De La Salle University Publishing House (DLSUPH)
Homeless in Unhomeliness: Postcolonial Critiques of Philippine Literature
edited by J. Neil Garcia
Published and distributed by
De La Salle University (DLSU) Publishing House, 2014
ISBN – 978-971-555-598-2
312 pages
The title of this collection of essays and critiques, written over a period of a decade (more or less), ubverts the title of its longest and probably most important piece, which constitutes its first section, ‘At Home in Unhomeliness’—a postcolonial reframing of the question of literary universalism, as such may be read in the tradition of Philippine anglophone poetry.
While the avowed intention behind this book’s title is to refunction and invert the trope of domiciliary belonging—a trope that has understandably been immensely privileged in postcolonial literature—the different pieces in this collection hopefully demonstrate its acute salience to the postcolonial condition, as a whole. While we must celebrate the instances of transcultural agency that are apparent in our postcolonial performances, we must also never lose sight of the historical determinations within which this agency precariously exists. This book, while merely a gathering of critical pieces—and not a full-length study—hopefully illustrates the many possible vicissitudes and implications of this ‘theme.’ As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has now and then reminded us, this condition is the exact same space where global—and, increasingly, cosmopolitan—neocolonialism’s seductions and contradictions have come to stake their resolute home.
J. NEIL C. GARCIA teaches creative writing and comparative literature in the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where he serves as a fellow 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), Slip/ pages: Essays in Philippine Gay Criticism (1998), Performing the Self: Occasional Prose (2003), The Garden of Wordlessness (2005), Misterios and Other Poems (2005), Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics: Essays and Critiques (2003), and the monograph At Home in Unhomeliness: Philippine Postcolonial Poetry in English (2008), whose accompanying anthology he edited for the Philippine PEN. In 2009, Hong Kong University Press published its own international edition of his Philippine Gay Culture (1996). Between 1994 and 2006, he coedited the famous Ladlad series of Philippine gay writing. He is currently working on a full-length book, a postcolonial survey and analysis of Philippine poetry in English, partial research for which he carried out in the United States in the spring of 2008, as a Fulbright senior research fellow. His most recent book is Aura: the Gay Theme in Philippine Fiction in English, published in 2012. This anthology gathers together Filipino anglophone stories and novel excerpts about the male homosexual character, by nationally acclaimed writers like Jose Garcia Villa, NVM Gonzalez, Edith Tiempo, and Ninotchka Rosca. He is also currently at work on “Likha,” his seventh poetry book, which will be a sequence of lyrics about the generative power of mourning and fallible affection.