The Postcolonial Perverse: Critiques of Contemporary Philippine Culture, Volume One

The Post Colonial Perverse #1

by J. Neil C. Garcia

The Postcolonial Perverse is a two-volume collection of fifteen different critiques of varying “aspects” of contemporary Philippine culture. The work’s “eclectic” topics range from the independent cinema movement to the mystifications of nationalist poetics, from sacrilegious “avant-garde” art to the deconstruction of an inaugural text in the Philippine anglophone tradition, and from reflections on the contact zone between science and art to the impertinent question of our foremost national hero’s quizzical gender and sexual identity. The title’s two concepts—“postcolonial” and “perverse”—are almost symmetrically split across these two books, urging the reader to more sharply intuit and “experience” the project’s central theme. Namely: that the postcolonial hybridity or cultural mixedness that characterizes Philippine life is the same thing as the perverse inability of its agents to stay committed to principled and categorical thought. In the Preface the author, Professor J. Neil C. Garcia, offers the reading that it is perhaps our culture’s relatively recent and uneven literacy—as well as its enduring residual orality—that has brought this “perverse” situation about, rendering Filipino social memory fluid and malleable on one hand, and social relations and norms eminently negotiable on the other. And yet, what’s interesting is that it is precisely upon this ambivalent cultural ground that Filipinos must endeavor to fashion their sense of collective being—which is to say, their national identity

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

J. Neil C. Garcia finished his BA Journalism (magna cum laude) in the University of Santo Tomas in 1990. He is currently teaching creative writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines , Diliman, where he also serves as an associate for poetry in the Institute of Creative Writing . He is the author of numerous poetry collections and works in literary and cultural criticism, including Our Lady of the Carnival (1996), The Sorrows of Water (2000), Kaluluwa (2001), Philippine Gay Culture: The Last Thirty Years (1996), Slip/pages: Essays in Philippine Gay Criticism (1998), Performing the Self: Occasional Prose (2003), The Garden of Wordlessness (2005), and Misterios and Other Poems ( 2005) His latest critical work , Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics: Essays and Critiques , is a revised version of his PhD dissertation in English Studies: Creative Writing, which he completed in 2003. He is currently working on a full-length book, a postcolonial survey and analysis of Philippine poetry in English.