A detailed investigation of the contemporary Philippine Left, focusing on the political challenges and dilemmas that confronted activists following the disintegration of the Marcos regime and the reestablishment of electoral democracy under Corazon Aquino. The authors focus on such varied topics as peasant politics, urban social movements, purges and executions, and Marxist theory.
"A powerful, complex, and fascinating coming-of-age novel." -- Costa Book Award PanelA boy and a girl in the Philippine jungle must confront what coming of age will mean to their friendship made even more complicated when Americans invade their country. Samkad lives deep in the Philippine jungle, and has never encountered anyone from outside his own tribe before. He's about to become a man, and while he's desperate to grow up, he's worried that this will take him away from his best friend, Little Luki, who isn't ready for the traditions and ceremonies of being a girl in her tribe.But when a bad omen sends Samkad's life in another direction, he discovers the brother he never knew he had. A brother who tells him of a people called "Americans." A people who are bringing war and destruction right to their home...A coming-of-age story set at the end of the 19th century in a remote village in the Philippines, this is a story about growing up, discovering yourself, and the impact of colonialism on native peoples and their lives.
Philippine political history, especially in the twentieth century, challenges the image of democratic evolution as serving the people, and does so in ways that reveal inadequately explored aspects of many democracies. In the first decades of the twenty-first century the Philippines has nonetheless shown gradual socioeconomic "progress". This book provides an interpretive overview of Philippine politics, and takes full account of the importance of patriotic Philippine factors in making decisions about future political policies. It analyses whether regional and local politics have more importance than national politics in the Philippines. Discussing cultural traditions of patronism, it also examines how clan feuds localize the state and create strong local policies. These conflicts in turn make regional and family-run polities collectively stronger than the central state institution. The book goes on to explore elections in the Philippines, and in particular the ways in which politicians win democratic elections, the institutionalized role of public money in this process, and the role that media plays. Offering a new interpretive overview of Philippine progress over many decades, the author notes recent economic and political changes during the current century while also trying to advance ideas that might prove useful to Filipinos. Presenting an in-depth analysis of the problems and possibilities of politics and society in the Philippines, the book will be of interest to those researching Southeast Asian Politics, Political History and Asian Society and Culture.
In 1969, Ferdinand Marcos won a second term as president, in one of the dirtiest campaigns in Philippine history. That same year, Edgar Jopson was elected president of the National Union of Students of the Philippines, in a campaign to keep the Communists out of the student movement. Thirteen years later Jopson was gunned down by the military during a raid on an underground safehouse. He was by then one of the most wanted people in the country, with a price on his head, a leading Communist Party cadre and member of the urban underground. Jopson was an unusual individual, and his story is a fascinating one. Yet his experiences were those of a generation of student radicals that came of age in the 1970s, and galvanized a country to action in the 1980s. Thus this book is not just the biography of one person, it is the history of a generation.
In Things Fall Away, Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new paradigm for understanding politics and globalization. Her analysis illuminates both the power of Filipino subaltern experience to shape social and economic realities and the critical role of the nation’s writers and poets in that process. Through close readings of poems, short stories, and novels brought into conversation with scholarship in anthropology, sociology, politics, and economics, Tadiar demonstrates how the devalued experiences of the Philippines’ vast subaltern populations—experiences that “fall away” from the attention of mainstream and progressive accounts of the global capitalist present—help to create the material conditions of social life that feminists, urban activists, and revolutionaries seek to transform. Reading these “fallout” experiences as vital yet overlooked forms of political agency, Tadiar offers a new and provocative analysis of the unrecognized productive forces at work in global trends such as the growth of migrant domestic labor, the emergence of postcolonial “civil society,” and the “democratization” of formerly authoritarian nations. Tadiar treats the historical experiences articulated in feminist, urban protest, and revolutionary literatures of the 1960s–90s as “cultural software” for the transformation of dominant social relations. She considers feminist literature in relation to the feminization of labor in the 1970s, when between 300,000 and 500,000 prostitutes were working in the areas around U.S. military bases, and in the 1980s and 1990s, when more than five million Filipinas left the country to toil as maids, nannies, nurses, and sex workers. She reads urban protest literature in relation to authoritarian modernization and crony capitalism, and she reevaluates revolutionary literature’s constructions of the heroic revolutionary subject and the messianic masses, probing these social movements’ unexhausted cultural resources for radical change.
