BISDAK: (1st of 3 parts) Mindanao is not ignored anymore

HONOLULU (MindaNews / 21 August) – Carol Arguillas’ straight-forward reportage of the Philippine Book Festival recently held in Davao City elicited yet another irritated response from the local intelligentsia. The spark was in the first three words of the article’s title: “A bit of Mindanao.” You’ve heard the complaints before the little work on Mindanao compared to the rest of the country; Mindanao publishers hardly gave scholars and writers on Mindanao central space, and hardly any books were on display.

Unfortunately, save for the third complaint, this is not anymore true. The record of my favorite academic publisher, the Ateneo de Manila University Press, shows the reverse. Since Dipolognon Maricor Baytion took over the director’s position of the Press and through the terms of Prof. Rica Bolipata and Karina Bolasco, Ateneo has consistently given Mindanao a big chunk of space in its publications programs.

I compiled a list of the Press’ printed books (see Table 1), classifying them by the three general regions and the disciplinal categories. Mindanao studies top the list (33), followed by Luzon (29), and Visayas in a poor third (9). Ateneo Press may be an institution based in the imperial capital. Still, under these three directors, it has made sure that Mindanao studies will not be ignored by academia and the literati. Prof. Bolipata has taken over the director position after Bolasco recently retired, and I am very optimistic that she will continue to devote a large portion of the Press’ resources to publishing works about Mindanao.

Let me break down the listing to prove several points and pinpoint where we have to do more. First, five of the Mindanao books have an island-wide focus: Ediberto Alegre’s Biyaheng Pinoy: A Mindanao Travelogue;  Fr. Miguel A. Bernard’s Great Island: Studies in the Exploration and Evangelization of Mindanao; Jowell Canuday and Joselito Sescon edited Transfiguring Mindanao: A Mindanao Reader; Francisco Lara and Steven Schoofs edited Out of the Shadows: Violent Conflict and the Real Economy of Mindanao; and Ricardo de Ungria edited  Kalandrakas: Stories and Storytellers of/on Regions in Mindanao, 1890-1990, Volumes 1 and 2.

You cannot find anything comparable published about Luzon and the Visayas Islands in other academic and non-academic presses in the country and even beyond. I wish to emphasize this because if some of the younger scholars and writers in Mindanao and elsewhere aspire to write a story of the island and not just of its constituent parts and communities, these five books will be fantastic foundational readings. The same goes for planning to teach a course in Mindanao. You already have the readings for Part 1 of the introduction in these books. I will go back to teaching later in this essay.

Second, imperial publications describe Mindanao as an economically unexploited, culturally backward frontier and an ungovernable periphery of the nation-state. We know why Manila wants to represent the island in these terms, so there is no need to repeat them here. Four of the Ateneo Press’ books, however, show not only the opposite but that Mindanao, more than the rest of the archipelago, has had these long historical connections with the world:  Oliver Charbonneau’s Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World;  Patricia Dacudao’s, Abaca Frontier: The Socioeconomic and Cultural Transformation of Davao, 1898-1949; Shinzo Hayase’s Mindanao Ethnohistory Beyond Nations. Maguindanao, Sangir, and Bagobo Societies in East Maritime Southeast Asia; and James Warren’s The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State. The significance is worth underscoring here: if we write and teach about Mindanao as part of Southeast Asia and the world capitalist system, and not just some Philippine backwater, think of the many possibilities of developing different analytical threads not tied to the history of the nation-state.

The syllabi our educators will develop will be much richer because the island’s history is not just older than that of “the Philippines” but also much more international. Ultimately, we will have more grounds to argue our Southeast Asian connections to correct this misimpression peddled by many in the imperial capital. We have more affinity to Latin America because of our Spanish colonial heritage. What a great way to upend nationalist history!

Table 1. Rough Listing of Ateneo de Manila University Press by Geographic Region

(To be continued)

[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Patricio N. Abinales, an Ozamiznon, teaches at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. He studies the four-legged rat (a pestilence that brought famine in many parts of postwar Mindanao) and the two-legged rat (the politico)]