The Wily Filipino

Lit Panic.

I'm in a bit of a panic. Due to an unfortunate combination of events, I'm in the midst of preparing my syllabus for a Filipino American literature class in the fall. And I feel like I'm totally out of my element.

The reason I'm working on a syllabus almost half a year in advance is due to the financially beleaguered Cal State system, about which I've written before. Our department, in any case, is running out of photocopying money in June -- that's right, all faculty will have to shoulder its own photocopying expenses in the fall and the foreseeable future -- and so I'm taking advantage of some downtime before the papers and finals start coming in next week.

(The other reason has to do with the awful fact -- making xerox money the least of our problems -- that we're laying off our lecturers. I shouldn't say "we," but I'm complicit if I don't do something. The irony is that there's no money -- and the pittance offered is already an insult -- for the poet who's teaching the class this spring, and so it's cheaper to fire the real expert, and get me (since there are no other Filipino tenure-track faculty close enough to do this) to teach the class. Yes, this is screwed up.)

Part of my anxiety has to do with my predecessor, who's on maternity leave. The professor who usually teaches this class has created an extremely successful twice-a-year event, in combination with a website, zine and CD. I can't even come close to her level of success, so I won't try.

But the real reason, of course, is that my PhD is in Anthropology. My dissertation was an ethnographic study of the Filipino community in Daly City -- originally about homesickness and nostalgia, then mutating into transnationalism, and now, for the time being, about betrayal and belonging. This was itself a project quite removed from my master's thesis, Displaying Filipinos (see book on the right) on photography and colonialism in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. The point here is that none of this, obviously, has to do with lit. I am not a lit person at all (and therefore my discomfort at somehow ending up being linked to on poetry blogs).

Which is funny because there was a point in my life when I was kind of a lit major. I emphatically say "kind of" because my undergraduate degree had little to do with how American universities conceive of "lit." It was in Communication Arts at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos -- though "agricultural school in a provincial town in the Philippines" doesn't quite capture the relatively cosmopolitan atmosphere of LB. But my ComArts degree turned out to prepare me quite well -- well, for something: a little drama here, some radio broadcasting there, a good chunk of communication theory, enough units in sociology to count as a minor, a few units in journalism, and finally, "lit." (Not necessarily lit theory, mind you, as this was mostly staid but illuminating New Criticism; I would get a bit of theory later when I would take MA classes in comp lit at UP Diliman.) But unlike my classmates who did the practicum (they had all the fun interning at newspapers and TV and radio stations), I churned out a rather moralistic, but exhaustively researched, undergraduate thesis on the works of F. Sionil Jose.

So when I arrived at Cornell to do my M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies, I was fully prepared to do "lit;" I even remember being introduced to people with "This is Sunny, he's going to work on Filipino lit." But then came that fateful day when I picked up a bound book of Philippine postcards from the early 1900s; I knew then that I had to write on the photographs. And I forgot all about lit. (I think the original plan was to work on Dogeaters and Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe, but it's all a distant memory now.)

But now lit has been dragged back into my life, or vice versa; I may be qualified to read it, but certainly not to teach it. Anyhow, I'm working late nights figuring out what to assign for the class. I'm definitely not anti-theory, but the kind of students who take AAS 336 would, I think, detest it. Funny how the last comp lit class I ever took was all about theory, with little about literature per se; I look up at my bookshelf right now and I see dusty copies of Dissemination and Course in General Linguistics (okay, I open that up twice a year) and S/Z and On Deconstruction. (Actually, I may seem harsh, but it was a fun class; I got to see a whole slew of guests performing, as it were, for the grad students, including Laura Mulvey discussing Madonna's video for "Open Your Heart.")

I was hoping to stay away from the Dynamic Duo of Carlos and Jessica (DDCJ), but I find them inescapable. While DDCJ resistance may be futile, I'm at least hoping to shake up the syllabus a little bit by including a film and a hiphop CD. (Now if I could get the students to go to a gallery while listening to Eileen's poems, that would be awesome.) I'm also thinking of anchoring the bigger works specifically in the Bay Area, so Eileen and Barbara and NVM Gonzalez and Brian Roley -- okay, American Son isn't set in the Bay Area, but the man lives here now -- and Al Robles and Jaime Jacinto are all in here. (And I'm willing to count J from DDCJ as BA, even though she's totally NY, but she won't leave room for a couple other books of poetry I'm hoping to squeeze in before my students cry tito. And of course I'd happily count Zack Linmark as a Bay Area writer, though I had such problems teaching Rolling the R's last semester -- not because of the sliced narrative, or the pidgin, or the sexual content, but because the students just couldn't get Scott Baio.)

Well, enough for now; the next time you'll hear about this is when I set up a collaborative blog for the class. (For inspiration, Kasey Mohammad has a class blog on zombies, but somehow I remember it as being more of a team blog before. Maybe I'm imagining links to students on the right side?) Anyway, my fingers are crossed -- it depends on how connected to the net my students will be in the fall, especially after rumors that SF State will start charging for e-mail next year in an attempt to generate revenue.

Posted by the wily filipino at May 4, 2004 10:01 PM