The only book length study to cover the Philippines after Marco's downfall, this key title thematically explores issues affecting this fascinating country, throughout the last century. Appealing to both the academic and non academic reader, topics covered include: national level electoral politics economic growth the Philippine Chinese law and order opposition the Left local and ethnic politics.
The Philippines is a fascinating example of a "poor country democracy" where issues of economic development and poverty, political participation and stability, as well as ethnicity and migration are crucial. The Routledge Handbook of the Contemporary Philippines provides a comprehensive overview of the current political, economic, social, and cultural issues of the country. The Handbook is divided into the following four sections concentrating on a different aspect of the Philippines: domestic politics; foreign relations; economics and social policy; cultures and movements. In terms of domestic politics, chapters discuss clientelism, bossism, dynasties, pork barrel and corruption as well as institutions - the presidency, congress, the judiciary, the civil service, political parties, and civilian-military relations. The Philippines is confronted with many overseas challenges, with the foreign relations section focused on the country’s relationship with China, Japan, and the USA as well as assessing the impact of the Filipino diaspora community around the world. Regarding economics and social policy, authors examine industrial policy, capital flight, microfinance, technocracy, economic nationalism, poverty, social welfare programs, and livelihoods. The final section on Philippine cultures and movements highlights issues of customs, gender, religion, and nationalism while also examining various social and political forces - the peasantry, the middle class, indigenous peoples, NGOs, the left, trade unionism, the women’s movement, and major insurgencies. Written by leading experts in the field, the Handbook provides students, scholars, and policymakers of Southeast Asia with an interdisciplinary resource on the evolving politics, society, and economics of the Philippines.
In Republicanism, Communism, Islam, John T. Sidel provides an alternate vantage point for understanding the variegated forms and trajectories of revolution across the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam, a perspective that is de-nationalized, internationalized, and transnationalized. Sidel positions this new vantage point against the conventional framing of revolutions in modern Southeast Asian history in terms of a nationalist template, on the one hand, and distinctive local cultures and forms of consciousness, on the other. Sidel's comparative analysis shows how—in very different, decisive, and often surprising ways—the Philippine, Indonesian, and Vietnamese revolutions were informed, enabled, and impelled by diverse cosmopolitan connections and international conjunctures. Sidel addresses the role of Freemasonry in the making of the Philippine revolution, the importance of Communism and Islam in Indonesia's Revolusi, and the influence that shifting political currents in China and anticolonial movements in Africa had on Vietnamese revolutionaries. Through this assessment, Republicanism, Communism, and Islam tracks how these forces, rather than nationalism per se, shaped the forms of these revolutions, the ways in which they unfolded, and the legacies which they left in their wakes.
Critique of Philippine Economy and Politics seeks to explain comprehensively the basic character of Philippine society and the basic problems that afflict the Filipino people, especially the toiling masses of workers and peasants. Since 1946, the US has granted nominal independence to the Philippines but has retained. US dominance over the economic, political, cultural and social life of the Filipino people. The shift has merely been from direct colonial to semicolonial or neocolonial rule The semifeudal economy has persisted. There has been no genuine land reform and national industrialization. Imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism perpetuate underdevelopment, extreme exploitation, mass unemployment and widespread poverty. About the author: Jose Maria Sison is the Founding Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, Chief Political Consultant of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and Chairperson Emeritus of the International League of Peoples' Struggle. He has continuously studied Philippine society as a student, as a teacher of literature and political science and as a full time proletarian revolutionary. About the series: The International Network is proud to present the third book of the Sison Reader Series, Critique of Philippine Economy and Politics. To follow shortly will be the fourth book on the People's Democratic Revolution.
