratives is to speak back to a dominant discourse that favours invulnerability and a masculinised, disembodied way of being academic.

TURNING THE TIDE: PROTEST POEMS ON MARTIAL LAW AS COUNTER-MEMORY

Memories of Martial Law and the burial of strongman Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani on November 2016 prompted artists and writers to converge at a common platform—that of safeguarding national consciousness from the impending rewriting of history. Using Foucault’s concept of counter-memory, this paper attempted to illustrate how literature, specifically protest poetry, can be used to interrogate perceptions and knowledge of events and personalities on Martial Law. Six poems namely “Open Letters to Filipino Artists,” “A Furnace,” “Still Life for Mendiola,” “A Metaphysical Dialogue Between the Bronze Man and the Great Stone Face,” “Third World Opera,” and “Dead Man’s Tale” were used to challenge the existing texts written on Martial Law. The results revealed that literature can either deceive or enlighten readers. It also remains an important site where ideology is articulated and truth is interrogated.Keywords: Martial Law, counter-memory, protest poems, alternative history, subjugated knowledge Cite as: Majul, M.A.M. (2017). Turning the tide: Protest poems on martial law as counter-memory. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 2(1), 111-121.

Performing Genealogies

This chapter considers how education is deployed in Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican performance poetry as a tool in decolonizing activist projects. It cites the work of Los Angeles-based Filipino American and New York-based U.S. Puerto Rican performance-poet activists such as Bonafide Rojas, Rebecca Baroma, and Napoleon Lustre to show how they teach their local communities to disidentify with narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and multiculturalism in order to recognize global power hierarchies that reproduce racial and class inequality. By connecting disparate subjugated knowledge, they construct a history of oppression and resistance that they make available to their local communities. Inside and outside the classroom, they promote disidentification as a repertory strategy to challenge institutionalized histories that privilege narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and marginalize alternative narratives.