Caroline S. Hau

Privileging Roots and Routes: Filipino Intellectuals and the Contest over Epistemic Power and Authority

Reynaldo Ileto’s “Orientalism in the Study of Philippine Politics” (1999) highlighted the problematical relationship between colonialism and knowledge production in American scholarship on the Philippines. In recent decades the target of the critique has shifted to Filipino-American and overseas Filipino intellectuals. This article examines the changing intellectual and material contexts in which Philippine-based, often middle-class, intellectuals claim epistemic privilege in representing the Philippines by virtue of “authentic” experience and knowledge. These claims involve a contest over the power and authority to speak (on behalf) of the Philippines and the role and subject positions of intellectuals in relation to a “Filipino nation” that is in the throes of transformation.

Did Padre Damaso Rape Pia Alba?: Reticence, Revelation, and Revolution in José Rizal's Novels

This article revisits the debate in 2010 among Philippine Daily Inquirer columnists over the question of whether or not, in José Rizal’s novel Noli me tángere, Padre Damaso “raped” Maria Clara’s mother, Pia Alba, a debate inspired by the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill. The article examines how Rizal employs rhetorical strategies of reticence and revelation along with literary onomastics and allusions in his two novels to create meanings and associations that open his novels to multiple, even competing, interpretations. Such ambiguity reveals the artistic, intellectual, and political stakes of interpretation, which involves not only the struggle for understanding and struggle over meaning, but also the struggle to make, unmake, and remake community.