Panel: Reconstructing Historical Biography
Copanelists: Mary Louise Penaz and Katsue Reynolds
Jose Garcia Villa is best known as a modernist Filipino poet who migrated to America in the 1930s. Much critical discussion of Villa in Philippine literary studies has emphasized his narrow concern with aestheticism and his rejection of contemporary demands to politicize artistic production.
This paper returns to Villa’s first short story collection, Footnote of Youth (1933), and argues for a reconsideration of the politics of Villa’s modernist aesthetics. In particular, I wish to concentrate on a series of short stories at the end of the collection that present revisionary “shadow biographies” of revolutionary hero Jose Rizal, whose own life story and novels have attained, in Carol Hau’s words, the status of “master-narratives” of the Philippine nation, with Rizal himself portrayed as the “First Filipino.”
Apart from engaging in translation across language in a multilingual environment, the short stories are translations in a larger sense. They re-present elements of longer narratives such as biography, and indeed the “biographization of the social,” deployed by the colonial and bourgeois national states in a consciously fragmentary form. Furthermore, they map such biographies onto the lives of ordinary Filipinos in a manner that destabilizes them: on a rational level, the claims of filiation made in these stories are preposterous, yet the narrative and literary economies of the texts encourage readerly identification with their subaltern protagonists.
In exploring the space of contradiction that Villa’s stories occupy, and the manner in which their formal qualities enable a reappraisal of this space, I wish also to make a larger argument concerning the frequently neglected centrality of the short story and life writing in creating national imaginaries under late colonialism.
Philip Holden is Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of several books and many articles exploring (post)colonial literature and culture, particularly within an Anglophone Southeast Asian context. His latest book, Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State, was published this Spring by the University of Wisconsin Press. The current paper arises from a manuscript he is completing with his colleague Rajeev Patke, a literary history of Southeast Asian writing in English, which will be published by Routledge in 2009.