Lecture by Chris Cañete Rodriguez Kelly
Chaired by Manan Ahmed

The dedicatory preface to Francisco Balagtas’s 1838 Tagalog poem, "Florante at Laura," introduced a new conception of time to Philippine literature by referencing mortality as “búhay ma,i, mapatid,” or “life with a cut.” Mapatid, meaning “cut,” contradictorily has the same root word as the Tagalog word for sibling, kapatid. Zeroing in on the term’s simultaneous connotation of cessation and relation, this talk will explore the specificity of time’s emergence as an object of representation in Philippine literature through mapatid. Chris Cañete Rodriguez Kelly examines Lope K. Santos’s Tagalog socialist novel, Banaag at Sikat (Soft Glimmers before Dawn), for its omission of a representation of US colonial rule. This omission is a development of Balagtas’s notion of time, and that cutting the historical context of US colonialism ironically allows the novel to criticize colonialism.

Fall Thursday Lecture Series events are open to Columbia-affiliated faculty, students, and invited guests. All others interested in attending, please email the SOF/Heyman at [email protected].

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